Eldredge Prize: Maurie D. McInnis “Slaves Waiting for Sale: Visualizing the American Slave Trade”
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Join Maurie D. McInnis, professor of American art and material culture and associate dean for undergraduate academic programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, and winner of the museum's 2012 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for distinguished scholarship, for a discussion on her book.
[Clapping]
- (Maurie McInnis) Well, thank you very much, and I am so honored to be here this afternoon and really humbled by being among the list of some of the really most important works in American art historical scholarship, and thank you very much for coming this afternoon so that I can share a little bit with you of this project that has meant so much to me over the last few years.
On 6 May, 1861, a crowd of British royalty, nobility, and politicians inaugurated the 93rd Annual London Exhibition of the Royal Academy of the Arts. Arriving at the National Gallery’s newly renovated exhibition rooms at 2:00 in the afternoon, they toured the gems of British art before sitting down to a sumptuous feast with members of the Royal Academy. They formed, according to the times, the largest and most distinguished company yet assembled at the annual event. A long series of toasts and speeches with a rhetorical flourish characteristic of the Victorian age continued until 11:00 in the evening. One of the visitors that opening day was the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, author of such celebrated works as Vanity Fair and Pendennis. Only Charles Dickens eclipsed Thackeray’s popularity. As Thackeray walked around the exhibition that spring day hobnobbing with other notables, he must have noticed one painting in particular, Eyre Crowe’s Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, which was described by the critic for the Art Journal as one of the most important pictures in the exhibition. Nearly a decade earlier, Thackeray had spent six months in America delivering lectures in the Atlantic Seaboard cities, including Richmond. He was accompanied on this trip by the artist. Crowe was a close family friend and a young struggling painter. He gladly accepted employment as the author’s secretary. We do not know whether Thackeray pointed out the work to his fellow distinguished attendees or whether, in line with his own public evasion of the slavery question, he left it for others to discover. Slaves Waiting for Sale, a picture only about three feet wide, was one of the smaller works on display. It hung alongside larger pictures covering a wide array of subject matters and genres from medieval English history to Scottish peasant scenes, from historical biblical narratives to detailed landscape studies. The cornucopia of artistic riches hung frame to frame, floor to ceiling, jockeying with one another for attention. Before his journey to America almost ten years earlier, Crowe had had only a few pictures accepted for the Annual Royal Academy Exhibition. His American sojourn, however, proved a thematic watershed for his art, bringing a new subject to the fore, American slavery. As he planned what he would submit for the 1861 exhibition, it was with knowledge of the volatile, political situation in the United States. English newspapers and periodicals were filled with the coverage of the American political crisis following the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 and the secession of Southern states. Although Crowe had earlier published numerous American scenes in the Illustrated London News and had exhibited several pictures concerning American slavery at the Royal Scottish Academy, the [Royal] Society for British Artists, and the British Institution he now hoped one would be accepted for the Royal Academy. To understand how Crowe arrived at this moment we need to wind back the clock in order to understand what Crowe had seen, how he made visual sense of it. It is also necessary to consider how he transitioned from conventional modes of anti-slavery illustration, including his own, to finding a new approach, one that could be accepted at the Royal Academy, yet still make a clear anti-slavery statement and thus reach countless viewers not regularly part of the anti-slavery movement. While in America as Thackeray’s secretary, the young artist purchased the first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Crowe, who previously knew little about slavery, declared himself perfectly harrowed by its contents. Stowe’s novel tells the life stories of a number of slaves, including the eponymous Uncle Tom, and had such a significant impact in spreading anti-slavery awareness that President Lincoln supposedly said upon meeting her, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” Now, Lincoln’s words are likely apocryphal, but there is no doubt that the novel had a major cultural impact. Crowe, who knew little of slavery before traveling to America, became determined to learn what he could of American slavery, and especially of the slave trade that was featured in Stowe’s novel. When he arrived in Richmond, the first southern city he visited, he set out to witness a slave auction in order to see the slave trade that had become by the 1850s the focus of Abolitionist Eyre. What he saw there was certainly unlike anything he had expected. Richmond, a town of about 30,000, nearly 45% of whom were African American, and on his first morning in Richmond Crowe sat alone at breakfast reading the local papers. He wrote