Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins

Thomas Greene Wiggins was born on the twenty-fifth of May 1849 at the Wiley Edward Jones plantation at Harris County, Georgia, the son of Charity Wiggins and Mingo Wiggins — enslaved field labourers. He was born blind, with what is now understood to be congenital cataracts of both eyes, and was bought with his family by the planter General James Neil Bethune at an estate sale shortly after his birth.

He was placed at the Bethune household at Columbus, Georgia, where the family piano stood in the parlour. He produced his first reproduction of a heard piece — a Mozart sonata fragment — at four. He gave his first public recital at five at the Temperance Hall of Columbus in 1855. He was hired out at eight by Bethune to the impresario Perry Oliver of Savannah at a contract of fifteen thousand dollars per annum and a quarter of the gate — the highest concert-pianist contract then drawn in the United States.

He performed before President James Buchanan at the White House in April 1860 — the first African American to perform there — at eleven years of age. He played the standard concert repertoire of the period — Beethoven sonatas, Chopin études, Liszt transcriptions — alongside his own compositions, of which over a hundred survive in print.

His emancipation in 1865 did not end the Bethune contracts: he was placed by court order in the wardship of John G. Bethune and then under contract to Eliza Bethune, who collected his earnings until his death. He toured the United States, Britain and continental Europe between 1866 and 1900 — touring at the highest level of concert exposure for over thirty years while seeing none of the proceeds.

He died at Hoboken, New Jersey, on the thirteenth of June 1908 of a stroke, at fifty-nine.

He is honored here as the first African American to perform at the White House.