Staging the Dismal Swamp during the Civil War

On the day Jeb Stuart was mortally wounded defending the Confederate capital, R. D’Orsey Ogden, manager of the New Richmond Theatre, was busy preparing his most spectacular production, The Ghost of the Dismal Swamp. Having... [ view full abstract ]

On the day Jeb Stuart was mortally wounded defending the Confederate capital, R. D’Orsey Ogden, manager of the New Richmond Theatre, was busy preparing his most spectacular production, The Ghost of the Dismal Swamp. Having procured the equipment necessary to create the “Pepper’s Ghost” effect that had charmed New York theatregoers the previous year, Ogden was going to premier his ghost on May 9, 1864. With an investment of $19,000 on the line, Ogden advertised the play several ways: First, he connected it to Thomas Moore’s gothic poem “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” in which a young man follows the ghost of his lover into the swamp—never to be seen again. Second, Ogden added a subtitle, “Marteau, the Guerilla,” to evoke the warfare being conducted against Union soldiers in southern swamps. Third, he emphasized the spectacle itself: “The Ghost is Coming!” Ogden was by all accounts a terrible actor, but he was a shrewd businessman who knew how to please an audience, and his mixture of gothic romance and patriotic bluster did just that. Although there is no extant copy of the play, the context of its performance provides an opportunity to explore the changing relationship between Southern people and their swamps, both real and imagined, during the war. Drawing upon other examples from the mid-nineteenth century, Tynes Cowan, in “Staging the Dismal Swamp during the Civil War,” considers the likely representations used by Ogden to evoke the swamp on the Richmond stage.