Chapter Nine
SLAVERY,
ANTI-BLACK RACISM &
American Artists
CONTENTS
Introduction
9.1
Théodore Géricault, Romanticism
and the Radical Representation of Race
9.2
The Atlantic Slave Trade: Records and Reverberations
9.3
Abolition and Aesthetics in Britain: J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship/a>
9.4
Picturing Enslavement:
Genre, Race and Stereotype in Antebellum America
9.5
9.6
Emancipation, Black Civil Rights and Social Reform<
9.7
Winslow Homer: Bearing Witness
9.8
Reconstruction and the Remaking of Identity
9.9
9.10
9.11
Frederick Douglass’s “Pictures and Progress”:
Reclaiming Race
9.12
Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner: Breaking Free
INTRODUCTION
An understanding of nineteenth-century modernity is incomplete without a consideration of the complex legacy of racialized slavery. Beyond its economic and political impact and the horrific human toll on millions of people of African descent, the history of Atlantic slavery advanced a Eurocentric worldview which asserted Western supremacy and legitimized the identity construction of the ‘other.’
This chapter will look at how representations of race were conceived, received and confronted in the Western imagination. How did artists picture a negated humanity born of bondage? Beginning with the European Romanticist artists, Théodore Géricault and J.M.W. Turner, and moving through to late-nineteenth American art, we will examine the underpinnings of conceptualizing race as momentous events were shaping modern history. In the context of race, these themes extend to narratives related to slavery, colonialism, and the struggles of marginalized communities.
When Édouard Manet was painting his infamous Olympia in 1863, and Paris was embracing modern life, modernity in the United States was mired in the changes of a nation’s fractured identity. America’s expansive agenda, its manifest destiny, was deeply entwined with slavery. The clash over slavery divided the country and led to the cataclysmic events of the Civil War in 1861, and the Reconstruction era, fraught with stereotypical slander, which followed.
American artists were severely challenged by the impact and aftermath of the war and the profound social changes they witnessed. Some turned to genre images of the every day, ambiguous and open-ended, to comment on the changing relationships between blacks and whites. Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson produced works that reflected America’s complex, changing attitudes toward black citizens in psychologically nuanced works that considered the inner experience of African Americans. Others adopted the metaphorical potential of the natural world, presenting the transformations of a nation in flux through the pictorial investigation of landscape phenomena.
The contributions of nineteenth-century African American artists Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner will close the chapter. The obstacles of racial and gender bias compelled both artists to pursue their acclaimed professional careers internationally, Tanner living in Paris, while Lewis worked in Italy, where she produced the iconic sculpture Forever Free.
9.1
| Théodore Géricault, Romanticism
and the Radical Representation of Race
In the early nineteenth century, as the Napoleonic Empire collapsed, European allies comprising Britain, Prussia, Russia, Austria, and later France, convened the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) to reorganize Europe and re-establish conservative order across the continent. France was returned to its original borders of 1789 but reclaimed the West African colony of Senegal from the British. The international abolition of the slave trade was also on the table in Vienna, initiated by British anti-slavery campaigners who feared that with peace, French slave traders would resume their trafficking of enslaved Africans.
Their fears were not unfounded. The restored Bourbon government commanded an expedition to recover the Senegal colony, an important symbol of French colonial ambitions in West Africa, and install its own administration, as well as restore a now covert slave trade. A convoy of ships set off from France on July 17, 1816. Over four hundred people were on board the flagship Medusa, among them the new governor of Senegal, settlers, an army regiment, and a group of government officials. Also aboard were abolitionists whose mission was to develop a cooperative agricultural industry between the Senegalese and the colonists, a venture through which they hoped to eliminate the practice of enslaved labour.
At the ship’s helm was Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a minor aristocrat with little naval experience who had been given the post as a reward for his allegiance to the monarchy. When he failed to assess navigational soundings adequately, the ship ran aground on the Arguin Bank off the African shore. What followed was a narrative of horrific human proportions. Only 15 of the 150 people aboard the raft were rescued by the Argus, and only ten ultimately survived to recount the horrors of cannibalism and murder. The event was monumentalized by the Romantic painter Théodore Géricault in his iconic Raft of the Medusa exhibited at the Paris Salon under the title Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene).
Claire Black McCoy’s essay, “Géricault, Raft of the Medusa,” provides more fully the historical context (Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticism/romanticism-in-france/a/Géricault-raft-of-the-medusa):
There had never been a painting like Raft of the Medusa. It was on the grand scale of French history painting (think, for example, of Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii) but instead of ideal forms and a moralizing story from history, Géricault offered the Salon audience a thoroughly modern, Romantic depiction of death and suffering based on a contemporary event that was in the news. To create his painting, Géricault investigated everything about the story of the raft and talked with many of the survivors. He then brought all of the research together to create a radical painting that responded to the conservative tradition of history paintings.
Géricault first learned about the disaster in the Paris newspapers. Then two of the survivors, the ship’s surgeon, Henri Savigny, and the engineer, Alexandre Corréard, published accounts of their experiences on the raft. Géricault interviewed them both and worked with other survivors as well. The painter went to the French coast to study the movement of ships on the water. He examined images of the raft’s design and the Medusa’s carpenter, who had built the raft, gave Géricault a miniature copy of it. Géricault began drawing the bodies of the living and the dead, then working out the scene in watercolour and oil sketches trying to figure out what to show the viewers and just how to do it. The process required over 100 studies that moved through each episode of the story.
In Raft of the Medusa, Géricault chose to represent the dramatic moment of hope when the distant ship Argus was first sighted. That he articulated it through the image of a black man at the apex of the composition is significant. Poised at the top of the painting, the sailor waves a red rag at the distant, passing ship. Beneath him on the makeshift raft is a pyramidal composition of living bodies and corpses.
The political impact of the work cannot be underestimated. The tragedy of the Medusa had become a full-blown scandal, calling into question the politics of France’s Restoration government. And although slavery was only superficially discussed in connection with Géricault’s painting, it was fundamental to its intended meaning.
The commander’s trial had become the trial of the monarchy, rallying the liberal opposition. Géricault’s placement of a black figure at the top of his pyramidal composition, instead of at its base, was symbolically charged.
Klaus Berger and Diane Chalmers Johnson in “Art as Confrontation: The Black Man in the Work of Géricault” (The Massachusetts Review 10, no. 2 (1969): 301–40) connect the black man in the Raft of the Medusa with other depictions of blacks by Géricault.
Géricault realized also that through the black man his art could deal with the concepts of modern society in a concrete way, and that such an art could then become a means of social and political confrontation. For Géricault, born in a time when Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité were legally established as the goals of society, the discrepancy between these high-minded ideals and the terrible realities of slavery was too obvious. He was determined to bring the people and the Establishment of his country face to face with their hypocrisy.
His interest in prints led him, indirectly, to an important awareness. In 1818 he made a lithograph of a Prize Fight [Boxers]…. In this irrelevant piece of pictorial cartoon Géricault hit upon an answer to his urgent questions: How can an artist deal pictorially with abstract concepts such as Freedom, the Rights of Man, the Equality of All Men? How was a painter to make known his passionate political convictions without resorting to the cartoon? How could he, Géricault, use the monumental artistic traditions of the past to deal explicitly with the complex of appalling social problems in the life about him? A glance at this English boxing print gave him an answer: the Negro.
…
In his own version of the Prize Fight Géricault did not depict merely the specific match between a Black named Molineaux and an Englishman named Crib; he created a visual embodiment of the whole problem of Black versus White. …There is no hint here of winner or loser. The two men are represented as completely equal in physical strength and courage and are placed in equally dominant positions in the composition.
Géricault’s interest in the Medusa was inspired in part by Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 a book written by J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Corréard. The publication’s impact was significant; it was translated into English and French and reprinted in multiple editions.
Géricault recognized the story’s importance beyond its tragic narrative. He was interested in the fact that French nationals wishing to escape the despotism of the French Restoration government were also aboard the Medusa, their mission to resume the administration of the French by living cooperatively among the Senegalese. The book describes the controversy of their stance:
Their attitude towards the Negro was “enlightened,” that is, they believed Negroes “should be prepared for their new condition [emancipation] as well by instruction as by the progressive amelioration of their situation.” The captain of the Medusa, on the other hand, was an incompetent, elderly and reactionary emigre, who owed his appointment to government patronage. Was it possible that this captain had set the raft adrift purposely in order to assure his own safety? Certainly he would have thought of many of these men leaving France as deserters, even traitors. Whatever the truth of the story, evidently Géricault saw far more in this contemporary catastrophe than a merely sensational, gruesome happening. He saw in it a chance to attack the Bourbon monarchy, and he took it.
Géricault was twenty-seven when he began to work on the immense painting. He was politically astute and fully aware that the size of the work would restrict it to museum display, thus bringing it directly to the public’s attention. He isolated himself in his large studio throughout the spring and summer of 1818, completing the work by August, in time for the opening of the Salon on August 25, 1819. Berger and Chalmers recount the contrary reactions it elicited:
As one writer has put it, “Géricault’s success rested not only on his artistic qualities. If he wanted to provoke a political scandal, he calculated only too well. The government would not allow the name Medusa in the catalogue, and substituted the harmless title, Shipwreck Scene. The public quickly restored the right name, and political sympathies were given free reign. Some congratulated Géricault on his courageous attitude as a citizen, others blamed him severely for his choice of subject. Whoever let the Medusa stir him to sympathy, indirectly brought the government of Louis XVIII into disrepute.” Géricault himself recognized that the criticisms leveled against his painting were largely dependent upon the political stance of the particular critic: “This year our journalists have reached the pinnacle of the ridiculous. Every picture is judged first on the spirit in which it is painted. So you will hear a liberal writer praising the patriotic brush-stroke or the nationalist color of a certain work. The same work, judged by a reactionary, is not only a revolutionary composition dominated by a generally seditious tone, but also one in which the faces are filled with an expression of hatred for our paternal government. Finally, I have been accused by a certain White Banner of having libelled the entire Navy Department in one ‘character’ head.”
In spite of the many criticisms made of the Raft of the Medusa, one imagines that secretly Géricault must have been pleased at the tremendous public reaction to the political and social indictments of the painting’s theme. Not only is the Navy indeed accused of incompetence by the tragedy itself; the entire government, as well as the public, is forced to accept the work or be accused of discrimination, for there at the climax of the scene, the one man strong enough to attract salvation for the rest, is the Negro. Géricault forced a confrontation through this painting, a confrontation of the people of France with the depiction of a black man as not only an equal, but perhaps a superior being.
Through numerous oil sketches, such as Negro Woman
and several studies of Negro heads, as well as in chalk drawings, Géricault goes beyond generalizations to recognize the beauty and delineate the unique variations of these personalities. The schematic profile of the Negro boxer is quickly superseded by portrait-like, illusionistic presentations.
This individualistic representation of the black man is carried into the final painting of the Raft of the Medusa, especially in the figure to the right of the mast.
This black man, though individual in physique, has his face turned from us towards the distant ship, the source of his deliverance from the misery of the raft. The man remains anonymous, a symbol of all black men urgently seeking liberation. Through this fusion of the factual account of the event with the grand composition and heroic gestures of traditional classical art, Géricault monumentalizes the incident and the men of this modern tragedy.
…
One of the last and unexecuted projects planned by Géricault was a monumental painting, or series of paintings, depicting the moral and physical horrors of slavery. The abolition of slavery, for which Géricault appeals here, was first achieved in England. During the artist’s visit in 1820-21, the English abolitionists had already begun organizing an Anti-Slavery Society, which by 1823 was publishing periodicals on the appalling conditions of the slaves. England finally abolished slavery in 1833, while France, moving more slowly, granted the Negro freedom in 1848.
Senegal continued to be a notorious clearing point for slave traffic. The demand for slaves in the West Indies and the southern United States made clandestine traffic worth any risk, and the profits involved incited large-scale bribery.
Géricault‘s The Slave Market portrays a captive black man, hands bound behind his back and neck encased in an iron collar, about to be brutally beaten by a slaver. A black woman struggles to defend him from the flogging. The cruelty depicted extends beyond the aggression. The image speaks of the separation of husbands, wives, and children, a strategy designed to break the human spirit of enslaved families. Géricault’s image succinctly contrasts the inhumanity of the slavers with the powerlessness of their captives. To abolitionists, scenes such as this confirmed the devolution of slave traders into sadistic monsters who had lost their moral compass. Berger and Chalmers:
In his conception of the slavery paintings, Géricault drew on earlier tendencies. Like the Raft of the Medusa, these were to be huge works in the grand tradition of Western painting, meant to confront the viewer with the horrible realities of slavery. The more complete drawing deals with the cruelties of the Slave Market,
the other with the lonely despair of women and children separated from their husbands and fathers, doomed regardless of age or sex to inhuman treatment and early death. Surely Géricault had scenes such as these etched in his imagination by the publications of the abolitionists…
…
In this later work the true social situation is rendered in dramatic naturalism: the slave is helpless in the hands of his captor tormentor; and anguished women, beaten and torn from their men, replace the jolly English spectators of the Prize Fight. Again Géricault uses all the strength of the classical grand tradition to render the scene clearly and forcefully, and again he tempers this classicism with naturalistic representation and the simple and somewhat exaggerated dramatic gestures of the popular prints. Although Géricault was undoubtedly inspired by the themes and even the compositions of such prints, he overcame the insignificance, the narrowness of this genre art by applying the insights obtained through his long studies of classical reliefs and great Italian and French painting. His aim was the monumental fresco depicting the epic events of his own day “with buckets of color,” as he put it. This expressive synthesis was conceived by Géricault, but never realized. The artist died in January of 1824 at the age of thirty-two.
Lorenz Eitner, in French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century (Part I: Before Impressionism, 2000 (excerpt, https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1334.html) discusses the significance of Géricault’s sojourn in Italy where he saw Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
In March 1816 he competed for the academic Rome Prize but failed the contest and decided to undertake the voyage on his own account. His Italian stay in 1816-1817 gave him profound impressions of paintings of heroic size that further stimulated his interest in problems of style and whetted his appetite for work on the wall-filling scale.
The enormous canvas represents an episode of a recent shipwreck that had violently aroused French public opinion. The problem that Géricault set himself in composing his picture was to combine the immediacy of an eyewitness account with the permanence and stability of monumental composition. He thus sought to unite the two antithetical aspects of his art in a grand synthesis, reconciling historical realism with heroic generality: the modern shipwreck was made to echo Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
Scholarly interpretations of the Raft of the Medusa have been numerous over the years and have stimulated critical assessments. Here is a recent noteworthy example by Ken Lum.
Lum maintains that “most art historical treatments of The Raft of the Medusa have concentrated on the allegorical functioning of the painting; its image of despair and degeneracy …. In fact there has been surprisingly little analysis in terms of the painting’s other functioning as a radical expression of racial and sexual permutability within modernity.” (“On Board The Raft of the Medusa” in Everything Is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018, 35–41; originally published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 10 (1999): 14–17)
(https://www.design.upenn.edu/fine-arts/graduate/post/excerpt-ken-lum-g%C3%A9ricaults-raft-medusa).
Lum’s argument is as follows:
In Géricault’s painting, everyone is literally on the same boat with hardly a shred of clothing to distinguish officer from seaman and slave from slave trader. Although the depicted scene is a tragic one, the grouping of bodies on the raft can be read unitarily as a community.
The raft functions as a platform of interspersed sexual and racial codes, metonymically split from the false decorousness and rigidly stratified constitution of French society of the period. More particularly, the composition of the human pyramid aboard the raft is meant to mirror the social composition of France’s apparatus of empire, built to a large extent as it was on the backs of male African slaves.
…
The Medusa painting is an image that upsets power relations because it articulated modern ideas of multiple social roles but it could only do so on the largely imaginary and deculturated setting of Géricault’s canvas.
…
The important artistic problem for Géricault was how to negotiate a meeting of mutuality without ceding his art to mere illustration of historical fact. His solution was to highlight the salience of race and male sexuality in the raft narrative by dislodging both terms from their normative and socially fixed meanings. Throughout his career, Géricault insisted on the prominence of both discursive terms in the configuration of modernity.