that what most captured his attention were the advertisements, not those of politics or entertainments, but as he later recalled, the announcement of slave sales. In one, N.B. and C.B. Hill announced that they were the agents for a trustee sale of negroes and would on that day at 10:00 sell three negro men, 21, 26, and 30 years old. After reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin and meeting numerous abolitionists in his travels through the North, Crowe was eager to observe this commercial aspect of slavery himself. These relatively small notices would have been lost in a sea of commercial announcements, and yet they immediately jumped out for the young artist who had read about the trade in human flesh, but who could not fully comprehend it. Richmonders looking at the same paper would not have seen anything unusual, as advertisements for slave auctions were commonplace and part of Richmond’s routine commerce, so commonplace in fact that dealers regularly advertised in city directors and printed up price lists such as the one on the screen in order to report on the current price of the negro market, as the page informs us. In 1857, the editor of the Warrenton Whig reported that the trade in Richmond amounted to more than four million dollars annually. With an average selling price of just under a thousand dollars in that year, that suggests that more than four thousand slaves were sold. Historian Michael Tadman has estimated that more than 350,000 slaves left Virginia between 1820 and 1860, most through the interstate slave trade. Not knowing where the advertised sales were located, Crowe was directed by a man who worked at the hotel to a place only a few streets away. Crowe later identified this street as Wall Street, which not only does not appear on any map of the city today, but is hard even to find on contemporary Antebellum maps. It was then, as now, almost invisible as part of the public face of the city. It was a small street, little more than an alley a block long, that ran north along what should have been the path of 15th Street from Main to Franklin. Despite its unassuming appearance, according to the Illustrated London News it was by far the greatest object of curiosity to European visitors in Richmond because from here, entire armies of likely hands had issued forth after being sold and gone South to the plantations. As Crowe had been informed, on Wall Street was a concentration of traders and brokers who sold slaves at auction. Although the density of traders and salesrooms located here attracted the most notice from visitors, Wall Street was part of a much larger commercial slave-trading district. There were numerous businesses in the areas related to the trade, jails where thousands of men and women and children were held before sale, auction rooms where they were sold, and other businesses that supplied the trade with necessary items such as those clothing stores that specifically supplied clothing in order to dress slaves for sale in order to make them appear more attractive to potential buyers. The path of Crowe’s footsteps that day can be largely reconstructed. Seated at breakfast at the American Hotel on March 3, 1853, he looked at the papers and saw the advertisement for N.B. and C.B. Hill’s sale to take place that same day. Crowe left the American Hotel, turned right down Main Street, the primary business thoroughfare, and walked down the steep declivity just a few blocks to its intersection with Wall Street. On Wall Street he entered the first salesroom, likely that of Pulliam & Davis. He discovered that sales were announced by hanging a red flag outside of the doorway, a flag he described as being blood red. That sanguinary flag haunted him for years, and in the painting he uses its red color to chromatically link each slave to their treatment as chattel property. From the red vest of the seated man to the red bows around the necks of the women to the red shoes of the little girl, each figure is stained by the fate embodied in that blood-red flag. Journalist Charles Coffin, entering Charleston with federal troops in 1865, was also struck by the illustrative purposes of the red flag that he took one hanging outside a Charleston slave market and sent it back to Boston. It is the one you see on the screen. Crowe noted that after each sale was completed the entire audience moved on to the next salesroom. He was at first overwhelmed by the multiple sensory stimuli. His eyes swam, his pulse raced, and his olfactory nerves were assailed. In the first two rooms he merely observed the sales in progress. He later published the image, “Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia,” depicting the event he witnessed in that first room, again, likely the room of traders Pulliam & Davis. In the third room he entered he was so struck by the sight of a group of slaves seated on benches before the sale that in what he described as a “hardly justifiable fit of enthusiasm” he took out his pencil and paper and began to make a sketch of the scene. The resulting sketch made in that third room was Slaves Waiting to be Sold. That room was most likely the auction room of N.B. and C.B. Hill whose advertisement had first directed him to Wall Street. His sketching attracted considerable attention. Those around him took notice of what he was doing, and when bidding did not proceed on a particular slave, the dealer came over and inquired what he was doing. “I don’t feel bound to answer your questions,” Crowe replied, and the dealer returned to his post, but as the buyers remain