1844

Barnes, Charlotte Mary Sanford. The Forest Princess, or Two Centuries Ago. 1844. Plays, Prose and Poetry. Philadelphia, 1848. 145-270. (Plays by Early American Women, 1775-1850. Ed. Amelia Howe Kritzer. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.) Barnes -- active in our early theater as an actress, playwright, and director -- is one of the cluster of ante-bellum dramatists working on Pocahontas that includes Barker, Custis, Owen, and Brougham. She calls her Pocahontas "the animated type of mercy and peace, unselfishness and truth," focusing on her "benevolence," and, eschewing the temptation to attribute romance to her motivation with Smith, her "disinterestedness" -- her simple dedication to mercy and justice. But her Pocahontas is also a "warrior," strong in the face of adversity and tough in her indictment of English policies. The rescue of Smith happens dramatically at the end of the first act, and Smith is already gone from Virginia at the beginning of the second act, whose climax is the marriage with Rolfe, the "first of the two nations joined," uniting "in peace and love the old world and the new." After saving Rolfe in the third act, the play ends with a glorious death-bed "Vision of Pocahontas," in which the figures of Time, Peace, the Genius of Columbia, and Washington prophesy a future in which the arms of "the island mother and her giant child" exchange the "grasp of lasting friendship."
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