The rationalization for a full realization of human freedom for slaves was consistently compromised by the faith invested in the guidance provided by positivistic thought and the empirical sciences that in Géricault’s time made many racist claims on the person of the slave. A common view among Europeans held that the black body was a savage body, descended from a tribe of cannibals. Homologies between racist science and the slave trade were widely accepted because the equation of blacks with cannibalism, for example, offered the convenience of one more racial justification for slavery. Both Géricault and the Salon public were familiar with the accounts of cannibalism that had taken place on the raft, measures taken out of desperation to survive. But in the artist’s Medusa painting, cannibalism is not essentialized as a property intrinsic to the black person. Rather, it is something generalized to both the white body and black body. The artist seems to be saying that in a diseased situation anyone can become a cannibal.
…
The Raft of the Medusa did not conform neatly to contemporary perceptions about alterity; what it more accurately conformed to were contemporary facts about alterity not yet understood. The discourse of colonization meant the increasing inscription of the Other within the space of the same.
Géricault’s Medusa functioned as a signpost of multi-racial hybridity, one that effected what Homi Bhabha has described as the unfixing of the authority of colonial discourse by the voice of the Other. As such, The Raft of the Medusa operates in what bell hooks refers to as a counter-hegemonic cultural production. The painting is an expression of Géricault’s reflection on the profound precariousness of traditional conceptions of race and sexuality at the dawn of the modern industrial age. He understood that to think historically about slavery was to grapple with a profound ambiguity, that slavery continued to thrive in a period marked by profound opposition.
This led Géricault to draw upon the subconscious force of the image of the black African in order to challenge its basis. His challenge came at a time when debates about the slave trade coincided with what Heinrich Heine has called the new revolutionary force of money. Norbert Elias has pointed out that “the reproduction of capital is tied to the reproduction of slaves, and thus directly or indirectly to the success of military campaigns.” It has been argued that international finance entered into the modern era after the French debacle at Waterloo in 1815, merely a year before the Medusa tragedy, when there was a decisive shift in influence from nation-states to financial institutions such as the House of Rothschild and Baring Brothers.
The penetration of European money into Africa, Asia, and the Americas spurred new entrepreneurial agencies of European colonialism that established a global division of labour of unprecedented exploitative power. Despite its language of indignity, opposition to slavery was often in practice an argument for a new form of indentured labour. The work of slaves would be recast in new terms, as agricultural labourers legally and economically bonded to France, free only to the extent of the slave wages offered.
9.2
| The Atlantic Slave Trade: Records and Reverberations
Two decades after Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa was shown at the Paris Salon, and within a month of the opening of London’s World Anti-Slavery Convention in June 1840, the English Romanticist J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship was exhibited at the Royal Academy. The timeliness of the painting’s public showing on the heels of the Anti-Slavery Convention contributed to its impact.
The Anti-Slavery Convention was organized by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1787, the same year as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The twelve male members comprised nine Quakers and three Anglicans, including Thomas Clarkson. Through their efforts, the Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807, its purpose to abolish the slave trade. From 1823 to 1838, the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions lobbied to bring about the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, advocated by William Wilberforce. By August 1834, some 800,000 enslaved people in the British empire had been freed. The work had just begun. The need to campaign for anti-slavery worldwide resulted in the founding of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) in 1839 and the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, the latter only permitting access to male delegates, of whom 200 were British, 50 American and a minor number of attendees from other countries.
Jake Thurman in “Origins and Overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (sixteenth to nineteenth century CE)” (World History Project, https://www.oerproject.com/-/media/WHP/PDF/Era5/WHP-5-4-2-Read—The-Transatlantic-Slave-Trade—1140L.ashx) explains how and why the transatlantic slave trade came about, how it affected the lives of those enslaved and what the consequences were for Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
Slavery is one of the most devastating things that one group of humans can subject another group to, and it is an extremely complex topic. The arrival of Europeans in the Americas caused major changes in the social, political, cultural, demographic, economic, and environmental aspects of the Western Hemisphere. The needs and desires of elites determined how land and laborers in the New World were exploited. Though on a different continent, the goal was to support the economic growth of European communities. The shift to plantation agriculture in Brazil and the Caribbean meant that sugar could now be produced and exported on a large scale. This created a demand for labor. Spaniards and Portuguese did not want to work in the fields; they wanted to own the fields. European diseases had wiped out indigenous populations, and conversion to Christianity made some indigenous peoples exempt from certain types of forced labor. As a result, Europeans looked to Africa for a new source of workers. Africans were deemed suitable for work in the Americas because they were unfamiliar with the land and so less likely to escape, largely resistant to European diseases, accustomed to laboring in the tropics, and came from farming cultures. Scholars still debate how much race had to do with Europeans’ initial decision to enslave Africans. Certainly at the height of the slave trade and in the centuries that followed, the notion of racial inferiority was used by Europeans to justify the enslavement of millions of Africans. Other justifications included religion and concepts of “civilization.” To the English, for example, pagan people were candidates for enslavement. They argued that the absence of Christian belief and behavior made people inferior and that they lacked the capacity to be “civilized.”
The Atlantic slave trade began shortly after the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas. The transatlantic leg of the African slave trade most likely began with a Portuguese slaving voyage from Africa to the Americas in 1526. The earliest efforts were copied and accelerated by later Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch voyages. All told, approximately 12.5 million Africans were taken from the coast of Africa to the Americas, though about 2.5 million of those died during the voyage. The sheer volume and violence of the trade sets it apart from the types of slavery that existed earlier in history. Complex links between networks of slave traders in Africa trying to meet Europe’s demand led many of those 12.5 million humans being forcibly taken from Africa.
But there were other Africans who were forced into bondage through war and societal collapse. The violence of the trade was undeniable, as slavers from the coasts journeyed inland and used their military advantage to prey upon smaller agricultural societies and their populations. It is true that many of those doing the enslaving were themselves Africans. However, European demand and economic muscle clearly drove the trade and maximized its volume. Europe had the demand, the traders on Africa’s coasts had the supply, so slavery became a major business. As slave traders provided more enslaved people to European colonies in the Americas, many communities in Africa simply collapsed. Africans and Europeans both cited factors such as economics, religion, and race and ethnic divisions to justify the enslavement of millions of people based upon factors such as economics, religion, and racial and ethnic divisions.
9.3
| Abolition and Aesthetics in Britain: J. M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship
Turner’s The Slave Ship was inspired by accounts of the late 18th-century slave ship Zong, which had jettisoned human cargo at sea to collect insurance money.
The story appeared the year before the exhibition in the new addition of Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, which described how in 1783, 152 enslaved men had been thrown overboard while still alive. The Zong ship had lost its way; 60 slaves and seven crew members had died of an epidemic, and the water supply was depleting. The survivors were in poor health, and the captain knew many would die before the ship reached its destination. Because insurance compensation could only be claimed for those slaves “lost at sea,” but not those who had expired on board, he contrived to cast three groups of men to their fates at sea.
Robert Leo Costello, in “The Center Cannot Hold: J. M. W. Turner’s Contemporary History Paintings in the Age of Revolution” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2002), notes that
The only sign of the slaves being thrown overboard in the painting is the shackled leg, hands and chains that slide into the water in the foreground, but it is referred to directly in the verse-tag which accompanied the entry in the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue. The verses read:
“Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the Typhon’s coming.
Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying – ne’er heed their chains
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?”
Slave Ship was ridiculed at the Royal Academy. The Times remarked that it was “impossible to look at without mingled feelings of pity and contempt … the leg of a negro which is about to afford a nibble to John Dory, a pair of soles, and a shoal of whitebait.” In the Athenaeum May 15, it was a “passionate extravagance of marigold sky, and pomegranate-coloured sea and fish dressed as gay as garden flowers in pink and green with one shapeless dusky-brown leg thrown up from this parti-coloured chaos” (quoted in Albert Boime, “Turner’s Slave Ship: The Victims of Empire,” Turner Studies, 10 no. 1 (1990): 34–43).
There are multilayered meanings to Slave Ship, writes Costello. He summarizes two key writings, the first by Boime.
Boime relates the visual and thematic structure of the image to economic issues contemporary to the painting, and argues that it stages the struggle between the plantation system of slavery and the new forces of laissez-faire industrialism of the nineteenth century. According to Boime, the painting’s fiery sunset is a metaphor for the “passing of the outmoded institution [of slavery] in the context of the new industrialized state.” Boime’s metaphorical interpretation depends upon the identification of the ship as the Zong because it places British participation in the slave system firmly in the past. The ship’s conflict with the storm can then be made, in his account, to represent the conflict of slavery with the new industrial forces of the nineteenth century.
A particularly relevant part of Boime’s article is about William Makepeace Thackeray, a British novelist, author and illustrator. Boime relates that Thackery, who was a racist, wrote to his mother on 26 January 1853 while visiting slaveholder friends in the southern United States.
“Sambo is not my man and my brother, the very aspect of his face is grotesque and inferior. I can’t help seeing and owning this, at the same time denying any white man’s right to hold this fellow creature in bondage and make goods and chattels of him and his issue.”
Like most members of his group, he assuaged his guilt through the caricatural depiction of ethnic groups as sub-human. In fact he returned home believing that the working poor in England were worse off and more miserable than Black slaves in America. He also felt that England should clean up its act before advising other countries on slave issues.
“Of course we feel the cruelty of flogging and enslaving a negro- they feel here the cruelty of starving an English labourer or driving an English child to a mine – Brother, Brother we are kin.”
The second interpretation summarized by Costello is John McCoubrey’s “Turner’s Slave Ship: Abolition, Ruskin and Reception” (Word and Image 14, no 4 (1998): 319-53):
John McCoubrey, however, has suggested that a very different moment is represented in the Slave Ship. While Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1806, a number of other nations, including Spain and Portugal, continued to engage in it in the 1840’s. British warships patrolled the waters of the West Coast of Africa in an effort to stop them, but because captains were given prize money for slaves captured on the open sea but not for those still on shore or in the harbor, many captains allowed the slave-ships to leave the coast before pursuing them. A frequent result of this tactic was that the slavers jettisoned slaves to lighten their ships as they tried to outrun the patrol. This issue of pursuit and jettison was a highly controversial public concern in 1840, and, according to McCoubrey, it is such a scene which Turner depicts in the Slave Ship.
As evidence, he points to the shape of the slave-ship which he finds similar to those used by the Spanish and the Portuguese in those years and slaving vessels.
He also points to the blue and white object in the water in the middle-left of the painting, which he reads as a Portuguese flag of trade also in use in the late 1830… McCoubrey also discusses at length the considerable public debate over the continued practice of the slave trade as well as the role of the British navy. McCoubrey has thus brought an important new aspect of the slave trade issue into play in relation to this painting and shown that it was indeed a very topical work of art.
Here is McCoubrey’s description of a detail of the painting:
If we allow Turner the necessity of painting on the surface of the sea the horrors that should be hidden in its depths, the figures are not much more bizarre than the anomalous behavior of the ship, the misplaced swells and belated storm we have mentioned. The most arresting figure is a woman, scarcely mentioned in 1840, who has been the focus of the most hostile criticism. Her right leg, an iron fetter around its ankle, is upthrust, and her breasts are clearly visible just above the frame. In a cruel frenzy, carnivorous fish feed upon her, led by one whose eyes and mouth unmistakably express human malevolence, relating its assault to the human profiteers from slavery and its trade. The leg is seen against a large, indistinct, whitish form of what must be a shark whose mouth appears to her right, and whose large fin or back rises close behind it. Because of its alignment, it is tempting to conclude that this monster is swallowing the woman’s other leg, the fish claiming its ‘legacy’ noticed in a ghastly pun by a hostile reviewer in 1840; but, since it is clearly a right foot upraised, the other leg of the victim is to the left.
…
It is not surprising that this seeming fantasy was not taken seriously, much less understood, as a public protest. In 1840, the naked, upside-down woman was not only an affront to the decorum of high art, but a violation of common morality that forfeited the painting’s claim to address any moral issue.
Costello also suggests that Biard’s The Slave Trade was exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1840, the same year as Turner’s painting,
… had considerably less dangerous implications for a British audience. Because the title of the painting placed its atrocities so specifically on the African coast, rather than in the colonies, there could be no direct implication of guilt to a contemporary audience in Britain. What guilt there was could be firmly placed in the past, allowing the image to fit very comfortably into the dominant model of abolition that I have described, which held Britain to be cleansed of sin, having ended its role in slave trading. Turner’s image on the other hand, with its dialectical structure of reference, suggested a much more complex, less progressive model of history in which British guilt was not so easily eliminated.
Sam Smiles in “Turner and the Slave Trade: Speculation and Representation, 1805-40” (British Art Journal 8, no. 3 (2007): 47–54) discusses a key piece of evidence that confirms Turner’s “deeply skeptical view of abolition.”
It comes as a surprise, therefore, to find that in 1805 Turner invested in a Jamaican speculation whose profits were entirely dependent on slave labour. The Dry Sugar Work pen in St Catherine’s parish was an estate of about 1500 acres close to Spanish Town, whose primary business was intended to be the raising of cattle for the local market. Currently encumbered with a mortgage of £2530, an investment scheme was devised to pay this off, buy sufficient slaves to run the property effectively and remit the ensuing profits to the subscribers.
…
Turner cannot have been in any doubt regarding what he was investing in. The printed Proposals for the tontine, having enumerated the property’s potential to deliver a substantial income, clearly state that . . . “these Objects cannot be accomplished without a large Gang of Negroes; the Money is therefore to be laid out in the Purchase of Negroes … the Number of Negroes thereby purchased, will of themselves form a full Security for the Money, independent of the present and the daily increasing Value of the Estate. Negroes always greatly increase in Value, after they have been some time in the Island, so as to double the Amount of their first Price, after allowing any casual Loss by Death.”
All these assets could be sold for profit, except the slaves, who were too valuable to dispose of. Given the strength of the abolitionist campaign in the early 1800s, this last clause may have been included as a reassurance to the investors that even were the slave trade to be outlawed the Dry Sugar Work pen would maintain its slave population.
…
[It] seems reasonable to suggest that Turner’s investment in the tontine points to an uncritical view of slavery in the 1800s and, correspondingly, that his humanitarian feelings for the victims of the slave trade and his endorsement of abolition did not exist much before the later 1820s.
9.4
| Picturing Enslavement: Genre, Race and Stereotype in Antebellum America
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the widespread forcible removal of Africans from their homeland to the American colonies to be exploited as labourers in the production of tobacco and cotton crops. By the mid-19th century, the controversy surrounding America’s westward expansion and the rise of the abolition movement in the States incited a debate over slavery that tore America apart, culminating in the bloody Civil War. Even though four million enslaved people were liberated, the legacy of slavery continued to impact the nation in myriad ways, including challenging its collective identity and how artists found ways to represent it.
William Sydney Mount, an American painter from Long Island, was the first native-born artist to specialize in genre paintings of quotidian life in rural America. His realistic scenes reveal a particular interest in the depiction of African Americans, whom he often portrayed as smiling.
Mount was born into a prosperous family of slave owners in Setauket, Long Island (slavery was only abolished in New York in 1827). His attitude was paternalistic, his much-quoted phrase that “a Negro is as good as a White man-as long as he behaves himself,” summarizing his innate beliefs. Frederick C. Moffatt explains in “Barnburning and Hunkerism: William Sidney Mount’s Power of Music” (Winterthur Portfolio 29, no. 1 (1994): 19–42) that this phrase spoke of: “the innate servility of the black race, of the humane treatment black slaves received, of their basically childlike and happy natures, of their acceptance of their status as property in Southern white society, of the economic benefits the nation reaped from the products of slavery … As personal property, the slave could expect birth-to-death protection and nurturing from his master.”
The assumption that African Americans were carefree was linked to slavers’ beliefs that they possessed limited intelligence. To those who supported slavery, they were regarded as savage beings who could be domesticated only in captivity. The fact that obedience and docility were the result of brutality was unrecognized or unheeded.
The trope of the “lovable slave” was positioned against that of the “monstrous freedman.” Enslaved adults were regarded as dependent children but were deliberately kept from an education that would advance their cause. While laws in most Southern states barred slaves from schooling, their independent efforts to educate themselves, sometimes with the aid of their “owners,” is well-documented.