uninterested in the sale and engrossed with what Crowe was doing, the dealer returned to the artist with what Crowe described as “ill-disguised rage” and once again demanded to know what he was about. Crowe replied, “You can look for yourself. I am sketching.” The dealer returned to the auction block, but the audience remained absorbed in the image Crowe was creating. A third more insistent question from the auctioneer compelled Crowe to leave. He quickly departed, turned to the right, and hid away in the second salesroom and waited not wishing to look as if he were flying, but as he left that building he noticed the entire group headed by the dealer coming after him. He quickly turned and walked towards Main Street and disappeared into the crowds. Crowe was not the only chronicler that day of the events. A week afterwards the New York Daily Tribune published a letter from a New Yorker who told of the auctions he had witnessed in Richmond. His letter recounted the controversy over an artist’s sketching which clearly had caused quite a stir. In his telling the writer reported that they were all sure he was an abolitionist, and they all wanted to lend a foot to kick him. As Crowe noted, the atmosphere was particularly heated because everyone was, as he put it, “at fever pitch owing to Mrs. Stowe’s fiery denunciations in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” There was much about the slave auction, however, that Crowe could not represent due to the constraints of Victorian propriety. In written accounts of slave auctions observers winced at how enslaved bodies were measured, evaluated, and assessed as commodities. In his own article that accompanied his “Slave Auction at Richmond,” Crowe alluded to the common practice of lifting a woman’s skirt while she was standing on the auction block by showing the young “help” holding onto her skirt as if he is about to lift it up to show her legs and ankles. The event was probably similar to the one described by C.C. Ron in his private diary. After visiting Dickinson & Co.’s Richmond’s salesroom in 1852, he wrote about the auction of a woman who looked, according to him, “permanently pensive and sad, and when put on the block I saw big tears slowly, and as if imperceptibly to her, trickling down her cheeks.” The writer assumed that the woman was feeling modest and disdainful about the free examinations usually made of their legs and that she jerked her dress out of the hand of the black man whose business it was to show them off. G.H. Andrews, and English visitor to an auction in Richmond, wrote about how male slaves were usually taken to a room or behind a screen where their backs were examined. Andrews’ description echoed dozens of others. Sometimes men were asked to roll up their pants so that their legs could be examined. Other times they were asked to remove their shirts, and in other circumstances they were completely stripped. Writers found it difficult to describe how degrading the process was, and, thus, they often only hinted at its barbarities without elaborating on its details. Former slave John Brown wrote that he “could not for decency’s sake describe what dealers did.” Defeated in trying to find words that adequately could describe the revulsion he said instead, “What passes behind the screen, only those who have gone through the ordeal can tell, but God has recorded the wickedness that is done there, and punishment will assuredly fall upon the guilty.” Artists chose not to reveal this practice, but Crowe alluded to it in his image. Slaves being sold in America had already lived in slavery, and traders wanted to determine whether they had scars from earlier whippings. In his “Slave Auction at Richmond,” just to the right of the auction itself, an enslaved man is shown holding a brogue in one hand and stretching out his arm as if putting his shirt back on. Behind him stands a white man, presumably a trader, who is gesturing towards the enslaved man’s back. This motion was significant. As Crowe noted, the value of a slave was diminished by the presence of scars, as they were interpreted by the buyers as evidence “not of the cruelty of the former master, but of restiveness in the slave.” Traders and buyers thought that they could read a slave’s history and his character from the multiple scars. Multiple incidents probably indicated a slave who would frequently run away, whereas old scars suggested a slave whose behavior had been modified by the application of the lash. Whereas slave traders looked at these scars as markers of the worth of an individual slave, Crowe saw the backs of slaves as evidence of something much larger. Ever attuned to the contradictions inherent and the contrasts between American liberty and American slavery Crowe wrote, “A closer inspection reveals a world of scars and stripes distributed with not so much regularity as in the flag of the Union.” The visual and verbal correspondence in the “stars and stripes” of the country’s flag and the “scars and stripes” of a slave’s back, however, was a contrast too painful for the visual language of 19th century sentimentality to render. How did the thousands of slaves annually end up on the auction block in Richmond? In Crowe’s visit there, He did not see the first link in the chain of the slavey trade. In the slave trading district the salesrooms were near buildings referred to as “negro jails.” In these buildings dozens of men, women, and children were held until sold. They were sent there by individual owners or by dealers who traveled throughout the Virginia and Maryland