ELEANOR HARVEY: The painting I’m standing here in front of is Eastman Johnson’s “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” He painted it in 1863 the year that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into full effect. It’s a painting that resonates on several levels.
First of all, it’s a young black man who is learning to read using the bible. Harper’s Weekly ran an article that stated, “the alphabet is an abolitionist, if you wish to keep a people enslaved do not teach them to read.” What everyone realized was literacy, the ability to read what was happening to be able to tell your own story, was a vast part of becoming part of the American mainstream. For formerly enslaved black people in this country literacy was often an effort they undertook themselves as part of proving that they were worthy of being considered whole people. This young black man literally takes literacy into his own hands holding, gripping the bible, but Eastman Johnson threw an interesting curve ball into this picture. He titled it the “Lord is My Shepherd” and the Psalms are one of the calm parts of the bible, an affirmation of God’s love but they occur in the middle of the book.
This young man is reading the front of the book. It’s probably Exodus with its powerful message “let my people go.” With the beginning of The Civil War the stories of Exodus the flight from Egypt in Exodus and in Numbers resonated in the black community. One of the earliest songs recorded was called the Song of the Contrabands or the escaped slaves who made it past Union lines and were accepted into the ranks, as cooks, as teamsters, and as laborers, and it’s always seemed to me that in deliberately choosing to have this man read the front of the bible instead of the middle Johnson was making two points.
The first is that once you teach someone to read you cannot control what they read and you have to be ready for reading all of the bible not just the parts that you think will make the most pleasant reading. The second is when we cleaned this picture we discovered that the blanket that he is sitting on on this chair next to the chimney is probably a US Army blanket, raising the question whether this man is contraband, escaped from the South and now learning to read under the coaching of Union soldiers or whether in fact he has requested to become a member of the colored troops, which were allowed into the Union Army in the same year in 1863. Either way the idea of determination, of initiative, the idea of taking your future into your own hands becomes a central part of Eastman Johnson's narrative of the American Civil War.