The laziness of black Americans was a stereotype propagated by slave owners to justify their barbarous actions .“It was the general testimony of slaveholders… [that the Negro was] habitually indolent and opposed to exertion, which condition necessitated a master to force him to work.” (William Sumner Jenkins, Proslavery Thought in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 251).
In Mount’s Farmers Nooning, we see a striking contrast between the representation of the indolent black man sporting a smile and napping on a stack of hay and the industrious white Yankee honing his scythe sharpener, the implication being that whites alone could stay alert during a noonday break. The black man was further demeaned here by being cast as the butt of a joke, fast asleep while being tickled with a straw. African Americans were common victims of practical jokes in early 19th-century images, accentuating the assumption of gullibility and feebleness.
Karen M. Adams writes in “The Black Image in the Paintings of William Sidney Mount” (American Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1975): 42–59):
In Farmers Nooning Mount has painted a subtle allegory on the subject of work. For this enduringly popular painting, which was lithographed by the Apollo Association and later by the American Art Union and published in “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” Mount utilized the stereotype of the lazy, carefree Negro, a type readily recognized and accepted by his contemporary audience.
Yet, despite the device of the small boy with the teasing straw, this black man is no caricature. He is, as one of Mount’s reviewers recognized, “the masterpiece of the composition.”‘ Placed in the sunlight, in a pose of luxuriant abandon reminiscent of the sleeping Ariadne, he dominates the scene.
This painting is a subversive attack on the Puritan maxim to make hay while the sun shines, although its subtler message may have been lost on most of his audience and on his imitators–like James Goodwin Clonney, who in the 1851 painting Waking Up perpetuated the stereotype but borrowed none of the modifying qualities of grace and beauty that characterized Mount’s sleeping black man.
The association of the black with natural grace and sensuousness, with a relaxed attitude and a love of pleasure, was part of a concept that reassured American slaveholders that black men were more like animals than were white men; but these same qualities were cited in the 1830’s, ’40’s, and ’50’s by reformers and abolitionists such as Alexander Kinmont and Théodore Tilton in defense of the notion that black men had more natural Christian virtue than did white men. This romantic idea was as much a critique of American society as it was a defense of anti-slavery.
It found its most complete and popular expression in Mrs. Stowe’s bestseller.
In his interpretation of Harriet Beecher’ Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Robert Seldon Duncanson addressed the issue of spirituality and race in a romanticized way. Duncanson was the first documented African American landscape artist. He established himself in Cincinnati in the 1840s with the help of funds from the Anti-Slavery League and private patrons where he worked as a painter of still lifes and “fancy pieces” after success as an itinerant painter. Racial tensions following the Civil War forced him to leave America for Canada, where he lived in Montreal from 1863 to 1865.
His travels to Europe and studies in the European landscape tradition reveal the influence of Turner, Claude Lorrain, and Thomas Cole. Uncle Tom and Little Eva was one of only a few of his paintings that dealt directly with African American subjects.
The two central characters, Uncle Tom and Little Eva are depicted in the foreground of a lyrical landscape painting. The scene is patterned on an edition of the story which describes the event at the St Clare family’s summer home on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. It is sunset on a Sunday evening. Eva stands bathed in light in front of her faithful servant and points to the sky. “Where do you suppose new Jerusalem is, Uncle Tom?” said Eva. “Oh, up in the clouds, Miss Eva” he replies. “Then I think I see it,” said Eva. ” Look in those clouds!—they look like great gates of pearl; and you can see beyond them,—far, far off,—it’s all gold. Tom, sing about ‘spirits bright.'”
The image illustrates the bond between the Black servant and the white little girl. Its engagement with the spirituality they shared highlights Little Eva’s (and thus Stowe’s) belief that spiritual and physical salvation for African Americans could be attained through devotion to a Christian God. The blond Eva represents the best of abolitionist sentiment and Christian love, although she dies shortly after the scene by the lake. Still, one discerns a patronizing tone: the child, who is unmistakably blond, will lead the Black man out of darkness and ignorance into salvation and light. White abolitionists saw the passivity of Uncle Tom as evidence of the morality of efforts to free him.
Duncanson’s image maintains the tone of Stowe’s text. Little Eva elicits a Christlike association while Uncle Tom’s religious devotion to her is immediately perceptible.
Stowe writes, “Uncle Tom loved her as something frail and earthly, yet almost worshipped her as something heavenly and divine. He gazed on her as the Italian sailor gazes on his image of the child Jesus-with a mixture of reverence and tenderness.”
When the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission was formed to advise the government in the aftermath of emancipation, its final report contained a call to religion to help usher freed people and their former owners into the post-slavery era. Adams quotes from the “Final Report of the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission,” issued in 1864 at the request of President Lincoln and quoted by Adams:
The Anglo-Saxon race, with its great force of character, much mental activity, an unflagging spirit of enterprise, has a certain hardness, a stubborn will, only moderate geniality, a lack of habitual cheerfulness. Its intellectual powers are stronger than its social instincts. The head predominates over the heart. There is little that is emotional in its religion … It is a race more calculated to call forth respect than love, better fitted to do than to enjoy. The African race is in many respects the reverse of this. Genial, lively, docile, emotional, the affections rule; the social instincts maintain the ascendent except under cruel repression, its cheerfulness and love of mirth overflow with the exuberance of childhood. It is devotional by feeling. It is a knowing rather than a thinking race…. As regards the virtues of humility, loving-kindness, resignation under adversity, reliance on Divine Providence, this race exhibits these, as a general rule, in a more marked manner than does the Anglo-Saxon… With time, if we but treat these people in a Christian fashion, we shall have our reward. The softening influence of their genial spirit, diffused throughout the community, will make itself felt as an element of improvement in the national character.
A painting that illustrates the racial divide in America while suggesting a shared humanity between Blacks and Whites is Mount’s The Power of Music. The scene takes place before the Civil War in rural Long Island. It is a complex, compelling work. It elicited commentary for its unique subject when it was first displayed at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1847.
The Power of Music portrays an African American labourer as he listens intently to white men playing the fiddle. The figures occupy separate spaces – the white men indoors, the black man outdoors – but they are united by the music they love.
Frederick C. Moffatt writes in “Barnburning and Hunkerism: William Sidney Mount’s Power of Music” (Winterthur Portfolio 29, no. 1 (1994): 19–42):
When The Power of Music first was exhibited, The Literary World reviewed it at some length as “one of the most thoroughly original and successful little pictures it has ever been our lot to behold. The subject is one that he has in other ways treated before, but never so successfully as now.” After discussing the three white men, the anonymous reviewer continued: “But the triumph of the picture is the negro standing outside the door, out of sight of the main group but certainly not out of hearing. He is an amateur, plays himself, and listens critically, at the same time delightedly. We never saw the faculty of listening so exquisitely portrayed as it is here. Every limb, joint, body, bones, hat, boots, and all, are intent upon the tune.”
…
A New England journalist was equally impressed with the psychological portrayal. “The scene is a country barn, the hostler is fiddling, the stable boy, a negro wood-sawyer, and one or two others are listening, and never was the power of music more beautifully portrayed than in this rude audience, no longer vulgar, but transfigured. The music has struck the electric cord, and kindled the latent soul that now shines through every feature. To idealize such faces, and such a scene, I conceive to be a great triumph in art.”
Neither reviewer mentions the racial implications of The Power of Music. An African American labourer is outside a barn listening to a fiddle tune enjoyed by white men inside the barn. A love of music may indicate a shared humanity, but the two races are in different spaces, symbolic of their unmistakable division.
Scholars have varied in their interpretation of The Bone Player, painted five years before the Civil War. Is the painting a stereotypical image of an African American, or is it a sympathetic portrait of an individual? Mount titled the painting The Bone Player. Does this mean that the main subject is the man’s musical ability rather than his identity? The bones of ivory, wood, or bone clicked together were a typical instrument of African American minstrels.
When Mount was painting his genre pictures, the image of the beaming black minstrel had already been cast into stereotype, aided by the advent of minstrel shows, a form of popular entertainment based on the image of the happy, carefree and child-like slave.
In the 1840s, Dan Emmett, an American songwriter and the author of “Dixie,” founded the first troupe of Blackface minstrels known as the Virginia Minstrels. The genre became popularised in American theatre. Thus began the fixed image of a toothy-grinned black man wearing tattered clothes, carrying a fiddle, a tambourine or bones, and doing the cakewalk. The iconic image became the standard cover of Emmett’s programmes, typically depicting a man strumming a banjo and wearing a freaky facial expression. White racists took the banjo-picking Jim Crow as a stereotypical representation of blacks.
This conceptualization was almost universally recognized in the 19th century and partially explains the pervasive caricature of cheery black folk, puppet-like performers even in servitude.
Bruce Robertson, in “‘The Power of Music’: A Painting by William Sidney Mount” (The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79, no. 2 (1992): 38–62), offers another viewpoint.
The essence of the minstrel show was the ludicrous spectacle of whites imitating blacks. The stereotypes were usually scurrilous; blacks were stupid, vainglorious, naive, ugly. The format was irregular, consisting of patter songs, skits, ballads: whatever seemed apposite and likely to get a laugh. But the humor was not aimed at blacks so much as the white elites who lorded it above the white working- and middle-class audiences. It was the spectacle of blacks mimicking their ultimate superiors (their aristocratic Whig allies) that proved so funny, because it mortified the latter’s pretensions.
Eastman Johnson, a Northern artist whose father was a state official, depicted pre-Civil War black Southern life in a sentimental light. Negro Life at the South takes the deprived life of enslaved people and renders it picturesque. Later, his works would contribute to the general, gradual transformation of the public image of black people following the Civil War.
Negro Life at the South was painted at a critical moment in the debate about slavery, and its impact was significant.
In 1867, Henry Tuckerman, in his Book of the Artists (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867, 467-70), said of Eastman Johnson that “No one of our painters has more truly caught and perfectly delineated American rustic and negro, or with such pathetic and natural emphasis put upon canvas bits of household or childish life, or given such bright and real glimpses of primitive human nature. . . In all his works we find vital expression, . . . [I]nvariably characteristic; trained in the technicalities of his art, keen in his observation, and natural in his feeling, we have a genre painter in Eastman Johnson who has elevated and widened its naturalistic scope and its national significance. His pictures are in constant demand, and purchased before they leave the easel. All American collectors seek and prize them.”
Tuckerman’s attitude reflected a Northern elitism in keeping with Johnson’s paternalistic attitude, a form of liberalism couched in sympathetic feeling for social groups unable to defend their cause.
Negro Life at the South was exhibited at the National Academy of Design spring exhibition in 1859. The figures were inhabitants of the block his father owned on F Street. The worn-down house was situated in the interior yard of what used to be an old tavern east of the family home in Washington, D.C. The ramshackle state of the dwelling is emphasized by the deteriorating wood, loose clapboards, and broken windows, and it evokes a picture of dismal living conditions.
Various figures surround the central banjo player: a mother and her children, kids at play, self-absorbed lovers, and, looking down from a window, a turbaned woman and her baby. Two young girls look on from the sidelines as an elegant white woman (Johnson’s sister), and her companion emerge from the big house next door to watch.
The painting’s instant success was aided by its equivocal approach to the subject of slavery. Abolitionists in the North interpreted the scene as depicting the appalling living conditions of Southern slaves. In contrast, Southern slave owners argued that it demonstrated how the enslaved in the south were happy, despite their “uncomfortable” living conditions.
The most direct and distressing contradiction to this phoney belief came from a former enslaved black man named John Little. In A People’s History of the United States,1492-Present (Harper and Row, 1980), Howard Zinn includes an excerpt from an interview with Little: “They say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in a day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains….We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken.”
While Johnson’s scene speaks to the stereotype of the ever-cheerful black person, approaching somewhat the notion of many Southerners that “Negroes” could find happiness and fulfilment only when in service to a white master, it also addresses abolitionists’ concerns by showing crumbling and decaying architecture as signifiers of the crisis of slavery.
John Davis writes in “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C.” (Art Bulletin 80, no. 1 (1998): 67–92):
The great success of the painting at the time of its debut in New York has usually been ascribed to its ability to be all things to all people. For abolitionists, the decrepit, tumbledown living conditions pictured by Johnson matched the moral degeneracy of the institution of slavery, while for slavery’s defenders, the careless leisure-time activities of several generations of slaves provided visual proof that forced servitude was neither physically onerous nor destructive of family life… The main question, at least indirectly, has centered on intentionality: Did Eastman Johnson create Negro Life at the South as an indictment of Southern slavery, or was it intended as a sop to apologists of the peculiar institution? Or, perhaps was it simply a shrewdly constructed document of judicious neutrality?
Above all, Negro Life at the South was commended for the distinct types it catalogued visually, for its seeming “truthfulness of expression,” reality of character,” and “honesty of painting,” in the words of the Evening Post. To identify these types, critics resorted to the language of minstrelsy and popular literature, particularly Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851).
The most enduring popular association, however, was with Stephen Foster’s sentimental minstrel song “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!” (1853), a mournful tune with overtones of impending death and longing for an earlier, uncomplicated time when slaves supposedly lived untroubled existences in idyllic rural landscapes.”
…
Although records in succeeding decades were kept less carefully, petitions against Washington slavery continued unabated through the 1850s, up to the time of the unveiling of Negro Life at the South and, subsequently, the outbreak of the Civil War. Abolitionist newspapers helped by fanning the flames of public outrage: William Lloyd Garrison’s Boston Liberator lamented, for example, “The District is rotten with the plague, and stinks in the nostrils of the world.”
Broadsides, such as Slave Market of America, with maps, illustrations, and descriptions of district slave prisons in what it termed “The Home of the Oppressed,” were also distributed as part of the campaign.
9.5
| Civil War
The Civil War in the United States broke out in 1861 after decades of tensions between Northern and Southern states. A central issue was the abolition of slavery. The government’s prohibition of enslavement led the deep South to secede and form the Confederate States of America, which the incoming Lincoln administration and Northern states refused to recognize as legitimate.
African American men were officially allowed to enlist in the Union army following the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In the Northern states, black people were now regarded in a new and different light—their fight for freedom equated with Western Europeans’ release from feudal dominion—and they were actively recruited to serve in the army.
American artists wrestled with representing a war that had fractured a country’s nascent identity, and their response was diverse stylistically and ideologically. Images of enslaved people and former slaves that bracket the Civil War are conspicuous in their differences. In terms of painting, the predominant subjects fell into the categories of landscape and genre, with the former assuming a metaphoric dimension and the latter modulating everyday scenes to look at a changing social order where former enslaved Americans negotiated for a life in freedom.
The theme of the runaway slave was popular during this period, affording a visible contradiction to Southern propaganda that enslaved people did not seek change. It also carried New Testament parallels in allusions to Mary, Joseph and Jesus fleeing to Egypt.
Only a few weeks into the war, in May 1861, three enslaved African American men escaped Confederate territory and sought refuge at the Union’s Fort Monroe. The fort’s commander, General Benjamin Butler, refused to return them to the Confederate officer who legally owned them, declaring they were a “contraband of war.” His stance was codified by the First Confiscation Act, which invalidated the claims of enslavers to escaped enslaved people who had been used on behalf of the Confederacy. Thousands of fugitives escaped slavery at significant risk by fleeing to Union lines, and many became involved in the Union war effort.
Johnson’s Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive Slaves encapsulates the transformation from passivity to intentionality as a black family ride to freedom. The painting is autobiographical, recalling an event Johnson witnessed near Bull Run in Virginia in March 1862. An inscription on the back of the image describes the event: “A veritable incident / in the civil war seen by / myself at Centerville / on this morning of / McClellan’s advance towards Manassas March 2, 1862 / Eastman Johnson.” While Johnson painted three versions of this event, he never displayed any. Two are in public museums; the location of the third is unknown. Did the incident captured in A Ride for Liberty raise issues that Johnson hesitated to display publicly?
In Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory: The Civil War in Art (New York: Orion Books, 1993), 246-248), Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely, Jr. describe the painting and Johnson’s motives:
About all the viewer can surmise is the nobility of the woman, the innocence of the child, and the responsible seriousness of the husband and father determined to free himself and his family from the horrors of slavery. Like much antislavery propaganda, Johnson’s painting aimed at the sentimental bull’s-eye of the nineteenth-century American heart: the family. The blacks escape as a family unit, not as dislocated, unpredictable, hopeless, or dangerous individuals.