countryside looking for slaves to buy. Even though the men and women incarcerated there had committed no crimes, the word aptly describes the penal nature of these places where slaves were confined until sale. Most of the jails were located near Wall Street, including Richmond’s most infamous slave pen known as “Lumpkin’s Jail.” It consisted of four buildings, Robert Lumpkin’s house, a boarding house where those selling or buying slaves could board at low rates, a kitchen or tavern building, and a jail for housing slaves awaiting sale. There were dozens of slaves at Lumpkin’s at any one time, many having been collected in the countryside and sent to the jail to be held until sale. Sometimes slaves were held for longer periods to wait for the market to improve. As one trader wrote to Dickinson, “You may confine him in jail until prices rise, and be sure to get to him a good price.” Part of what Crowe observed closely is unexpected to modernize. Many comment that Crowe must have altered the clothes that the enslaved were wearing in order to make the image more palatable. Quite the contrary. Slaves were commonly dressed for sale, and such expenditures were all part of increasing the profitability of slaves sold. In addition to feeding slaves well, traders usually dressed them in new clothing as a way of disguising their true histories. A client of Dickinson’s in Richmond, for instance, sent him 31 slaves from Gloucester County and told him to “fix them up well as you can before the sale.” As former slave Solomon Northup reported, “We were each furnished a new suit. The men had a hat, coat, shirts, pants, and shoes; the women frocks of calico and handkerchiefs to bind their heads.” The uniformity of this clothing wiped away the many different life histories of the enslaved and made them seem to buyers just different options of the same product varying by age, height, and skills, but obscuring their individual histories, experiences, and hardships. In Hector Davis’ account book in Richmond, clothing made up the single largest item of expenses related to slaves. Slaves’ neat dress surprised many visiting the auction rooms. William Chambers, an English traveler in Richmond about the same time as Crowe, wrote that, “Their appearance had little of the repulsiveness we are apt to associate with the idea of slaves.” Costuming was an essential part of the theater of the slave auction. Slaves were dressed as characters in a play and expected to act out their parts. Former slave Wallace Turnage, for example, described his principal job while a young slave in Richmond working for Hector Davis in 1860 as taking people from the jail to the dressing room and from the dressing room to the auction room. Certain clothing retailers specialized in providing clothes specifically for the trade. In Richmond, Lewis B. Levy had a shop under City Hotel on Wall Street in close proximity to the traders. Richmond-born sculptor Moses Ezekiel recalled in his memoirs how slaves were brought to his grandparents’ door on 17th Street just a couple of blocks away from the salesroom to be dressed for sale. Ezekiel described a store that surely resembled those next door on 17th Street and shown in this image. Ezekiel claimed that “Every negro who was brought to Richmond from the South to be sold at auction was on the morning of the sale brought to our house to be dressed. The men and boys remained in the store and were attended to by my grandfather, and the women and girls came into the backroom where there was a sort of closet which was filled with ready-made dresses of all sizes to fit any negro woman or girl, and they were dressed there by my old Mammie Mary.” Ezekiel also recalled how slaves were not always dressed the same. He told the story of one day when Black Moses, who worked for a slave dealer, brought slaves to the store and requested that six of the men and the boys be given suits, another eight be given shirts, socks, suspenders, and handkerchiefs, and the last four be given only shirts and handkerchiefs. The differences in clothing probably reflected both what the slave traders thought the slaves would bring on the market and what their owners were willing to spend. As Crowe considered what to represent, he drew upon 70 years of visual precedent, and in the book I explore how the breakup of the slave family and then the slave auction became dominant abolitionist themes. When Crowe traveled to America, the international trade, understood through the famous Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship, had now been illegal for more than 40 years, but the American domestic slave trade which sold upwards of two million people in the decades between 1808 and Emancipation, had now become the focus of abolitionist scrutiny. This is reflected in Uncle Tom’s Cabin that opens with the sale of two slaves and tells the story of slavery’s impact on enslaved families. Having seen countless illustrations that purported to depict an auction, Crowe likely knew that most of these artists had never actually seen one. Artists such as the ones who created illustrations for Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other abolitionist works typically depicted the theater of the auction itself. Those images generally relied upon sentimental conventions and stock characters most commonly showing an individual slave standing on an auction block next to an auctioneer with his arm raised with a crowd of potential buyers gathered around. Crowe himself had experimented with this moment in the wood engraving in the Illustrated London