Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE featured in the Ottawa Citizen

A strange double life

Famed 19th-century author and explorer Clarence King secretly passed himself off as a black Pullman porter -- even to his wife


By James Macgowan
March 8, 2009; Ottawa Citizen

When Martha Sandweiss sat down to research the life and times of Clarence King, it took her 10 minutes to find out she had struck gold. She knew going in that King, a prominent 19th-century Ivy League-educated geologist, author and explorer, who counted U.S. Secretary of State John Hay and the writer Henry Adams among his friends, had an enormous secret he was keeping from his high-society friends.

What she didn't know, but quickly found out, was that this secret prompted him to live two lives: the first, as the first director of the United States Geological Survey, a gregarious friend of powerful people, who occasionally dined at the White House; the second, as a black Pullman porter named James Todd who was married to a black woman named Ada Copeland.

"I'm the first person to figure that piece of it out," Sandweiss says from her Amherst, Massachusetts home. "What people knew before was only that the famous Clarence King had a 13-year relationship -- whether it was a marriage or not -- with this African-American woman and that they had several children together."

Sandweiss, a professor of American studies and history at Amherst College, had been urging her students to look into the story of King's secret marriage, propelled by the indignity she felt upon reading a 1958 biography of King that barely mentioned Ada, or dismissed her as an undignified aberration. None of her students took her up on it, and this aspect of King's life kept gnawing at her. When she finally sat down and discovered his dual identity -- thanks to the recent digitization of American census records -- she decided this was a story she would write herself.

The result, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line , is a staggeringly researched, absorbing and page-turning account of a stunning deception carried out by a complex man who believed that miscegenation was where the future of the white race lay. As Sandweiss writes, King believed mixing the races "would improve the vitality of the human race and create a distinctly American people."

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