Abigail Cooper, in “‘Away I Goin’ to Find My Mamma’: Self-Emancipation, Migration, and Kinship in Refugee Camps in the Civil War Era”(Journal of African American History 102, no. 4 (2017): 444-467) also focuses on the importance of the family unit. Cooper tells the story of Mary Armstrong, a fugitive slave with “free papers” seeking her mother. Moreover, she discusses her findings on fugitive slaves and refugee camps in her dissertation: “Lord, until I reach my home”: Inside the Refugee Camps of the American Civil War (PhD, diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015).
Mary Armstrong was about seventeen years old when she got her “free papers.” It was 1863 in St. Louis, Missouri. She took a basket of food, a basket of clothes, a little money, and a boat to Texas. For the first time in her life she did not belong to anybody, and she took that knowledge and headed into a war zone: “when Mr. Will set us all free … Away I goin’ to find my mamma,” Mary said. What she did next challenges the conventional view of the direction of freedom. … Mary had managed to avoid re-enslavement in Confederate Texas, but she had not found her mother. How can historians reckon with Mary Armstrong’s emancipation migration? She received her papers in 1863 in an emancipated metropolis under Union control and migrated south to Texas where the slave trade was still active … Freedom’s function was a claim to her kin—a material corporeal being together, of knowing her mother existed, knowing her location. Mary was a seventeen-year-old black girl with free papers hidden in her bosom traveling alone into spaces where she was considered walking currency, but the risk was of only secondary importance to finding her mother.
Cooper continues:
Civil War historians have drawn the maps and movements of armies over time in abundance; they have only recently begun to trace the migration pathways of African Americans in the Civil War era as a means to understand not just the many acts of self-emancipation but of walking toward something—a place where an entirely new order might be possible.
The new order that appeared possible to Mary Armstrong was the household of two—Mary and her mother Siby—that had been impossible in slavery. Mary’s migration suggested that traveling in search of kin (without a pass that would indicate that such travel advanced the purposes of a white person) was a legitimate form of movement for a free black woman in the U.S. South, and that Mary could expect recognition of two black females as a bonded and indissoluble family unit. Mary’s decision to move to her mother was a political act; her aspiration to stay with her mother as an independent household in Texas imagined a new order. Mary made her journey because papers alone were not enough to make her freedom real. The seal made self-ownership official, but her hunt for her mother gave it meaning. Looking out from slavery, Mary Armstrong’s migration embodies a version of black politics that put kin before nation as the integral foundation upon which black communities would navigate the route to citizenship.
The 1860 census reported 4.2 million African Americans lived in the South; 3.9 million of which were enslaved. Data compiled from government sources—refugee camp superintendents’ reports, records gathered by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, the Freedmen’s Bureau pre-Bureau records, and the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission records (to name only the most prominent), along with missionary sources and estimates gleaned from qualitative evidence in local archives, suggests that between 524,000 and 660,470 freed people populated refugee camps within Union lines by 1865.
Freed people frequently came into camps in family groups. They came like “the oncoming of cities,” one camp superintendent” wrote… Photographs and sketch artists alike captured scenes of black migration that were family affairs. These were representations of displacement, but they were also representations of a kind of settler experience.
The boats also permit perfect freedom of transportation to the [N]egroes, with or without passes,” a Confederate official noted. Boats might carry whole families, including those members whose limited mobility had once ruled out antebellum escapes. Indeed, boats transporting folks of all manner of abilities and disabilities are what sketch artists of the day captured in their scenes.
In a sketch in Harper’s Weekly on 9 April, 1864, a stooped woman with a cane makes her way to the rowboats coming onto the bank. She moves alongside a child with a dog and a man carrying flailing chickens.
Boats were also excellent means of escape due to their hiding places. Mary Armstrong seated herself “as close to the big wheel as possible” when she rode on the Mississippi steamer. …. Mary Armstrong relayed this story seventy-four years later with the precision and immediacy of a person giving directions to a stranger … Mary Armstrong’s telling reveals that this migration created an indelible memory. When she gave her interview in 1937, Mary already knew how the story would end; yet in her interview she relayed, and perhaps relived, the suspense of her journey.
Lawrence Goodman’s interview with Abigail Cooper highlights her findings about the refugee camps (“Between Bondage and Freedom: Life in Civil War Refugee Camps,” Brandeis Now, February 14, 2020, https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/february/civil-war-refugee.html)
By looking at this in-between moment when slavery’s end was possible but not assured, we can look to how African Americans made and lived out freedom on their own terms, Cooper said. “African Americans gathered to forge a monumental psychological transformation from knowing America as their enslaver to envisioning America as their home.”
A camp could hold anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand people, most of them living in barracks or fabric tents.
Conditions in many of the camps were squalid and disease was common. Black refugees lived in constant fear and terror of raids from southern whites. At one point, the Confederate army plundered and burned Slabtown to the ground.
But despite the hardships and oppression, Cooper says that the camps offered the formerly enslaved people their first opportunity to savor freedom, reunite as families and lay the groundwork for a new society and religion.
Never before had so many former slaves of so many different cultures gathered in such concentrations with the possibility of freedom near.
There was an exchange of ideas, traditions and rituals that fostered literacy and education and led to religious revivals.
Camp inhabitants compared their plight to the Israelites in the desert in the book of Exodus, freed from slavery but not yet delivered to their new country.
Critical to this was the ability to read the Bible for themselves for the first time in their lives. Southern slaveholders had used selected passages to justify slavery.
Blacks in the camps now formed Bible study groups and found scripture to support their liberation. The Jubilee in the Old Testament marks the day when Hebrew slaves would be freed from bondage in Egypt. African Americans created their own Emancipation Jubilee on January 1, 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
Often cast in terms of African Americans winning the right to vote or running candidates for office, Cooper believes there were other, equally fundamental ways blacks viewed freedom.
Freedom had a spiritual dimension that fueled a radical transformation of what it meant to be a black American.
Johnson painted The Lord Is My Shepherd only months after the Emancipation Proclamation of New Year’s Day, 1863, as an example of the educability of Americans of African descent. It shows a black man seated in the shelter of a warm hearth, concentrating on his reading. A dark blue coat with scarlet lining drapes over the back of the chair to emphasize that this man has served in the Union Army. The figure’s attentive expression, awkward way of grasping the book, and uncomfortable-looking posture suggest some difficulty with reading. At the same time, the image projects the man’s intense commitment to overcoming the obstacles in the way of his education.
Eleanor Jones Harvey writes in “Painting Freedom” (New York Times, October 30, 2013) (https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/painting-freedom/) that:
The title conjures the comforting words of the Psalms. But the Bible is not open to Psalms, which is in the middle of the book, but to the front — to Exodus — with its much more compelling message: “Let my people go.””
Exodus runs like a river through stories of escape from slavery. The parallels were easy to draw between plantation overseers and the pharaoh, and between their strongest opponents—Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass—and Moses, who served as a shepherd to his people as he led them out of Egypt to the Promised Land.
The story of Moses bringing the Israelites out of bondage held particular resonance among enslaved people. “Go Down Moses” was a familiar Negro spiritual in Virginia. The Rev. Lewis C. Lockwood, a Northern chaplain sent South by the American Missionary Association to aid black refugees, heard it sung as a rallying anthem by the contraband slaves who gathered at Virginia’s Fortress Monroe. Impressed by the timely and heartfelt song, he copied it down in late 1861 and submitted 20 verses to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. The song immediately became popular among Northern readers, and in December, a New York printer and a Boston music company collaborated to publish a sheet music arrangement under the title, “Oh! Let My People Go: The Song of the Contrabands.” The opening and closing verse of the song lyrics read:
Oh! Go down, Moses
Away, down to Egypt’s land,
And tell King Pharaoh
To let my people go.For many Americans, enslaved or free, this story from Exodus described the conditions of slavery in the South and the moral imperative for the North to free all enslaved blacks. The leading abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher delivered a sermon on Jan. 4, 1863, in celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation in which he warned his congregation that just as the Egyptian oppressors faced death and destruction with the departure of the Hebrews, so, too, North and South awaited God’s judgment for their selfish behavior regarding chattel slavery. It is possible that Johnson heard this stirring sermon, as he occasionally attended Beecher’s Church of All Souls, formerly his First Unitarian Church.
In this way, “The Lord is My Shepherd” blurs the line between two types of literacy, one in the service of faith and the other in political awareness. Literacy was in its own way a declaration of independence and humanity for a people long denied both. The idea of wanting to learn—reading, writing, talking and being heard—was a powerful force in the black communities. It embodied the concepts of determination and self-advocacy, of independent thinking and initiative. As a writer for Harper’s Weekly put it, “The alphabet is an abolitionist. If you would keep a people enslaved, refuse to teach them to read.” Literacy was also a means of understanding the past and of using that knowledge to create a future.
Many Americans, both enslaved and free, heeded such biblical lessons and felt that Lincoln was fulfilling a moral imperative when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and opposed a slave system that denied people the right affirmed in this painting: access to the liberating power of the written word. Johnson painted this composition as Americans began to consider the actual impact of emancipation, not simply its theoretical and moral aspects.
9.6
| Emancipation, Black Civil Rights and Social Reform
The liberal-minded artist Thomas Nast had fled Germany as a child, traveling to America with his family because his father held political convictions critical of the Bavarian government. His images in Harper’s Weekly document the plight of African Americans as they celebrate the promise inherent in the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln as an Executive Order on January 24, 1863.
The Emancipation of the Negroes is a complex image, centralizing a black family free at last from fears of exploitation and separation. While the central domestic scene is tranquil, imagistic associations to slavery appear in vignettes beside it—the slave ship, the lash, the bloodhound, and the auction block—while on the right, blessings for the future are pictured, such as education, wage work, home. “Here domestic peace and comfort reign supreme” explains the accompanying text “the reward of faithful labour, undertaken with the blissful knowledge that at last its benefit belongs to the labourer only and that all his honest earnings are to be appropriated as he may see fit to the object he has most at heart- his children’s advancement and education.”
Richard Samuel West describes the illustration in detail in “Emancipation of Negroes, 24 January, 1863.” (https://thomasnastcartoons.com/selected-cartoons/emancipation-of-negros-24-january-1863/)
Center image: The family is economically comfortable. Their parlor is well appointed with a modern wood stove, and Nast created the UNION brand to stress the point that the Union provides warmth and sustenance. Candlesticks rest upon a decorative mantle. A portrait of Lincoln, and a banjo, a validation of African American culture, hang on the wall next to a cornice window treatment with curtains fashionably pulled back…The father is well dressed and sits in a tufted chair, an overcoat folded over the arm. The coat suggests an arrival, perhaps from a day of paid employment. He playfully bounces a young child on his leg. Near the stove, an elderly woman wearing a headscarf, observes the play. A young boy, book in hand, stands behind his father –taking a break from his reading to admire the moment. Behind the grandmother, a young couple shares a tender moment of courtship. An adult woman tends to the stove opposite the elderly woman… She protects her striped dress with an apron as she busies herself with the family meal. Everyone is well dressed. There are no tattered holes or rags in this family’s wardrobe.
Below the central image: … a smaller circle containing a figure of an angelic Father Time. He holds the New Year baby who leans forward to unlock the hand shackles of one last slave, kneeling on the ground awaiting his freedom. This is the promise that Lincoln has ordered—a realization of the moral stance to correct the wrongs of history.
Vignettes:
left: scenes of grief and pain illuminate the recent history of African slavery in America. Vicious dogs chase down African Americans who are trying to escape.
middle left … a black man stands at auction, his future unknown. His distraught wife pleads with the white owner not to separate her family … Other slaves are slumped on the ground, heads down, awaiting their fate at the hands of the auctioneer.
lower left: In a scene of sexual submission, a female, stripped to the waist, bends over a tree stump, her white master swinging the knotted cat o’ nine tails whip high in the air to assure a severe punishment upon her naked back. Other acts of white mistreatment fill out the image.
right: Nast includes progress— the new system of public schools introduced during this era, and two children happily leave their home to receive an education. Nast believed in the concept of a multi-cultural public school system and in his public school cartoons shows children of many races and creeds playing and learning together.
bottom right: an African American stands at a cashier’s window making a transaction. His attire and bare feet indicate he is a sharecropper, confirmed by a smaller scene showing two farmers waving to their white overlord. The sharecropping system emerged out of necessity. Following emancipation, sharecropping developed as a popular method to retain African Americans as an agricultural labor force. Economic arrangements varied, but the sharecropping system largely favored white plantation owners and restricted labor mobility and economic choices for the worker or “sharecropper.”
right of a cashier’s window: … individuals conduct business. A Mexican serape or blanket, seen on the man on the right, suggests the movement or influx of new of people and new laborers toward new opportunities. In this gathering, an African American approaches the cashier to conduct a transaction. He may be receiving his pay, or making an arrangement to travel. A little girl armed with a basket, rather than luggage, waits to his left. By including this vignette, Nast is showing that new freedoms provide choices that were not offered in the past.
In 1865, the image was re-released by Philadelphia printmakers King & Baird and sold as a commemorative print after Lincoln’s assassination… The second version did not appear in Harper’s Weekly. In the commemorative version, the content of the smaller center circle was replaced with a portrait of Lincoln.
“A Typical Negro” appeared in Harper’s Weekly on July 4, 1863. Before the Civil War, Harper’s Weekly largely avoided the topic of slavery. This editorial policy stemmed from the conservative politics of the Harper family and the financial motivation to prevent the loss of subscribers across the country.
This changed after the start of the Civil War. Harper’s Weekly took a Unionist stance and strongly supported emancipation, black civil rights, and social reform. The shift was thanks to George William Curtis, the paper’s political editor, from 1863 to 1892. Curtis was a staunch supporter of civil rights for African Americans and Native Americans, women’s suffrage, civil service reform, public education, and environmental conservation.
Also responsible was Thomas Nast, the most important political cartoonist in American history, whose images addressed racial injustice. Curtis and Nast were influential advocates of equal rights for black Americans, attacking the prejudices and unrelenting violence committed against them.
Images of the brutality inflicted on people of African descent in America before and during the Civil War laid bare the horrific effects of disciplinary actions, including flogging, the standard punishment of whipping naked flesh with leather straps. The photograph printed by Harper’s labelled “Gordon Under Inspection,” part of a triptych, remains one of the most compelling images of slavery. The smaller photos on either side were tagged “Gordon as He Entered Our Lines” and “Gordon in His Uniform as a U.S. Soldier” but provided little more context or explanation.
David Silkenat writes in “‘A Typical Negro’: Gordon, Peter, Vincent Colyer, and the Story behind Slavery’s Most Famous Photograph,” American Nineteenth Century History, 15 no. 2 (2014): 169-186):
The image of Gordon, his back scarred from whipping, remains one of the most visually arresting depictions of slavery…. However, despite the image’s ubiquity, we know relatively little about the image and the man featured in it. Most historians who have examined the image have accepted the narrative in the accompanying Harper’s article as an accurate account of the subject’s life and the image’s origins. This article argues, however, that there is good evidence to suggest that the accompanying article was largely fabricated and much of what we think we know about “Gordon” may be inaccurate.
…
As Carole Emberton has recently observed, the transition embodied in the “Gordon”
triptych “played an important role in the redemptive narrative of the war.” It was a part of a larger genre of images that chronicled the transition from slave to soldier, from bondsman to citizen. “Gordon’s” suffering, the focal point of the triptych, helped to justify his assumption of the uniform and the rifle. For a public uncertain about the merits of African American as soldiers, the redemptive nature of the image helped to justify the enlistment of black soldiers and later for black citizenship.…
The article names the subject as “Gordon,” a slave “who escaped from his master in Mississippi, and came into our lines at Baton Rouge in March last.” The article indicates that the scarring on his back was the result of whipping he had received the previous Christmas, and that he had escaped from slavery using onions to disguise his smell from dogs sent in pursuit. The article also mentions that Gordon had served at one point as a guide for Union troops in Louisiana and was captured by Confederate soldiers, who “tied him up and beat him, leaving him for dead,” but somehow survived and returned to Union lines.
…
Only a few elements in the Harper’s article can be independently verified.