News. Typically as writers described auction scenes they emphasized the market drama, the suspense of bidding, and the theater of the “Going, going, gone” of the final sale. Its frequent repetition as a visual and textual formula made the image of the slave auction expected and almost familiar, which paradoxically, diminished both its horror and its impact. An artist at mid-century thus necessarily struggled with the charged topic of slavery. A critic in the Art Journal reviewing some of Crowe’s paintings objected to the inclusion of people of African descent in works of fine art, a view that was shared by many in the Anglo-American art world at the time. According to this critic, “However skillfully painted such a picture may be, the subjects do not commend themselves either to the eye or to the mind. Neither the color nor the features of the negro race can be associated with European notions of aesthetic beauty.” In fact, European features were placed at the top of an ethnic hierarchy, and other groups, including Africans, were variously distributed below. Like other critics, this one also objected to the representation of slavery, arguing that “the system of slavery is too abhorrent to Englishmen to render a representation of it acceptable.” And because of its political sensitivity, American artists rarely made a political statement about slavery in their works intended for exhibition. Crowe thus sought to convey the depth and complexity of the horrors of slavery by presenting an entirely new scene, not the moment of the auction by now so well rehearsed in the minds of viewers, but the moments before. This decision might seem a relatively minor choice, but it had dramatic implications. The shift in timing alone forced viewers to consider the topic anew. Instead of drawing attention to the auctioneer and the buyers, Crowe focused primarily on the enslaved. Significantly, he moved away from the characteristically crowded auction scene to the pre-auction and activity. He moved from representing the figures as stock types to creating images of individuals who possessed a depth of feeling and emotion rarely encountered in representations of persons of African descent in the 19th century. In Crowe’s painting, the viewer is forced to consider the slave trade, not just in the abstract, but instead to recognize that it happened to individual mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, daughters and sons. Crowe’s painting, however, was the result of the evolution of his own thinking about race and slavery. His original sketch had relied on figures who generally conform to racial stereotypes with exaggerated features. These had long been a staple periodical and book illustration and were so common that they were hardly noticed by most white viewers. When he walked into the salesroom on Wall Street, he certainly had Uncle Tom’s Cabin on his mind. This is most evident in his treatment of the man on the right, who in the sketch is treated as a racial caricature. With his exaggerated features and the look of pleasant complacency, the figure closely resembles the way Uncle Tom was presented in graphic illustrations. So closely linked is Crowe’s original sketch of this man to [Hammatt] Billings’ drawing “Little Eva Reading the Bible to Uncle Tom in the Arbor” that it appears Billings’ image must have been strongly impressed upon his mind as he entered that Richmond slave salesroom in March 1853. There are quite striking similarities between the two images including the pose, the clothing, and even the detail of the hat discarded on the ground. The man waiting to be sold in 1853 was Uncle Tom. The man in the 1861 painting was decidedly not Uncle Tom. What had changed? As tensions mounted in America with the election of Abraham Lincoln and the succession of seven Southern states in December 1860 and early 1861, Crowe turned back to his American material. That year he published commentarian sketches from his travels in America in the pages of the Illustrated London News which appeared at the start of a tidal wave of reporting on Civil War America. This topicality also governed his choice of a painting topic for the 1861 Royal Academy Exhibition. The depiction of a subject as inherently difficult as the American slave trade challenged Crowe. He would certainly have known the criticism that befell other artists who depicted difficult subjects with political commentary. What was acceptable on the pages of a magazine or a book was not necessarily what was acceptable for a painting on a wall. As one critic noted, “A painting cannot be shut up and put away like a book.” Crowe’s Slaves Waiting for Sale tried to navigate this complex set of expectations. He wanted to present a subject more commonly confined to social journalism, and its acceptance was certainly indebted to anti-slavery images that had been a constant part of Anglo-American culture for nearly a decade, and yet, Crowe’s painting differed from the earlier images significantly. From the time of the initial 1853 sketch to the 1856 Illustrated London News illustration to the execution of the painting in 1861, Crowe’s understanding of American slavery had deepened. The artist was surrounded by anti-slavery activity in London. Perhaps he had seen Henry Box Brown’s moving panorama, Mirror of Slavery. Brown’s story would have been of particular interest to Crowe since Brown was a fugitive slave who had escaped from Richmond by mailing himself to Philadelphia in a box. Crowe might also have seen the other anti-slavery panorama, that of William Wells Brown who