Freak bodies politic: Charles Stratton, Dred, and the Embodiment of National Innocence

Examining the performances of celebrity freak Charles Stratton (a.k.a. General Tom Thumb), this essay reorients recent efforts to read the cultural construction of blackness through its intersections with disability and childhood. Stratton’s dwarfism branded him a figure of national innocence through a performative continuum that included, among others, Napoléon, Yankee Doodle, and the slave child Tom Tit in Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), a P. T. Barnum production based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel. Unlike previous analyses of Stratton, I focus on the continuities between his different stage characters and the national identity they interpellate. Thus, both as Tom Thumb and Tom Tit, Stratton indexed a hopelessly passive and juvenile African American body politic, a vision that persuaded abolitionists, slavery apologists, and racist scientists alike. Nonetheless, as a person with a disability, Stratton was excluded from the nationalist fantasy he often incarnated.