…
While Civil War era Americans placed a great deal of faith in the veracity of photographic evidence, they were often skeptical of the accuracy of the illustrated press, whose coverage at times bordered on the sensational. Readers, therefore, would have been much more likely to believe in the images’ reliability than in the accompanying text.
…
Recognizing the image’s emotional power in dramatizing the brutality of slavery, abolitionists sought to use it to rally public flagging public sentiment … The appearance of the “scourged back” in Harper’s, flanked by images of a separate individual (one of which may have been fabricated) and accompanied by a partially invented narrative, therefore, served the interests of both abolitionists and publishers at a critical moment in the battle for Northern public opinion. Both Vincent Colyer, the presumptive author and illustrator, and the editors at Harper’s had incentives to create a narrative to accompany the image. It was too powerful an image at too critical a time not to.
Lincoln’s primary goal during the early months of the war was to preserve the Union. On January 1,1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation declared enslaved people free to join those areas still fighting in the North, it stated nothing about those left behind Union lines.
More desperate and violent attempts against blacks occurred as they gained legal freedoms through the Emancipation Proclamation. Those fleeing to the North were hunted down with bloodhounds, a practice abetted by the Fugitive Slave Act, which condoned their forced return to the South.
Lynching became a common sight in the South and even New York where former slaves were free.
“Nast and the New York Draft Riots of 1863” (https://thomasnastcartoons.com/irish-catholic-cartoons/new-york-draft-riots-of-1863/) provides an analysis of the image:
The Draft Riots of 1863 was a public reaction to the United States Congress enactment of legislation to resupply dwindling Civil War volunteers. The new laws included those who voted or intended to become citizens. This particularly affected the Irish who appeared on new voter’s lists in great number, thanks to [William Magear] Tweed’s efforts to naturalize the Irish quickly so they could vote on pro-Tweed issues.
…
This picture is not about looting. It is about a horrific murder of an innocent human being. Nast’s hazy ambiguity about the mob is curious because, years later, in subsequent images Nast directly implicates the Irish and places them on the scene as lead aggressors in the Draft Riot lynching.
In this cartoon, the phrase “Worse than Slavery” is printed on a coat of arms depicting a grieving black family holding their dead child. In the background, we see a lynching and a schoolhouse in flames. The cartoon links Democrats with white-led organizations that attempted to use violence and intimidation to disenfranchise and suppress former slaves during Reconstruction. Two men, one a member of the Ku Klux Klan and the other a White League representative, shake hands, congratulating themselves on their attacks and killings of black Americans. The White League (also known as the White Man’s League, was a paramilitary terrorist organization that began in the Southern United States in 1874. The Ku Klux Klan, also established after American Civil War, had numerous chapters across the Southern United States. Federal law enforcement attempted unsuccessfully to suppress it. Like the White League, often acting in tandem, its objective was to overthrow southern Republican state governments through voter intimidation and violence. Members made their costumes—robes, masks and conical hats—to terrify African-American victims while they remained anonymous.
Nast’s political cartoons addressed not only African Americans but also American Indians and Chinese Americans.
1871 Nast cartoon: “Move on! Has the Native American no rights that the naturalized American is bound to respect?” (While naturalized foreigners had the right to vote, Native Americans did not, as they were not considered United States citizens. This was not remedied until 1924).
1879 Nast cartoon: “Red gentleman (Indian) to yellow gentleman (Chinese) “Pale face ‘fraid you crowd him out, as he did me.” In the left background, an African American remarks, “My day is coming.”
Fiona Deans Halloran writes in “The Power of the Pencil: Thomas Nast and American Political Art.” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2005):
Nast’s cartoon legacy cannot be read in simple terms. Nast’s ambivalence towards a variety of groups – notably the Irish, African Americans, Native Americans and the Chinese – was both representative and reflective of a more general American ambivalence about race, ethnicity, and culture in the Gilded Age. Nast’s work is an ideal source for historians interested in demonstrating the ways that nineteenth century Americans simultaneously adopted radically new ideas and clung to older ways. Likewise, Nast makes visual the limits of nineteenth century flexibility on questions of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and politics.
9.7
| Winslow Homer: Bearing Witness
In a lengthy review of the 1880 exhibition at the National Academy of Design, Winslow Homer was extolled “as one of the few artists who have the boldness and originality to make something out of the negro for artistic purposes.” In a review of the Twelfth Annual Exhibition of the Water Colour Society held a year earlier, another proclaimed that “a hundred years from now those pictures (of Blacks) alone will have kept him famous.”
Homer affectionately called them his “darkey pictures.” But the fact that he entered several of them into some of his more celebrated exhibitions suggests his awareness of their importance in an artistic and historical context. During an era of extreme civil unrest, economic inflation and political upheaval, Homer reflected America’s complex, changing attitudes toward black citizens. His works were not typical representations, proffering more psychological and emotional depth at a time when African Americans, leaving behind the violence of enslavement, were uncertainly positioned in America. Up to then, the visual imagery employed by abolitionists to tell their stories had mainly centred on scenes of whipping and torture.
Homer began his career as a commercial printmaker, first in Boston and then in New York, where he settled in the late 1850s. In 1859, he opened a studio, and until 1863, he attended classes at the National Academy of Design, where he briefly studied with Frédéric Rondel in 1861. In October of the same year, he was sent to the front in Virginia as an artist-correspondent for the new illustrated journal Harper’s Weekly. Homer visited the Union front twice during the American Civil War, honing his ability to detail real places and people and bear witness to events.
Black refugee communities were springing up near Union camps during the Civil War. This development sparked heated controversy in both the Union and the Confederacy. Images of people identified as “contrabands”—sometimes portrayed in a positive light, other times rendered as insulting caricatures— began appearing in political cartoons, on envelopes, and in pieces of music.
The intense public interest in the contraband experiences provided the impetus for the double-page engraving, which appeared shortly after Homer’s return to New York. The engraving shows a black man dancing before Union troops gathered around an evening bivouac. The original dancer may have been an army man, for in the sketch, he appears European, even Irish, and wears boots. In the completed image, however, Homer has darkened his complexion and depicted him as hatless and unshod.
Campfire scenes were commonplace throughout the war, as were images of blacks performing for a white audience. Arguably, one positive aspect of the havoc of war was the interaction between different class structures, what may be described as the beginnings of an enormous social melting pot.
While Homer assigns the dancer central status amongst dozens of white men, an unusual decision for the time, Ethan Lasser, curator of the exhibition Winslow Homer: Eyewitness has noted, “Homer as witness suffered from the biases of his time.” In “A Bivouac Fire on the Potomac,” he said, “The image of a freed slave who crossed Union lines and is dancing for others is a very stereotyped image; he is not working, he is not a soldier, he is entertainment for the troops.” (Colleen Walsh, “Winslow Homer as Eyewitness,” The Harvard Gazette, September 13, 2019, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/winslow-homers-work-as-civil-war-art-correspondent-focus-of-eyewitness-exhibit-at-harvard/)
Regarded as property by some, only half free by others, his face is partially obscured, enigmatic, like the rising face of the full moon. On the bottom right, a small note reads IOU, perhaps a sign of the stakes of a card game between white soldiers. It is located between the audience and the fire, at a spot where a viewer might enter the pictured circle, a reminder of the human debt attached to generations of slavery.
Numerous works of Americans of African descent dancing appeared throughout those transformational years, Homer’s Our Jolly Cook from his campaign sketches among them. The frantically dancing black man seems to be performing at the behest of the watching white soldiers.
Homer spent time in Virginia in the 1860s and again 1870s. He was there during some of the Civil War’s worst battles, including the siege of Petersburg in mid-June 1864 when the tired armies were dug into a trench war. Stuck in a face-off for weeks, they stared and swore at one another as frustrations and desolation mounted.
Homer’s depiction of the event shows a Confederate soldier silhouetted against the sky, fists clenched, taunting the Union sharpshooters across the field. A black enslaved man playing the banjo sits in the dugout below him. Nearby puffs of smoke suggest the warfare has begun. The significance of the black figure informs the meaning of the entire picture.
On the morning of 30 July, Union forces detonated a charge beneath Confederate defence lines. The soldier is standing on 320 kegs of dynamite; the long stick on the left and the bayonets and banjo on the right all seem to point to that location below his feet.
The painting speaks to the explosive charge of the institution of slavery. Homer evokes that proposition by placing the black man below the ground upon which the rebel has taken his stand. The stereotypical black figure performs several additional functions. He is located in what will become the Crater, and for Northern viewers, this would evoke immediate thoughts of blacks who fought and died in the Civil War.
As Northern public opinion accepted the role in combat of blacks in uniform and the government edged toward a policy of equal pay, Homer’s images began to change. He turned to subjects of everyday life and the chores for which African Americans were now compensated. The Union’s Army of the Potomac in eastern Virginia employed hundreds of contrabands as cooks, laundrymen, valets, and teamsters.
Army Boots is a record of this aspect of black life. Two youths are pictured playing cards in a tent. They have been shining army boots. Their role has complex associations, mainly as related to the object of the black army boot. For one, a “boot” was a boot-black that shined shoes. A boot was also a fresh military recruit in “boot camp.” However, what counteracts the metaphor, and provides new meaning, is that Homer’s whole subject is the young men, and he has situated them in the centre of the composition accordingly. They are not marginalized as in A Bivouac Fire; instead, they are afforded new value, a parallel perhaps to their changed status as wage earners.
Painted during the last year of the Civil War, Homer’s The Bright Side was another realistic depiction of mundane aspects of army life. During the Civil War, free blacks from the North and Southern contrabands worked as mule drivers in the Union Army. Their work involved moving battle supplies and the materials needed to set up camp. They are pictured here as they wait for their orders between missions. Notably, Homer chose to paint them as they stay, not as they drive through enemy gunfire, knowing full well of the stereotypes he was engaging with and that all soldiers on both sides spent considerable amounts of time just waiting for something to do happen.
Jennifer A. Greenhill discusses aspects of the trope and its relationship to humour in “Winslow Homer and the Mechanics of Visual Deadpan” (Art History 32, no. 2 (April 2009): 351-386):
[T]he work makes the familiar antebellum equation between the African-American and laziness – best represented perhaps by Mount’s Farmers Nooning (1836, Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages) or James Goodwyn Clonney’s Waking Up (1851, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The critic of Watson’s Weekly Art Journal seems to have recognized the joke: “The lazy sunlight, the lazy, nodding donkeys, the lazy, lolling negroes”, he writes, spelling out the work’s structuring discursive chain, “make a humorously conceived and truthfully executed picture.” But some critics located the work’s humour elsewhere, in the “comic old darkey with the pipe, poking his head through the tent-opening.” This figure, whose assertive, appraising stare out at the viewer was misread by one critic as “grinning,” making him a comic figure, seemed to period writers an exclamation point or final punch line for the joke the composition tells about blackness and laziness. But this punch line counters the stereotype that informs the rest of the composition and might therefore be seen to turn the joke on its head. “Homer’s muleteer is the defiantly aware center of the canvas,” writes Marc Simpson in his important essay, “The Bright Side: Humorously Conceived and Truthfully Executed” (1988). “He challenges the viewer to respond, but provides no clues as to what the nature of that response should be.” This inscrutable figure complicates the easy joke, calling into question the familiar elision between black man and animal. This figure’s forthright stare may be unsettling – as it surely was to those viewers who recast it as a familiar smile – but this is how the “emblem of incomprehensibility” works, as the philosopher Ted Cohen reminds us in his short text on jokes. The inscrutable or incomprehensible detail, when woven into the fabric of the joke, invites deeper consideration and may promote a change of view.
Near Andersonville addresses the realities of war from a different perspective, that of war prisoners specifically and captivity more generally. Andersonville was the desolate stockade where 45,000 Union soldiers faced confinement and possible death through exposure, disease and malnourishment. A total of 13,000 captives lost their lives in this largest of Civil War prisons.
This painting recounts the capture of six hundred Union prisoners by Southern rebel forces. Homer did not paint the aftermath of their capture. Instead, he chose the moment they were being led to their fate, insinuating an element of transition and uncertainty in the picture, echoing the social and political events underway.
A young black woman, modestly dressed and wearing a white apron, stands in the doorway of a simple dwelling. She is pensively looking off to her side. At the very edge of the painting, we glimpse the captive Yankees she is looking at. Rebel forces are leading them off, the triumphant Confederate flag flying overhead. Homer conveys the stakes of the war without resorting to the depiction of blood and death. He does so through the emotional force emanating from the face of one enslaved woman. Homer’s later works often betray his keen eye for the emotional tenor of his black subjects, especially women, affording them a palpable sense of psychic interiority.Near Andersonville‘s depiction of General Sherman’s soldiers moving south to face possible death while the black woman who hopes for freedom poignantly bears witness, cogently puts forward two separate narratives of captivity.
Glenn Robins writes in the review of the book “Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War by Peter H. Wood [Harvard University Press, 2010”], The Georgia Historical Quarterly 95, no. 3 (2011): 408–22):
Homer’s willingness to relate to his black subject, his empathy and effort to understand and express her point of view, is what separated him from other artists of his age and certainly from popular illustrators, trained on stereotypes and prejudiced perceptions. To Wood, one of Homer’s greatest gifts was his sensitivity to those held powerless by circumstances beyond their control. That compassionate perspective, which served the artist for the remainder of his career, may have found its first meaningful expression in Near Andersonville.
Keven Sharp (in Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 4 (2011): 565–67), offers another review of Near Andersonville by Wood:
Wood believes Homer’s experiences and the trajectory of the war caused the artist to embrace a decidedly emancipationist view of the war, an assessment that serves as the conceptual context for the painting, Near Andersonville. Wood considers Homer’s painting a statement on “recent events” and suggests that the piece’s iconography contains underlying and complex meanings… The red, white, and blue head-piece was “not the black-mammy bandana of popular cartoons. Instead, this bandana hints at what is known as the Phrygian freedom cap” (p. 75), which manumitted slaves wore in ancient Rome “to imply liberty” and that adorned the Goddess of Liberty in revolutionary France. Wood judges the Homer piece “as a revolutionary work of art” (p. 85)…, an African American occupies the foreground of the painting, unusual in that both the Union and Confederate soldiers occupy the background. Thus, Homer forces viewers to “consider an enslaved individual’s point of view . . . with her difficult situation and complex thought” (p. 85) as well as the obvious linkage between war and emancipation.
9.8
| Reconstruction and the Remaking of Identity
Homer returned to Virginia when the Civil War ended, so struck was he by the plight of enslaved people during his first sojourn. Images of Reconstruction compelled his attention, and the period was marked by works that interpreted the uncertainties, fears, and challenges facing African Americans after slavery was abolished. Traveling to Petersburg several times through 1875 and 1876, his nuanced paintings hint at the complexities of Reconstruction’s new social order.
To understand Homer’s paintings of this era, learning about the history of Reconstruction is imperative. Here is a succinct overview by Robert Longley (The Reconstruction Era (1865–1877): An era marked by thwarted progress and racial strife (updated on October 10, 2020) (https://www.thoughtco.com/reconstruction-definition-1773394)
The Reconstruction era was a period of healing and rebuilding in the Southern United States following the American Civil War (1861-1865) that played a critical role in the history of civil rights and racial equality in America. During this tumultuous time, the U.S. government attempted to deal with the reintegration of the 11 Southern states that had seceded from the Union, along with 4 million newly freed enslaved people.
Reconstruction demanded answers to a multitude of difficult questions. On what terms would the Confederate states be accepted back into the Union? How were former Confederate leaders, considered traitors by many in the North, to be dealt with? And perhaps most momentously, did emancipation mean that Black people were to enjoy the same legal and social status as White people?
…
To be accepted back into the Union, the former Confederate states were required to abolish the practice of slavery, renounce their secession, and compensate the federal government for its Civil War expenses. Once these conditions were met, however, the newly restored Southern states were allowed to manage their governments and legislative affairs. Given this opportunity, the Southern states responded by enacting a series of racially discriminatory laws known as the Black Codes.
Enacted during 1865 and 1866, the Black Codes were laws intended to restrict the freedom of Black Americans in the South and ensure their continued availability as a cheap labor force even after the abolishment of slavery during the Civil War.
All Black persons living in the states that enacted Black Code laws were required to sign yearly labor contracts. Those who refused or were otherwise unable to do so could be arrested, fined, and if unable to pay their fines and private debts, forced to perform unpaid labor. Many Black children—especially those without parental support—were arrested and forced into unpaid labor for white planters.