extensively toured his Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave. Crowe could also have seen the production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Royal Surrey Theater where [Simon] Legree’s slaves’ mutiny set buildings on fire and attacked their master with the words “Down with the oppressor.” Or perhaps Crowe went to the Wesleyan Centenary Hall in September 1860 to hear the former slave Theodore Gross. If so, he would have heard Gross talk of being sold on the block four times during his life. He would have heard Gross tell the audience that the misery of slavery was not in being hungry or whipped. Gross said, “That which preys upon his mind is the thought that his wife and his children and his nearest relatives may any day or hour be sold and sent away where he will see them no more.” We do not know how active Crowe was in anti-slavery activities or what he read or whom he met, but when he published his 1857 article about the American slave trade in Dicken’s journal Household Words, he described himself as “one they rightly took for an abolitionist.” Clearly by the time he turned his attention to painting Slaves Waiting for Sale he had gone from seeing it as a picturesque illustration of life in America to understanding that slavery and the slave trade stood at the heart of the conflict. He also understood that the event portrayed in the painting perfectly captured the current historical moment. Its ambiguity resonated with the current mood. Not only were the slaves waiting to learn their fate, but also the world was waiting to learn the fate of the United States and of American slavery. Some of the exhibition reviews grasped the painting’s potential significance. One remarked that Crowe had “produced one of the most important pictures in the exhibition and certainly the most promising work of the season.” Other than Crowe’s, the only painting to deal with slavery was Richard Ansdell’s Hunted Slaves with the massive hunting dog snarling, their teeth bared, and the male slave with a hatchet raised over his head. This painting was anything but a carefully modulated work like those usually seen on the Academy’s walls. The critic for the Art Journal applauded the timeliness of the painting, but Ansdell’s painting was not universally hailed by the critics. Blackwood[‘s] Magazine thought the artist’s manner “uniformly loud and melodramatic.” The Illustrated London News was even less pleased, calling Ansdell’s work “not an agreeable picture, either in idea or treatment.” Because they were both about slavery, critics compared the works. The critic for the Times thought Ansdell’s painting showed “vigor enough and subject enough for those who like such strong meat,” pointing to the difficulty that artists who chose to paint scenes of American slavery faced in attracting positive reviews. Although the critic noted, “The present circumstances of the South will enhance its interest,” he thought the work was not realistic. Of the two paintings, he thought Crowe’s “showed the truths of negro life,” while Ansdell’s was “a bit of studio romance.” Several other critics also picked up on what they considered the “truth” of Crowe’s picture. His fidelity was suggested by pictorial details such the architectural setting, the hat in the foreground, the red flag hanging outside the doorway, and the artist asserted his presence by etching his signature into the dirt of the floor. All these details convinced viewers that the artist had really been there and seen what he was painting in contrast to Ansdell’s studio romance. Many critics likely knew that Crowe had been to America, and that imbued his works with a greater sense of authenticity. The writer for the Examiner, for example, thought the picture had “the highest merit such a scene could have. Without being too painful, it secures sympathy, and without being the work of a dull transcriber, it looks like a literal and faithful transcript from the life it represents.” For this reviewer at least, Crowe had struck the right balance, not too painful, yet a faithful transcript. The truth that Crowe tried to represent, however, was not merely pictorial, but also human. This was the biggest difference between the 1853 sketch and the 1861 painting. The reviewer for Blackwood’s Magazine wrote that Crowe’s painting was “truth pushed to the verge of the grotesque,” pointing to the fine line Crowe walked. In order to be truthful to what he had seen, a scene that possessed what Crowe described as a “choking sense of horror,” he risked creating a painting that would be rejected from the Academy Exhibition or condemned by the critics. The truthfulness was most vigorously expressed in the portrayal of the enslaved man. While most paintings of slavery only reified white superiority and white power, Slaves Waiting for Sale made viewers consider the possibility of black power as Crowe represented black resistance in the crossed arms and clinched fists of that figure. Here in the figure of this man was something startling for white audiences to consider. The man in Crowe’s painting was described by a list of adjectives rarely encountered in Royal Academy reviews, “sullenly resigned” according to one, and displaying “suffused indignant scorn mingled with defiance” according to another. Crowe accomplished this transformation from his original sketch by making a number of small, but significant, changes. Most obvious is that he eschewed the racial caricature of the earlier sketch, perhaps suggesting that he worked from a live model in his London studio. Crowe shifted the