![]() Writer Hans Christian Andersen, who would befriend and unrequitedly pine for her, recalled in The True Story of My Life the night she conquered Denmark. The child of a single mother, Lind began training to sing opera in her tween years. “ was hugely famous,” says historian Betsy Golden Kellem. October 6 marks the 200th anniversary of Lind’s birth in Stockholm, Sweden. In the words of Fredrika Bremer, a Swedish reformer visiting America in 1850, “ Jenny Lind, the new Slave Bill, and the protests against it in the North, Eastern, and Western States are…the standing topics of the newspapers.” The two issues would continue to appear side-by-side in the newspapers, and before long, Lind herself would be drawn into the national debate over slavery. For the next 21 months, thrilling accounts of Lind’s American concert tour would dominate newspapers, but the triumphs of the Swedish Nightingale would not eclipse the national debate over slavery which was polarizing America. Long popular in Europe, this was Lind’s first visit to the United States. The remainder of the Herald’s six-column front page was largely devoted to the arrival in New York of the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. The Herald’s editor, James Gordon Bennett, predicted, “In another week there will be but little anxiety entertained in relation to the question of slavery, the public mind will be so fatigued that it will be disinclined to think of the matter any further.” The Compromise of 1850, a collection of laws passed that month, would decide not only which new territories would permit slavery, it would include the Fugitive Slave Act, a measure that directed federal officials throughout the land to aid in the recapture of African Americans who had escaped bondage. The lead item in the pro-slavery New York Herald on September 2, 1850, was an editorial advocating that Congress swiftly pass a pending bill that would “ dispose of the slavery question forever” in the United States.
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