The restrictive nature and ruthless enforcement of the Black Codes drew the outrage and resistance of Black Americans.
…During the Civil War, Union forces had confiscated vast areas of farmland owned by Southern plantation owners. Known as the “40 acres and a mule” provision, part of Lincoln’s Freedmen’s Bureau Act authorized the bureau to rent or sell land this land to formerly enslaved persons. However, in the summer of 1865, President Johnson ordered all of this federally controlled land to be returned to its former White owners. Now lacking land, most formerly enslaved persons were forced to return to working on the same plantations where they had toiled for generations. While they now worked for minimal wages or as sharecroppers, they had little hope of achieving the same economic mobility enjoyed by White citizens. For decades, most Southern Black people were forced to remain propertyless and mired in poverty.
…According to historian Eugene Genovese, over 600,000 formerly enslaved persons stayed with their masters. As Black activists and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery” (Black Reconstruction in America (Transaction Publishers, 2013)
…As a result of Reconstruction, Black citizens in the Southern states gained the right to vote… However, the growing political power of Black people provoked a violent backlash from many White people who struggled to hold on to their supremacy. By implementing racially motivated voter disenfranchisement measures such as poll taxes and literacy tests, Whites in the South succeeded in undermining the very purpose of Reconstruction. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments went largely unenforced, setting the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
…Though they were repeatedly either ignored or flagrantly violated, the anti-racial discrimination Reconstruction amendments remained in the Constitution. In 1867, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner had prophetically called them “sleeping giants” that would be awakened by future generations of Americans struggling to at last bring true freedom and equality to the descendants of slavery. Not until the civil rights movement of the 1960s—aptly called the “Second Reconstruction”—did America again attempt to fulfill the political and social promises of Reconstruction.
Weaning the Calf is a rural vignette typical of the genre subjects associated with Homer’s early oeuvre. While it offers visual respite from the reality of recent catastrophic events, it still suggests battles to come. It depicts a young black boy, wearing tattered clothes struggling to lead a calf from its mother. Two nattily dressed white boys watch on from nearby. They contemplate the tug-of-war with interest but without involvement.
Homer’s realism captures the scene with an empathic eye, subtly articulating a narrative through the visual contrasts: the straining black boy, bathed in shadow and alone at his task; the taut, unbending rope he uses to accomplish his job; the brightly lit passive white figures, together provoke the question will he succeed in this struggle? Will he make it on his own?
Seen from another perspective, this narrative may also suggest that black Americans were also being weaned away from the institution that provided them sustenance, severing the ties that linked them to their plantation pasts of forced dependency and perpetual childhood. From Homer’s viewpoint, African Americans were not simply being weaned but actively participating in their liberation.
Homer’s Uncle Ned at Home shows a barnyard scene populated by an elderly black man (Ned), a black youth, and white children. He stands at the entrance of a dilapidated plank structure which functions partly as a dovecote and partly as a pigsty. Wooden boxes top the roof, which rises gently from either end toward the center with rectangular openings and perches for nesting birds. The structural elements appear to strike a precarious balance that the slightest shift of wind or weight could wreck. The allusion to the unstable reality of life during the Reconstruction era is implicit.
The overall sense conveyed by the painting is one of domestic hardship, despite the quietude of the scene and the signs of new life within it, as in the kittens. The picture revolves around Ned, white-haired, in a tattered dark suit and brown coat, as he pauses before emptying a bucket. Despite his advanced age and deprivation, his figure reminds us that although Homer may not have regarded African Americans as equals, he was considerate of their humanity, providing them with presence and agency in his imagery.
Behind Ned, three primly dressed small children, apparently white, peer into his hut. They are balancing themselves on two sawhorses of unequal height as if on a teeter-totter, adding another note of instability. Like the young, enslaved female in Near Andersonville, Ned’s centrality is emphasized by the dark opening against which he is silhouetted, his feet facing one direction, his head and torso another, an ambivalent directionality signifying an uncertain present.
In A Visit from the Old Mistress, Homer quits the out-of-doors for the dark interior of an African American home. It is an arresting genre painting charged with the emotional complexities of an encounter between a former enslaver and the women who were once her property. The old mistress, in funereal garments, is stiff, and the mood is awkward. The three black women dressed in ragged clothing regard her directly. One remains seated on a low stool, a pointed statement.
Within this single interaction, Homer captures the nature of altered relationships. He confronts a history laden with familiarity and enmity. While enslaved servants were frequently friendly with their white charges, particularly within the confines of the domestic world of women, the potential for violence was also more significant behind closed doors. Court records of the mid-19th century suggest that large numbers of enslaved people retaliated against their owners or sabotaged the system of slavery from within, breaking utensils and staging slowdowns. In short, the closeness of domestic life offered the potential for goodwill and harm. Here, the bond has been most clearly severed. The tone of the interaction reminds us that despite a shared history, these formerly enslaved women were never, in any sense, part of the family.
Homer addressed the derogatory view, particularly in the South, that enslaved blacks had been as children living under the protection of a benevolent, often indulgent, master. According to this line of reasoning, freedmen were unprepared and perhaps incapable of assuming responsibility for their lives outside of slavery.
This inclination to view African Americans as eternally immature suggests itself in Busy Bee, where the figure of a youth, knee-high in wildflowers, is languidly swatting at bees with his straw hat. A substantial beehive is in the background. The symbolism of the industrious bee contrasts with associations of youth, race, and stereotype, paralleling the widely discussed question of whether formerly enslaved workers would fall (back) into a life of indolence.
In A Flower for the Teacher, a black boy in torn, patched clothes sits waiting for his lessons. On the ground beside him, his slate bears only the signature of the artist and the date 1875. He holds a giant, bright sunflower, and a monarch butterfly rests on his shoulder. In Christian iconography, the butterfly signifies the resurrected soul; the caterpillar’s life cycle, chrysalis and butterfly symbolize life, death, and resurrection. In this context, the butterfly suggests the metamorphosis of the African American, from enslaved to free, and the blank slate alludes to the promise of literacy.
Karen C. Chambers Dalton writes in “‘The Alphabet Is an Abolitionist’ Literacy and African Americans in the Emancipation Era” (The Massachusetts Review 32, no. 4 (1991): 545–80):
Black Southerners’ faith in education as the path to full citizenship is also expressed by the brilliant flower he grasps. Homer uses the sunflower as the traditional symbol of devotion and patience: just as the flower turns its head to follow the sun, this young scholar will direct his attention toward his teacher and enlightenment. Literacy will provide the seeds for full-fledged independence. Homer here distills into a small image of a black youth the anticipation and hesitation naturally felt at the moment of a fresh beginning. Northern whites and Southern blacks were equally convinced that one of the great promises of Reconstruction was education, that profound differences could be obliterated by literacy.
This theme is continued in other works, such as The Watermelon Boys, where the books in the foreground allude to the issue of education during Reconstruction. Homer began to represent white and black children together by the mid-1870s. The veneer of childhood was a means by which he could suggest racial coexistence. Subtle symbolism supports this possibility. The broken fence in the right-hand portion of the painting indicates that systems of separation have been breached. The easy interaction between the white and black children and the bundle of books on the ground speak to assimilation and the contentious education issue for blacks in Reconstruction America. Black literacy was perceived as a significant threat by white communities, and the formal schooling of African Americans was prohibited by law. Their access to education during Reconstruction represented a form of social upheaval.
Margarita Karasoulas discusses Homer’s ironic approach to the subject in “Visual Irony and Racial Humor in Winslow Homer’s The Watermelon Boys” (Athanor 33 (2015) 71-80):
Watermelon Boys appears quite serious to our modern-day sensibilities, the painting plays on the popular stereotype of the African American’s love of watermelon. The trope of black boys eating watermelon was already well ingrained in American visual culture, and Homer’s painting seems to have fit within the broader array of humorous depictions of African Americans in the nineteenth century. Yet, a sustained analysis of the racial significance of this stereotype is absent from the literature on Homer, and the work is seldom discussed in great detail. Moreover, in the context of Reconstruction, The Watermelon Boys has been conventionally understood as a racially benign genre scene: the implied scenario is that the boys, engaging in typical mischief, have raided a watermelon patch.
…
This interpretation of Homer’s painting demonstrates that the artist’s humor is twofold: first, he employed stereotypical humor honed by his exposure to the popular press; second, he enacted racial critique through irony. Visual irony, in this instance, indicates a kind of incongruity between the artist’s literal and implied meanings. Homer painted with symbolic complexity, and close formal analysis of The Watermelon Boys reveals layers of encoded meanings, each intended to disrupt, and in some cases contradict the racial stereotypes initially brought to bear on the work.
If we are to read the painting in terms of racial humor, the black children provide the first visual cue. The mere representation of black figures in the arts served to generate a comic effect for contemporary viewers who perceived racial difference as a sign of physical and mental inferiority. Viewers steeped in the imagery of black minstrelsy would have also recognized the humor and range of significations inherent in the watermelons themselves. The lazy, carefree, and watermelon-loving black emerged as a character on the minstrel stage beginning in the early nineteenth century. The actor J.W. McAndrews performed a popular skit called “Watermelon Man” between 1856 and 1899, and the racist association between blacks and watermelons persisted as a comic trope in the illustrated press.8 In Homer’s scene, the watermelons activate the racial stereotype and serve as a virtual stand-in for the black body. Situated in the immediate foreground, their vibrant red color punctuates the composition, enlivening the muted palette. Given their prominence in the work, they might also be understood as a visual punch line, articulating an easy joke for viewers already well-versed in its meaning.
…A pentimento shows that he reduced the number of figures from four to three, perhaps to create a more focused composition, with the main black figure singled out for attention. His body is highlighted with greater contours and definition, as opposed to the rest of the work, which is thinly painted. In addition, the black protagonist appears poised and vigilant: his raised eyebrows and crisply painted, almond-shaped eyes signal his alertness to some kind of danger beyond the fence.
…In most American artist depictions of interracial scenes, blacks are almost always outnumbered or relegated to the margins of the image. If they are depicted as a focal point, it is usually to reaffirm existing racial stereotypes. Here, however, the white youth is outnumbered and situated in a position below the central black figure. In a striking inversion, Homer seems to have displaced the negative physical characteristics associated with the black body onto the white boy. His eyes appear as mere slits, his dirty, bare feet protrude out towards the viewer, and his gaping mouth verges on the grotesque. With these pointed visual contrasts, Homer draws on the satirical potential of incongruity: his sympathetic treatment of the black boy in turn conflicts with and eschews prevailing caricatures of blacks during this time.
The figures’ close proximity to one another is also ironic in that it belies any indication of a racial divide. Although the boys do not interact, they appear to be friends, united by their actions and their tight triangular configuration.
William Black in “How Watermelons Became Black: Emancipation and the Origins of a Racist Trope”(Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 1 (2018): 64–86) adds another layer to the interpretation of Watermelon Boys in his analysis of the symbolic meaning of the watermelon and its association with African Americans during the Reconstruction era:
The watermelon has certain characteristics that have encouraged people to associate it with uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. The fruit connotes uncleanliness because it is so messy to eat, leaving behind seeds, juice, and rind. It connotes laziness because it is so easy to grow; its trailing vines can grow several yards long in search of water, and a single fruit contains up to a thousand seeds. It is also difficult to eat a watermelon while working—you really have to sit down and eat it. The watermelon connotes childishness because it is sweet and colorful, the sort of food a child might find more appealing than a carrot or a beet. Finally, watermelons connote an unwanted public presence because people usually eat them in groups rather than alone. The fruit is easily sliced and shared; indeed, it is hard to eat a watermelon by yourself. It is an ideal snack for outdoor social gatherings and for breaks from outdoor labor.
…
Above all, African Americans’ supposed predilection for watermelons was proof of their chronic short-sightedness. To invest, farm, or vote responsibly—to be a true citizen of the republic—one had to think in the long term and sacrifice for future gains. The former slave, however, as the New York Tribune wrote, “lives in the present, thinking little of the past or the future; a bottle of whisky or a watermelon today is more prized by him than a farm or a fortune twenty years hence.” The African American’s supposed inability to think beyond watermelons became a punchline. A popular joke told of “Old Uncle Tony,” who despite his religious piety was glad God had delayed the second coming of Christ “till after watermelon season.” There was also the story of a black man who remarked, as he was going to the gallows: “I wish dey had put it off till after watermelon time.” These jokes suggested African Americans were too preoccupied with instant gratification to be proper citizens.
White Americans bought sheet music with titles like “Gim Me Dat Sweet Watermelon,” “Melon Time in Dixie Land,” “Dere Aint Gwine to Be No Rine,” and “Plant a Watermelon on My Grave and Let the Juice Soak Through.” They bought potholders, paperweights, and salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like big-lipped, wide-mouthed, watermelon-eating blacks … As on the antebellum plantation, the sight of African Americans eating watermelon reassured whites that the racial order was intact, and that the worst predicament African Americans faced was an embarrassment of riches.
Indeed, caricatures of African Americans, in particular, those related to the eating of watermelons, were so pervasive and popular that they endured well into the twentieth century.
These negative caricatures of the facial features were supposedly justified by scientific findings. The American surgeon and anthropologist who owned slaves used his scientific influence to defend slavery and to popularize the notion of racial superiority. Nott’s Types of mankind: or, Ethnological researches … is accompanied by this passage: “nor can it be rationally affirmed, that the Orang-outan and Chimpanzee are more widely separated from certain African and Oceanic Negroes than are the latter from the Teutonic or Pelasgic types.”
9.9
| Tools for Freedom
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the education and employment of emancipated blacks gained traction. Congress set up the Freedman’s Bureau in March 1865, which built or aided in the creation of the first widespread free school system of the South, one of its most significant accomplishments. Only one person in ten among the newly freed could read and write, but they were eager to make every sacrifice for education.
This program represented a fast track to training formerly enslaved people and their children but was far from altruistic. Most white Americans felt antipathy towards equality and experienced forebodings that Americans of African descent would emerge from slavery with numbed moral facilities and vengeful attitudes. Moderates perceived this effort as a way of socializing blacks and keeping them from roaming Southern roads in desolation and starvation.
During the years after the war, black and white teachers from the North and South, missionary organizations, churches and schools worked tirelessly to allow the emancipated population to learn. Former slaves of every age took advantage of the opportunity to become literate.
The idea of the educated black person was perceived as challenging the myth of white social and cultural superiority. Images such as Uncle Ned, a bootblack, momentarily pausing in his labours to take reading lessons from a young black girl, were popularised. Still, other visual elements subverted the message of learning. Here, in Uncle Ned’s School by John Rogers, the man’s furrowed and puckered lips show him struggling with the pronunciation of the text. At the same time, a young boy seated on the floor beneath Uncle Ned has cast aside his book and is tickling the bottom of Ned’s right foot, interrupting his concentration. Viewers could thus be consoled by the implication that change would be slow.
This entry from the New Historical Society suggests the various interpretation of Uncle Ned’s School (https://emuseum.nyhistory.org/objects/28299/uncle-neds-school):
Rogers knew that his audience would be familiar with the character of Uncle Ned from the popular 1848 Stephen Foster song of that name. In Foster’s song the title character is a docile, obedient, aging slave who is blind. Rogers turned the caricature on its head by showing Uncle Ned perpetrating what would have been a crime in some Southern states when Foster’s song was written: teaching a slave to read. However, the figure of the boy who has stopped studying to tease his teacher presents another stereotype that raises questions about Rogers’ intentions. Does the boy represent harmless comic relief, or does he allude to concerns that African Americans lacked the determination and persistence to learn? The present-day scholar Kirk Savage has suggested that Rogers may have juxtaposed the boy and girl to pose a subtle question about which stereotype would prevail: the lazy scamp or the earnest pupil. Rogers’ sales catalogues noted that the older man was “too much occupied to attend to” the boy’s mischief, suggesting that Uncle Ned will not be deterred in his efforts.
Uncle Ned’s School was widely praised for its nuanced depiction of a socially significant issue. Rogers himself considered it an important work; he exhibited the sculpture at the National Academy of Design, his first contribution in three years. A Philadelphia writer called it much better than any of his previous groups. Rogers presented a copy to the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, who responded, “I am pleased with the complete rendering of the story, with a few means, and without exaggeration. Its simplicity is as agreeable as its errand is noble.”