man’s bodily stance as well as the expression on his face. By taking off the jacket and the hat, the clothes that symbolized his status as chattel property in the slave market, the man has demonstrated his unwillingness to comply with the usual costuming that was the central element of his commodification. He also made the man younger, and by taking off his coat revealed his powerful arms. This man was neither the supplicant and pleading slave who had dominated anti-slavery imagery for decades, nor the gentle and faithful Uncle Tom accepting his fate with Christian resignation. Crowe created an entirely new image of an American male slave. The crossed arms and clinched fists communicated a barely suppressed rage. These elements suggested a slave who could at any moment resist, run away, or rebel with force if necessary. Perhaps to diffuse the intensity of the seated male figure, Crowe retained elements of racial caricature in the boy and in one female who smiles and looks playfully at her child in her lap with an expression that one critic described as “almost comic.” But in depicting the other figures in the painting, he moved away from the comic caricature of the earlier sketch, replacing them with images of distinct individuals, sensitively rendered. This change significantly alters the viewer’s sense of connection with the figures. In both the earlier sketch and the Illustrated London News engravings their faces are little more than masks similar to Blackface characters like those seen on the stage in a minstrel show or in an Uncle Tom production. In this painting they are fully realized people displaying a range of emotions. Unlike the man in the painting whose emotions seem easy enough to read, the women’s expressions are more ambiguous, accurately depicting what Crowe undoubtedly would have witnessed even if he did not fully understand it. As Historian Walter Johnson has artfully explored, slaves in the marketplace learned how to alter their external appearance and attitudes in order to look after themselves. Two of the women in the painting look toward the doorway examining the men who enter as if assessing the advantages and disadvantages of one buyer over another. Slaves learned much about how to read buyers from the clothes they wore, the questions they asked, and the expressions on their faces. For most slaves in the market being for sale required a double consciousness, presenting an outward appearance that masked their inner self. It was rare, according to outside visitors’ accounts, to see unmasked emotion such as in the face and posture of the man in Crowe’s painting. Instead, viewers commonly reported seeing slaves who appeared happy such as the woman with the child in the painting. Although it would not have been apparent to most white observers, slaves were performing a part in order to exert what little control they had over the marketplace. Once they had assessed the potential buyers they could appear likely for one and sullen for another. As John Brown explained of his experience, “I had not yet found a purchaser because I did not care to speak up for myself so that my looks did not recommend me to buyers.” Almost as a bookend to the male figure on the right, the woman on the left with the multicolored headwrap, her back to the traders and looking directly at the viewer, appears completely dejected. Seated behind the stove which provides the only heat on the chilly March day, she appears to have had little interest in the proceedings. Her presence in the painting provides evidence that in addition to those slaves who are actively trying to shape their individual outcomes, there were slaves who had given up, who could barely go on. As John Brown remembered it, “A man or a woman may be well in every respect, yet their value be impaired by a sour look or a dull, vacant stare or a general dullness of demeanor.” Perhaps to try to disguise this woman’s inner anguish, the dealer has dressed her in a brightly colored headwrap and patterned dress. Even though neither Crowe nor the critics may have fully understood the source or the import of the expressions he delineated, the artist’s attention to representing a range of individuals and emotions particularly impressed the critic for the Art Journal. The critic thought Crowe had “successfully and discriminately represented the inward actuality and outward expression of phases of mental thought and human passion.” Inward actuality and human passion were not commonly encountered in the representation of people of African descent on the walls of the Royal Academy. The few black figures that had appeared there over the years were generally shown as servants in portraits or comic figures in large genre scenes. Crowe’s work was that much more unusual, therefore, for being a picture almost entirely about African Americans and depicting a moment of emotional tension. Unlike the theatricality typically expected of slave auctions, Slaves Waiting for Sale invited viewers to pause. Visually separated from the others, the woman on the far left looks directly at the viewer. By connecting with the viewer, she pulls us into the room as well. We are no longer merely watching a scene unfold before us on a stage, but we are invited in to consider the sights and sounds around us. The intimacy created by the collapsed space and the direct engagement calls upon us to consider more carefully the events unfolding before us. This emotional connection with the viewer made the critic for the Art Journal think that Crowe possessed a talent rare in British painters, as