John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
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married a lady of Spanish extraction, whom I have been led to understand was as beautiful as she was wealthy, and otherwise attractive.” She bore three sons and a daughter, Audubon writes, but only he, the youngest of the sons, “survived extreme youth.”4 Audubon enhances the enigma of his nativity by casually but carefully accepting no direct responsibility for the information he gives his own sons about his origins—“I can only say what I have heard” … “It seems” … “I have been led to understand”—and subtly transferring the only authority for this part of his life story to his long-dead father.
But Audubon goes on, and the story gets better. As an infant, he writes, he accompanied his parents back to “Santo Domingo,” or Saint-Domingue, and the family estate, where his mother soon met her doom as “one of the victims during the ever-to-be-lamented period of the negro insurrection on that island.” With the help of “some faithful servants,” the elder Audubon and his young son escaped the insurrection and made their way back to New Orleans and then back to France, where Audubon’s father had a home in the city of Nantes in the Loire Valley. He also had a wife in Nantes, an apparently tolerant and understanding woman who accepted the young boy into the household and raised him as her own; she was, Audubon writes, “the only mother I have ever known.” Audubon then spent his early years in Nantes “much cherished by my dear stepmother … [and] constantly attended by one or two black servants, who had followed my father from Santo Domingo to New Orleans and afterwards to Nantes.”5 Audubon spins quite an exciting story for his sons: of being born to a Spanish mother on one side of the Atlantic (presumably in Louisiana) and being raised by a French stepmother on the other side, in France; of losing his birth mother in a major slave revolt in a French colony and escaping with his father, thanks to the help of loyal slaves; and coming to safety in a French city, where he found a loving and generous stepmother who immediately cherished him—and he does it all in four short paragraphs. It is, in essence, a broad-reaching tale of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, beginning with a North American birth, followed by a brief but dramatic West Indian incident, leading to a longer French interlude, and, as Audubon’s sons (and we) would know, culminating in a return to America, where he would eventually enjoy a comfortable outcome by gaining artistic and scientific fame. It would have made a promising outline for a popular novel, and perhaps it should have been a work of fiction: Important parts of it were simply untrue.
For that reason, it makes sense to explore more fully the ambiguities of Audubon’s autobiography to appreciate the place of the evasions and omissions about his origins in the longer trajectory of his life. It may well be, of course, that the “enigma” of his birth explains it all, that Audubon knew only what he had “been led to understand” by his father. If so, he apparently didn’t press his father for details, and if he did, he certainly didn’t share them with his own sons—or anyone else, for that matter. Questions about Audubon’s origins persisted throughout his lifetime, and he never made much of an effort to answer them in print.
Audubon was always very vague about something as basic as his age, for instance, usually overstating it by a few years, perhaps because he hoped to mislead for some reason or probably because he just didn’t know for sure.6 Some of the contemporary official sources don’t offer much help. His 1806 application for American naturalization described him as “a free white person of the Age of Twenty three Years … born at Aux Cayes in the Island of St. Domingo sometime in the Year one thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty three.” Six years later, in 1812, his record of naturalization referred to him as “John Audubon of the District of Pennsylvania a native of the Island of St. Domingo aged about Twenty Six years.” Finally, Audubon’s American passport for his second journey to Great Britain in 1830 noted that he was “46 years, 5 feet 8 1/2 inches, common forehead, hazel eyes, prominent nose, common mouth, pointed chin, greyish hair, brown complexion, oval face.”7 The age never seems to come to rest on any definite number—twenty-three in 1806, “about” twenty-six in 1812, and forty-six in 1830—or even on any specific year of birth. The differences may have as much to do with the vagaries of record keeping in various parts of the Atlantic world as with any attempt on Audubon’s part to deceive, but the point remains: On such a basic issue as birth date, even birth year, the documentary evidence on Audubon could be, at best, uneven.
Whatever variation there may have been about when Audubon was born, the question of where seems even more salient. By the 1830s, when Audubon had begun to gain decent notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic, the uncertainty surrounding his birth and national identity became a perplexing part of his story in the popular press. Despite the recognition of his birth in Saint-Domingue in his passport and other official documents, the more enduring narrative of his life—the one he created and the one that seemed to stick in the popular press—located his birth in the United States. To be sure, an 1832 essay in the American Monthly Review did raise the issue of the ambiguous information in Audubon’s “auto-biographical sketch” in Ornithological Biography, observing that “Mr. Audubon says that he was born in the New World; but does not inform [the reader] in what part of this wide New World, or at what time the event happened.” At about the same time, almost in response, a writer in the New American Review sought to clarify the location of his birth, reporting that “Mr. Audubon was born in America, but was descended from a French family, and was sent early in life, to receive his education in France.” The following year, a Philadelphia-area newspaper took a different position, trying to rectify an apparently erroneous report that Audubon had been born in Pennsylvania; instead, the author noted that a “gentleman of this vicinity … informs us, that France is his native country.” A decade later, however, a correspondent for another newspaper, who claimed to have interviewed Audubon in person, stated flatly that “Mr. Audubon was born in New Orleans” and that “nothing would give him more displeasure than to be even suspected of being an European.”8 These differing accounts likewise remained a bit vague on his birth year—“about 1775,” “about 1780,” “about 1782”—but they came increasingly to reflect a clear consensus around locating Audubon’s origins in North America.
By the time Audubon died, his American-based birth narrative had gained considerable currency in the country, and his obituaries increasingly connected him not only to North America, but to the United States, giving him implicit citizenship in the new nation. An 1852 book, The Homes of American Authors, located Audubon’s origins “on a plantation in Louisiana, then a French possession,” and noted that he had been “born the same year the Declaration of Independence was made (1776),” thus rooting his Frenchness in the soil of an emerging Americanness. An 1851 death notice associated Audubon’s birth more directly with the new nation, noting that “Mr. Audubon was born about 1775, in the State of Louisiana,” thus anticipating by some twenty-eight years Louisiana’s acquisition by the United States, much less formal statehood. Another likewise located Audubon’s birth in Louisiana, in 1775, and insisted that “Audubon was a native of this country, and not an adopted citizen.”9 Whatever questions might remain about the exact date or location—New Orleans, somewhere else in Louisiana, or in the United States, at any rate—written accounts had made him a fully naturalized native of the nation, and any suggestion of his origins in Saint-Domingue never appeared in print.
Origin Stories
Before we allow Audubon or any of the contemporary sources to tell more of his origins, we might well turn to more recent writers. By the twentieth century, the story of Audubon’s background had become clearer, and his modern biographers reached a reasonable measure of agreement on most—but still not all—of the basic details of his birth. In 1917, Francis Hobart Herrick, one of the earliest and most thorough of the twentieth-century Audubon biographers, wrote that Audubon was born on April 26, 1785, in Saint-Domingue; on that there now seems to be no modern scholarly dispute. Unfortunately, there was no birth certificate or baptismal record to document his birth, because Audubon was born out of wedlock—an important issue in itself—and local officials did not give formal sanction to such births. The only documentary evidence for his birth, then, comes from the records of the doctor who attended Audubon’s mother, Jeanne Rabin (also spelled Rabine), who was ailing with some sort of tropical sickness during the last days of her pregnancy. On April 26, the physician’s entry showed that Jeanne Rabin had delivered a child—but only that, with no name or even description