John Rogers created many sculptural genre scenes, mass-produced in cast plaster and extensively sold through mail order.
Sunday Morning in Virginia by Homer offers a glimpse at this aspect of life after emancipation. It shows a young black woman instructing three children to read the Bible. An avid desire for learning among formerly enslaved people is encapsulated in the intense concentration of the older boy. Off-side an elderly grandmother is seated, her weary eyes and furrowed brows betraying a range of buried emotions. This painting stands among the most expressive of Homer’s Reconstruction pieces, even as it engages with the electric issues of literacy and religion so controversial in the emancipation era.
The poverty of the close quarters speaks to the existing hostility against black education in Virginia. Although white historians have applauded the efforts of Northerners in advancing access to education, it was former slaves who played a significant role in financing, building, and running new schools, often in dilapidated venues. That said, many brand-new structures were raised through formerly enslaved people’s efforts and labour. The black community had a broad-based quest for literacy and a specific desire for Bible instruction. The first schools to be built under the public school system opened as late as 1870, but schoolhouses often lacked windows, desks, tables, maps, and blackboards. Teachers and pupils in black schools were abused and threatened; schoolhouses often burned to the ground. Yet despite the aggressive adversity, blacks in Virginia opened the most day and evening schools in the South.
While Homer’s Sunday Morning in Virginia does not preach a happy ending, it expresses the active hopes, and anxieties, facing African Americans in their quest for literacy in the mid-1870s and later.
Karen C. Chambers Dalton quotes and comments on this passage from Harper’s Weekly May 3, 1873 issue in “‘The Alphabet is an Abolitionist’ Literacy and African Americans in the Emancipation Era” (The Massachusetts Review 32, no. 4 (1991): 545–80):
One of the most remarkable and encouraging features attending the emancipation of the colored race in our Southern States is the eagerness to learn displayed from the earliest moment of freedom. Old and young crowded to the schools opened for the benefit of the freedmen; and it was not uncommon to see men and women who had nearly reached the allotted term of their life poring over the spelling book with all the eager interest of children. Slowly and painfully, against every kind of discouragement, they would master the A, B, C, and learn to pick out simple words, until they could read in the book, which thousands of them knew already by heart, the Bible.
This quotation includes three themes that recur frequently in the illustrated press of the period, namely, the broad-based quest for literacy in the black community, the specific desire to read the Bible, and the new role of children as teachers.
Homer’s idealistic vision about the new possibilities for African Americans because of Lincoln’s Emancipation declaration changed radically because of what he saw in Virginia. Seven years earlier, in this wood engraving, one of the vignettes scenes he included to exemplify the results of the Emancipation Proclamation is an integrated classroom with a white teacher and a little black girl reading alongside her white classmates.
After the Civil War, industry in the South remained overwhelmingly agricultural. But while the mechanisms and methods of work were unchanged, relationships between planters and labourers were forever altered. As it had been under slavery, most rural blacks worked on land owned by whites. But they now had agency over their lives and liberty of action. Even so, the work of picking cotton, the ultimate symbol of slavery, was rejected by many freed people. Those who returned to it were forced back for wages during the difficulties of economic depression. Several of Homer’s works represent the complexities of returning to a sphere so fraught with history.
Upland Cotton, painted in 1879 and reworked in 1895, depicts two young black women in a field of fully ripened cotton plants. One woman, turbaned and brightly clad bends down at her task while the other stares pensively into space. A writer initially described the work for the Art Journal as it hung in New York’s National Academy of Design annual exhibition of 1879 as follows:
The cotton-plants are strangling across a footpath, in which are two negro women, with their heavy, Oriental figures clad in strong, rich colours. One woman stands upright, with her turbaned head swung back, outlined against a thin, hot sky. The other woman is stooping over and gathering the cotton-pods, and her rounded back seems to bear the burden of all the toil of her race. Down close into the foreground of the canvas the cotton-plant is painted, and for crispness and delicacy of drawing, and in the variously developed cotton-pods, from where the wool hangs out of the dry pod, to the half-opened and still unclosed buds, each pod is painted as if doing it was all the artist had ever cared for. The picture is a superb piece of decoration, with its deep, queer colours like the Japanese dull greens, dim reds, and strange, neutral blues and pinks” (Lloyd Goodrich, Record of Works by Winslow Homer, Volume III: 1877 to March 1881, Abigail Booth Gerdts, ed. (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2008), 207-8)
Susanna W. Gold writes in “A Measured Freedom: National Unity and Racial Containment in Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers, 1876″ (Mississippi Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 163-184):
Most scholarship on The Cotton Pickers interprets the artist’s rendering of Southern blacks as sympathetic, and perceives an optimistic future for the black situation under the new political and social structures following the Civil War. Public reception of The Cotton Pickers was favorable; the painting was purchased immediately at its first exhibition at New York’s Century Association in 1877, and a subsequent exhibition review claimed that “the freshest piece of figure painting that Mr. Winslow Homer has put his name to is his latest work, The Cotton Pickers, which provoked the admiration of the artists at the latest reception.” Noted art critic George W. Sheldon acknowledged Homer’s black genre works for their “total freedom from conventionalism and mannerism, in their strong look of life and in their sensitive feeling for character,” and the New York Times praised Homer as “one of the few artists who have the boldness and originality to make something of the Negro for artistic purpose.”
…
However, through my analysis of certain powerful elements that Homer includes in the painting—as well as those that he excludes—I offer an interpretation of the work that diverges from traditional academic views. By investigating social and political tensions leading to the conservative recovery of state control in the South following Reconstruction, one can understand the dilemma that the newly freed black American posed to national alliance. I suggest that the resolution of this “Negro Problem” is reflected in Homer’s The Cotton Pickers, where the young female laborers can be understood as victims of continued and unending oppression by nationalist sentiment, maintaining their identities as slaves in a recently created free black society.
…
Because The Cotton Pickers was painted as many as eleven years after the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation, the youthful appearance of these women suggests they may not have been subjected to slave labor, yet there is nothing in the painting to suggest that their current situation is any different from what it would have been in bondage.
…
The suggestion of a fruitless future for the black American is reinforced in the faces of the two young figures. Homer endows the women with traditional Caucasian features by painting them with light skin and slender facial bone structure. By representing the figures with a combination of both prototypical black and white physical characteristics, Homer portrays them as products of sexual mingling between the races. Although interracial cohabitation had been prevalent since the Colonial era, mulattos born in the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries were often the result of sexual relations between white males of the planter class and their domestic slaves. Common almost to the point of institutionalization, wealthy Southern planters kept regular concubines and bred entire families of mixed-race children, the result being an unprecedented increase in mulatto slavery during the years 1850-60. Based on the appearance of the two figures in Homer’s 1876 painting, their logical birth dates would fall near the height of interracial procreation, raising the distinct possibility that these women were fathered by the plantation owner.
The mixed-blood heritage of these women posed another problem in the progress of the black American. According to racial mythology advanced by the white population in response to the imagined threat to the purity of the white race, mulattos were doomed to biological eradication and could not reproduce beyond a few generations. Unable to sustain their heritage, the mulatto would be denied a place in America’s future, and the world of the powerless mixed-race individual was understood by whites to be one in which significant progressive change for the black situation could never occur.
…
One might consider that popular response among Northern audiences to The Cotton Pickers perhaps lay not in Homer’s sympathy for the plight of the freed black laborer but rather in his ability to translate public opinion concerning the proper place of the black American. Effectively contained in the archetypal role of slave laborer in The Cotton Pickers, these free black Southerners no longer posed a threat to white supremacy, and could not stand in the path of a long-pursued reunification of North and South. Instead of majestic or empowered women, Homer’s two young figures seem to be docile, non-threatening and above all, dependant servants contained in the fields, powerless under the Southern patriarchy.
Depicted with heroic stature and monumental form, the figures represent a grand potential in the future of the black American but one that is unattainable. Homer portrays these black women both as heroes and as victims, empowered beings that will never actually assume power. This measured freedom represented a safe solution to the problem of emancipation by allowing blacks to approximate white freedom, while keeping them always removed from true equality.
Carnival, one of the last paintings of African Americans before Homer left Virginia was painted a year after The Cotton Pickers.
The Metropolitan Museum description of the painting is as follows (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11116):
In this Reconstruction-era painting, Homer evokes the dislocation and endurance of African American culture that was a legacy of slavery. The central figure represents a character from a Christmas celebration known as Jonkonnu, once observed by enslaved people in North Carolina and, possibly, eastern Virginia. Rooted in the culture of the British West Indies, the festival blended African and European traditions. After the Civil War, aspects of Jonkonnu were incorporated into Independence Day events; the painting’s original title was Sketch—4th of July in Virginia. The theme of independence was particularly relevant in 1877, when emancipated Black Americans in the South saw an end to their brief experience of full civil rights with the final withdrawal of federal troops.
Calo, Mary Ann in “Winslow Homer’s Visits to Virginia during Reconstruction” (American Art Journal, vol. 12, no. 1 (1980): 5–27) documents why Homer left Virginia after painting The Carnival:
[The] New York Sun carried the following anecdote about the origin of The Carnival:
“The negroes had taken offense, it is said, at the studies he made of them, for his models were generally poorly clad, and their fellows who were much better dressed took it much to heart that he should choose such subjects. They carried a complaint to the Mayor, and gave him to understand that the sketches in question were of a kind that would reflect little honor on them, and that the artist should be notified that there were plenty of well-dressed negroes if he would but look for them. In short, there was a very strong feeling of animosity toward him so, by way of re-establishing himself in their favor, he painted this canvas, in which he represented a group of negroes in tawdry costumes of many colors, to their entire satisfaction.”
…
A similar version of this story … appeared in July of that same year, again within the context of an article on Clarke’s collection:
“Mr. Homer had been working at Smithtown, Virginia. Like many another artist, he found picturesque subjects in the people of color. He had painted them as he found them, in tatters. So they saw themselves in ‘The Old Mistress’ and other pictures. At last the models demurred; they objected to this – that such undignified likenesses of themselves should go up to the North. Excitement ran high; they almost mobbed the painter. At length, by way of compromise the latter agreed to paint them in their finery, as they were accustomed to deck themselves for their Christmas festivities.”
In all likelihood, the source of this story was Homer, himself, as Clarke had purchased the paintings directly from the artist.
9.10
| Nature as Metaphor
Beginning in 1884, Homer traveled south to escape the northern winters, either to Cuba, Nassau, Bermuda or Florida, where he devoted most of his time to fishing and watercolour painting.
Gulf Stream, named after the strong Atlantic current, is an iconic work which brings together Homer’s major themes, referencing some of the complex issues of the era—the trauma of war, the legacy of slavery, American imperialist ambitions—as well as more universal concerns with human fragility and resilience.
Homer completed the painting at Prouts Neck, in southern Maine, where he lived and worked in a coastal studio from 1883 to 1910. The dramatic scene depicts a black sailor stranded at sea during a catastrophic storm near Key West. The small fishing boat is irreparably damaged, adrift without a rudder or mast while sharks encircle it and a tropical storm forms in the distance. The man appears strong, but the struggle seems insurmountable. Homer later added a schooner to the composition to suggest the possibility of survival.
The endangered fisherman speaks to the struggle of African Americans at the end of the 19th century. Gulf Stream was painted shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898. It coincided with a virulent campaign of racial violence and legal segregation directed at African Americans throughout the South. Louisiana had recently passed its notorious Grandfather Clause, a statutory enactment by seven Southern states between 1895 and 1910 to deny suffrage to African Americans. In Wilmington, South Carolina, two days after the Congressional elections, a race riot broke out in which scores of blacks were killed. Despite new assaults on their civil rights, four black regiments were enlisted to fight in the war.
The painting began with Homer’s studies during his first trip to the Bahamas in the winter of 1884-85 and a visit to Nassau in 1898-99. Here are some of these sketches:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art entry for The Gulf Stream, ca. 1898-99 explains the prominence of the sugarcanes in the image.
(https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/829768?&exhibitionId=0&oid=829768&pkgids=756)
Homer studied details of the bow of The Gulf Stream’s boat. Significantly, he indicated the precise arrangement of the brightly colored stalks of sugarcane across the deck. By placing sugarcane at the center of his composition and writing that “the subject of this picture is comprised in its title,” Homer made an unequivocal reference to the institution of slavery. Sugar was a central commodity in the triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and the Gulf Stream current played an essential role in both its conveyance and the trafficking of enslaved people. The study also includes the damaged mast and gunwale (the upper edge of the vessel’s side), which he would later edit somewhat in the oil painting.
The attacks on African Americans in Congress during the era in which Gulf Stream was painted were discussed in this passage by John Sharp Williams of Mississippi on 20 December 1898:
You could ship-wreck 10,000 illiterate white Americans on a desert island and in three weeks they would have a fairly good government, conceived and administered upon fairly democratic lines. You could ship-wreck 10,000 negroes, every one of them of whom was a graduate of Harvard University, and in less than three years, they would have retrograded governmentally; half of the men would have been killed, and the other half would have two wives apiece. (Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (Da Capo Press, 1965), 90)
On the other side were the thoughts and writings of Frederick Douglass, a black abolitionist, suffragist, social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman. After Douglass escaped slavery, he became a prominent leader in the abolitionist movement.
Douglass was also fond of using nautical metaphors. In an early address meeting the challenge of racists, he adapted the metaphor of the sea to describe the endurance of black people in the face of every conceivable hardship:
The history of the Negro race proves them to be wonderfully adapted to all countries, all climates and all conditions. Their tenacity of life, their powers of endurance, their malleable toughness, would almost imply especial interpositions on their behalf. The ten thousand horrors of slavery, striking upon the sensitive soul, have bruised, and battered and stung, but have not killed. The poor bondman lifts a smiling face above the surface of a sea of agonies, hoping on, hoping ever. (cited in Frederick Douglass, The Speeches of Frederick Douglass: A Critical Edition (Yale University Press, 2018), 148)
Gulf Stream speaks to the qualities of toughness and tenacity. After experiencing one shock after another, the stranded black man’s reaction to his likely demise is calm and courageous. While some commentary described this as resignation, sullen laziness and apathy, a closer inspection of the figure reveals he is very much awake and alert to the dangers. Lying on his back, he props himself up tautly on his elbows to survey the perils, and despite the multiple risks confronting him, he betrays no fright. Nevertheless, the uncertain outcome perplexed critics and made buyers uneasy. When it was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1900-1 at a record asking price of $4000, the painting did not sell.
Albert Boime, in “Blacks in Shark-Infested Waters: Visual Encodings of Racism in Copley and Homer” (Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3, no. 1 (1989): 19–47), writes: [C]lients pressed Homer’s dealer to learn of the eventual fate of the picture’s protagonist. Homer responded sarcastically: “You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate negro who now is so dazed and parboiled will be rescued and returned to his friends and home and ever after live happily.”
This statement signifies the opposite of what it says, underscoring a suspended reality that echoes the experience of blacks in America through its open-ended narrative and unknowable outcome.
This print from the Harper’s Weekly by Homer illustrates the riot that occurred when Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists attempted to commemorate the death of John Brown at Boston’s Tremont Temple, one of the places of worship for Boston’s Jews.
Brown, a radical abolitionist and Christian evangelical, believed in the equality of the races. In 1855, with five of his sons, he settled in Kansas in an attempt to secure the territory’s entry as a free state. Brown planned to liberate the slaves through armed intervention. Eventually, he was captured after a failed slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. On December 2, 1859, Brown was hanged at Charles Town. His dignified conduct during the trial proceedings and his passionate defence led to his being widely regarded as a hero and a martyr.
Although Boston had come to be associated as the seat of the antislavery movement, many of the city’s citizens held contrary views. In December 1860, a group of abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, met at Tremont Temple in Boston to commemorate the anniversary of John Brown’s execution. The assembled abolitionists considered Brown to be a martyr to their cause, but other Bostonians were not persuaded. Some of the latter interrupted and took over the proceedings, passing resolutions that condemned John Brown’s raid and expelling the abolitionists from the hall. (Harpweek, https://blackhistory.harpweek.com/7Illustrations/Slavery/ExpulsionOfNegroesBI.htm)
9.11
| Frederick Douglass’s “Pictures and Progress”: Reclaiming Race
Douglass believed that the medium of photography was critical tool in ending slavery and racism because the camera did not lie, even if the photographer was racist. He was convinced that photographic images could counter racist caricatures, particularly blackface cartoons. Douglass, the most photographed American of the 19th century, used his portrait photographs to advance his abolitionist views. He refused to smile because he did not want to be associated with the racist cartoons of the toothy smiling, wide-eyed happy slave. He was insistent on looking directly into the camera, facing the viewer with a serious piercing look.
The early cameras, such as daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, and wet-plate collodion cameras, produced photographs with a depth of field. The photos revealed the details of the darker zones of the subject’s hair colour and texture, the folds and creases of the clothes, and, probably most important for Douglass and other black abolitionists, the range of skin colours grouped as “black.” These qualities were too often missing in photographs of black people that were under-metered or under-exposed.
Henry Louis Gates writes in “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura” (Aperture, no. 223 (2016): 25–29):
Since he was photographed more than any other American of his time, it shouldn’t surprise us that Frederick Douglass not only used photographic images of himself, like he used his oratory, in the battle to end slavery and to insure for the Negro full citizenship rights, but he also theorized about photography, about its nature and its uses. Douglass was, by all accounts, a master orator on his feet, summoning rhetorical tropes and figures seemingly at will to maximum effect. For someone so urgently concerned with effecting immediate political change, he was extraordinarily patient in making his case. One of his favorite tropes was the chiasmus, repeating two or more words or clauses or grammatical constructions, balanced against each other in reverse order, a rhetorical “x,” somewhat akin to a linguistic seesaw: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
The apparatus of the camera obscura is the optical counterpart of chiasmus, literally the “x” at the back of the box, the mechanism that reproduces, rotates, and reverses a scene, transforming it into an image flipped 180 degrees. Douglass used photography in the same way, registering, through image of himself after image of himself, that “the Negro,” “the slave,” was as various as any human beings could be, not just in comparison to white people, but even more importantly among and within themselves.
Douglass wrote three autobiographies, relating his experiences as a slave: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. The last book published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before Douglass died, covers events during and following the American Civil War.
Here are three quotations from his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave:
- 2
My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant — before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.
- 38
The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of errands, I always took my book with me, and by going one part of my errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. I am strongly tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids; — not that it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian country.
- 99
I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.
There’s a Reason Why Frederick Douglass Had So Many Photos Taken
Gates continues:
What was Frederick Douglass trying to represent and, just as importantly by contrast, what was he trying, through his over 160 photographic portraits, not to represent? Douglass, through these images of himself, is attempting both to display and displace: he is seeking at once to show in two dimensions the contours of the anti-slave, “God’s image in ebony,” as the abolitionists like to say, who in essence and in possibility fundamentally, by definition, shares the blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of every other white human being. Even more directly, however, Douglass was intent on the use of this visual image to erase the astonishingly large storehouse of racist stereotypes that had been accumulated in the American archive of antiblack imagery, the bank of simian and other animal-like caricatures meant to undermine the Negro’s claim of a common humanity, and therefore the rights to freedom and citizenship and economic opportunity.
…Douglass tells us in his 1864 speech “Pictures and Progress” that fate had given him both a mission and a text with which to embark upon that mission: “Now the speech I was sent into the world to make was an abolition speech the Negro is very apt to come with me. I cannot forget him: and you would not if I did.” “You” would not, he is saying, because “the Negro” is written on his face at a time when the blackness of that face cannot possibly be erased or be rendered transparent or invisible. Hence, he is engaged – one might even say he is trapped – in a discursive arena in which even a lecture about something as seemingly apolitical as photography or art in the end must, by definition, be engaged within and through Douglass’s state of being as a black man in a white society in which one’s blackness signifies negation. In “Pictures and Progress,” Douglass further explains that his other motivation for embracing this new technology with such alacrity, on behalf of the Negro, as representative Negro, as the anti-slave, is to counter the racist stereotypes, “the already read text” of the debased, subhuman Negro fabricated and so profusely distributed by the slave power, by supplanting those images with a proliferation of anti-caricatures. No wonder Douglass emerges as the most frequently photographed American in the nineteenth century. He was a reformer on a mission: he seized upon those long-exposure glimpses of black and majestic human forms, miraculously generated by the chiastic magic of Daguerre’s camera obscura, to fabricate – to picture
– the very images through which, at long last, the Negro as anti-slave could emerge and then progress, “clothed in his own form.”
[NEXT TWO IMAGES ARE PAIRED]
In 1844, Douglass wrote about “Negro Portraits” in the Liberator, the most widely circulated anti-slavery newspaper during the antebellum period and throughout the Civil War. He insisted that painted portraits of African Americans could never be “impartial portraits.”
It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. And the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other white persons, have adopted a theory respecting the distinctive features of negro physiognomy. We have heard many white persons say that ‘negroes look all alike’, and that they could not distinguish between the old and the young. They associate with the negro face, high cheek bones, distended nostril, depressed nose, thick lips, and retreating forehead. This theory, impressed strongly on the mind of an artist, exercises a powerful influence over his pencil, and very naturally leads him to distort and exaggerate those peculiarities, even when they scarcely exist in the original. The temptation to make the likeness of the negro, rather than of the man, is very strong; and often leads the artist, as well as the player, to ‘overstep the modesty of nature.’ There is the greatest variety of form and feature among us, and there is seldom one face to be found which has all the features usually attributed to the negro; and there are those from which these marks of African descent (while their color remains unchanged) have disappeared entirely. ‘I am black, but comely,’ is as true now, as it was in the days of Solomon. Perhaps we should not be more impartial than our white brothers, should we attempt to picture them. We should be as likely to get their lips too thin, noses too sharp and pinched up, their hair too lank and lifeless, and their faces altogether too cadaverous.
Douglass, however, did trust the images of two African American artists, Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner.
9.12
| Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner: Breaking Free
Frederick Douglass knew Edmonia Lewis when she was a student at Oberlin College in Ohio in the 1860s. Oberlin College was the first American higher-learning institution to allow women and people of different ethnicities to attend. Douglass encouraged Lewis to go to the East Coast and study abroad. He and his wife, Helen, met with Lewis when they visited her in Rome in 1887, where she had settled in 1866. Lewis did a portrait sculpture of Douglass. Unfortunately, its current location is unknown.
Mary Edmonia Lewis was born a free black woman in ca. 1844. Her mother had black and Ojibwa ancestry, and her father was black. Little is known of Lewis’s father beyond his being from the West Indies and his employment as a gentleman’s servant. Lewis’s Canadian mother, Catherine, was born to an escaped African slave and a woman of African and Ojibwa [Chippewa] descent. Catherine was denied Indian membership because of her African heritage, which was based on a degree of Indian blood. The family was pushed out of the Reservation where Catherine’s mother’s family lived.
In January of 1862, three years into her studies at Oberlin College, Lewis was falsely accused of poisoning two white female classmates with Spanish Fly, an aphrodisiac, in the wine she served them. Soon after, with the pending investigation, she was abducted, brutally beaten, stripped naked and left for dead. Then, a year later, in February of 1863, she was falsely accused for a second time, for stealing art material from a classroom. She was cleared both times but had enough of Oberlin and headed to Boston. She then traveled to Europe in 1866, and after a few months in Florence, she left for Rome, where she lived for over twenty years. At the time, many American artists, writers, and intellectuals were living in Rome. Lewis often returned to the United States for exhibitions and to sell her work. Lewis explained in an interview in the New York Times, 1878: “I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”
In 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, Lewis created the sculpture, Forever Free. Lewis was particularly interested in the identity and oppression of African American people. Forever Free depicts an African American man standing beside a kneeling African American woman with a fragment of a recently-broken chain still shackled to his wrist.
Susanna W. Gold writes in “The Death of Cleopatra / The Birth of Freedom: Edmonia Lewis at the New World’s Fair” (Biography 35, no. 2 (2012): 318–41):
In the immediate post-Civil War years, when she first disembarked in Rome, through the 1870s, Lewis asserted her newfound independence by addressing race in a number of her ideal sculptures—large-scale figurative works that illustrated weighty historical, biblical, literary, or mythological moments, and that were inspired by Classical aesthetics for serene physical perfection. In her earliest ideal work, The Freedwoman on First Hearing of her Liberty (The Freedwoman and Her Child) (1866, currently unlocated), and its complement, Forever Free (The Morning of Liberty) 1867, Lewis engages the noble theme of the emancipated slave. Somewhat similar in composition, both The Freedwoman and Forever Free feature a kneeling African slave woman, hands clasped and face raised heavenward in gratitude. In The Freedwoman, a small, apprehensive boy leans over his mother’s knees grasping her waist, while Forever Free features a husband standing by her side, his arm protectively around her shoulders. Both compositions include broken manacles clinging to the wrists of these now emancipated slaves, and the remnants of balls and chains lying at their feet. Lewis continued to work with themes relevant to her own heritage through the Reconstruction era, when she would reach the height of her success as a sculptor. In the fall of 1875 John Sartain, Chief of the Bureau of Art of the Centennial Exhibition, circulated among the American sculptors in Rome an invitation to submit work to the Centennial, and Lewis responded with The Death of Cleopatra.
Most notable among her contributions to the Centennial art galleries [at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia] was The Death of Cleopatra (1876), an over life-size Neoclassical representation of the ancient Egyptian Queen carved from pristine white Italian marble. Depicting the moment in the narrative popularized by Shakespeare when Cleopatra allows herself to be bitten by a poisonous asp following the loss of her crown, Lewis offers a startling portrayal of a Queen having chosen to suffer death rather than succumb to imprisonment and humiliation at the hands of her Roman conqueror. With her head thrown back in anguish and her slightly parted lips and eyes still registering pain, Cleopatra collapses into her throne just as the last pulse of energy drains from her body. While the asp twists through her motionless right hand, the agitation in her left arm is barely, but notably, perceptible as it falls to her side, resulting in a haunting interpretation of the very moment of death.
…
The Death of Cleopatra responds, too, to the cultural conditions of its time. At a critical moment in the reinvention of national identity, the interest of the African American community in preserving the memory of the Civil War and its consequences of Emancipation was at odds with the mainstream assumption that reproachful memories of the nation’s history of slavery and the resultant war must be forgotten or ignored in the process of nation-building. Lewis’s conception of the destruction of slavery—veiled under the pretext of historical narrative, the only acceptable means of such expression in the US art galleries—attested that the vindicating memory of Emancipation held firm in African American consciousness, and would not be relinquished with the restructuring of national identity. If The Death of Cleopatra served as a visual embodiment of slavery’s end, the Centennial viewer was then left to question what would fill this absence in the post-Reconstruction years ahead. While Centennial culture pushed the US public to envision national reunification, Lewis’s sculpture begs its audience to consider the terms of that vision. With the broad range of cross-cultural and cross-temporal confluences underpinning the production and exhibition of The Death of Cleopatra, Lewis introduces the possibility of a more pluralistic nation, one that acknowledges its own history of creolization, and requires that the diversity of its citizens be acknowledged in the Centennial re-invention of itself.
Henry Ossawa Tanner’s father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, an influential African Methodist Episcopal bishop and political activist, befriended Frederick Douglass when the family moved to Philadelphia.
Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1859. His mother, Isabel, a formerly enslaved person who escaped via the Underground Railroad, believed education was the route to African American progress. When the family moved to Philadelphia, Tanner enrolled in painting classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where he studied under Thomas Eakins; he was among the first African American artists to study at the academy. Upon graduating, Tanner quickly discovered that white Americans were unwilling to accept an African American artist on equal terms. He left Philadelphia and moved to Atlanta, where he took up photography. After a patron in Cincinnati purchased all his paintings that were in an exhibition there, he used the funds to travel to Europe in 1891. He studied at the Académie Julian under Benjamin Constant, who confirmed Tanner’s potential.
As he came to understand that he was a leading representative of “the race” in art, Tanner painted The Banjo Lesson in 1893 and The Thankful Poor in 1894. While The Banjo Lesson was accepted at the Paris Salon of 1894, it received little recognition from French or American critics. It was then that the artist decided to turn his attention to biblical subjects, and quickly gained recognition as a distinguished painter of religious themes. Tanner remained in France for the rest of his life, because of the repressive racial environment in the United States.
Albert Boime discusses Tanner’s genre work in “Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Subversion of Genre” (Art Bulletin 75, no. 3 (September 1993): 415-42):
His first major painting of this sort was The Banjo Lesson, executed in 1893 from drawings the artist had made in the South prior to his departure for Europe. The crude farmhouse interior and household utensils that form the backdrop of the picture link it to the mainstream of American rural genre, as does his representation of African-Americans within this setting. They correspond to Tanner’s nostalgia for his own far-off childhood, misty recollections of the family hearth that included a great Dutch oven, an image perhaps sparked by the cozy log cabin he had recently rented in Highlands, North Carolina. Further, the motif of the African-American playing a musical instrument-especially the banjo-was so commonplace that it continued to figure in penny postcards as well.
The basic themes of conventional representations however–the cheerful and grinning “coon” or the dancing “darkey” of the minstrel tradition–are noticeably absent in Tanner’s painting. Here the theme is not the African American as an object of white entertainment but as the subject of black education. It is an image which encapsulates the creative and intellectual promise of African Americans during the Reconstruction era.
The setting of a small log cabin is enlivened by the lovely glow of a hearth fire which casts its light on grandfather and grandson as they take part in what has been described as a generational torch-passing. The old man is teaching the young boy to play the banjo. While the warmth of the light envelops the young boy, the tone is cooler, the light more subdued surrounding the older man, an evocative contrast between past and future, the darkness of slavery and the light of freedom. The grandson, through his learning, symbolizes new possibilities.
This poignant image speaks of interiority and intimacy, affection and aspiration. It is private, and far removed from the scenes of amusement and spectatorship of popular illustrations or the self-conscious “acting out” typical of a banjo-playing black man. The banjo is not a stereotypical prop, but a metonym for education generally, and also for change.
A year later, in 1894, Tanner painted The Thankful Poor, which represents an analogous exchange between generations. The scene shows an older man and his grandson at mealtime. The young boy emulates the reverence of his grandfather just as he copies his physical gestures. Boime:
The youth’s tilted arm and folded hand echo his elder’s gesture, using them to support his head and aid in mental concentration. Tanner brings us close enough to the tabletop to see the scanty food offerings and to point up the contrast between the pair’s impoverished condition yet unremitting gratitude to God. The two figures are treated solemnly and with dignity. Unlike the actors in the penny postcards then in circulation, they are provided with sparse fare and yet maintain their decorum. They are shown as devout and sober Christians, a role almost never seen in popular representations, which generally mock African-American religious practices as a throwback to tribal ritual or fanatical superstition.
By the end of the 1890’s Tanner was settled in Paris as a professional artist. The biblical themes that became his focus were far removed from the earlier genre works, linked only by their familial psychological aspect. As Boime summarizes,
Although black people appear in these works, more often than not they are shown as eyewitnesses-as in the Raising of Lazarus, for example-to a multicultural and unitary scene. We may speculate that Tanner began to seek a more universal message through his biblical pictures … He deserted overt representations of the economically repressed conditions of African-Americans, and ultimately he reinscribed them in a biblical past to please his father and wealthy patrons.
…
On one level, Tanner’s biblical works reverted to the traditional definition and aims of genre. It might be argued, as several scholars do, that Tanner’s approach differs from conventional or academicized representations of biblical themes: using members of his family and close friends for models and digging relentlessly into the architecture, accessories, and costumes of ancient Palestine, he tried to make his works as archaeologically accurate as possible. He also humanized the protagonists and minimized the tendency to sensationalism or sentimentalism so common in renderings of biblical themes of the period.
Over a century after Lewis and Tanner faced racial prejudice at home to make their mark on the international stage, their importance as African American artists active at a historical moment charged by change is now being recognized more fully. Their legacy extends beyond their engagement with new ways of interpreting subjects stylistically to acknowledge their contribution to the subversion of stereotypical representations of black Americans during the late 19th century. That their work was influenced by race and racism is inarguable. But their success is a testament to their will and vision in an era of radical social change. Theirs is a narrative that continues to resonate today.