he described it, “The power of representing with facility and fullness, feelings which he comprehends with directness.” Both the critic and Crowe would have been fooling themselves if they thought they could fully comprehend the feelings of these individuals, but for a white, middle and upper-class audience in London at the moment of the outbreak of the Civil War, Crowe had painted a work that depicted, as one critic described, “the appalling guilt of that accursed system.” As Britian faced the decision whether to take sides with the North or the South or remain neutral, Crowe had created an image that spoke powerfully of the horrors of American slavery and the slave trade. He called into question the depiction of happy slaves that for the most part dominated the imagery of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the dozens of Uncle Tom’s shows in London. In so doing, he called upon British viewers to consider carefully the situation of slavery in America. As an image of the slave trade, it, of course, was far from the truth actually experienced by American slaves. Hanging on the exhibition walls of the Royal Academy in London it was, in many ways, a sanitized view of the trade, yet it was there at a vitally historical, important historical moment. Crowe’s painting was a view of American slavery that was far removed from much of the imagery about American slavery, especially Uncle Tom’s Cabin that had circulated for more than a decade. Slaves Waiting for Sale spoke to emotional anguish even as it was tense with ambiguity. Even today its carefully painted eyewitness pictorial details and its invitation to reflect on the interiority of the individuals depicted offer new insights into the world of the hundreds of thousands of slaves in America who found themselves in the jails and auction rooms of the American slave trade. Thank you.
[Clapping]
And I am, of course, happy to take questions. We have microphones at each aisleway. Since this is being webcast, if you have a question and are willing to get up and go to the microphone, that’s great because then the sound picks up for the webcast. If not, I’ll repeat your question. Yes, please do.
- (Audience Member) Could you tell us what else Crowe has painted?
- (Maurie McInnis) Well, he has a very long career, and there are a handful of slavery pictures, only two of which really survive, this picture and a painting called [After the Sale: Slaves] Going South which depicts the kind of next part of the story of the American slave trade, and that is what happened to slaves after they were sold at auction. So what he shows in that picture is a number of slaves being gathered up to be put on the railroad in Richmond to then be sent southward. Most of the slaves being sold in Richmond were ultimately transported many, many states away, particularly to the booming cotton states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. His other exhibited work about the slave trade showed a slave auction in Charleston. That painting is not currently known, but he published a Illustrated London News image of the same title that’s probably related to the painting. There are a few other exhibited works that clearly were about slavery. There was one about a barbershop in Richmond. It’s published in the Art Journals. We kind of know what it looked like, but, again, the painting is lost, and another one that’s called American Scene, that clearly had something to do with slavery, but, again, also lost. The rest of his work is pretty typical 19th century, mid-level genre painter in England, historical literary subjects from the 17th century English genre pictures. These are the bulk of his kind of politically charged works, and then he goes back to painting, what sells because these don’t sell. But they got him attention, and they really brought him into prominence, and he becomes an associate of the Royal Academy about ten years later.
- (Audience Member) Okay. Here? Okay. I came in a little late, so you may have covered this, but I have two questions. The first one is, how did you get interested in that particular painter, and the second question is, it’s curious to me that someone from England would be so interested in slavery in the United States when they had been so involved in the slave trade and were still slave holders in the West Indies and Latin America. So…
- (Maurie McInnis) So I’ll try to address all of those. So I became particularly interested in this painting because as a teacher of American art, and especially a teacher of American art who focuses particularly on the South and am particularly interested in issues related to race and slavery, I’ve taught this painting for years. There’s been very little scholarship done on it, and I had always been really quite perplexed by the ambiguity of the image and knowledgeable somewhat about the American slave trade, but not at the level that I have since become since I started doing research on it, but knew that there was a story there to be told, that it would tell us something about the American slave trade that we didn’t know because he’s one of the few artists ever to see it and then create a visual work from it. So we have lots of written descriptions of the trade, former slaves who had been involved in the trade, visitors, and mostly, in fact entirely, anti-slavery activists who visit auction rooms and write about it. But the fact that Crowe was there and saw real places I thought had to give us a window into this world we didn’t know, and so that’s how I became interested in working on the subject. I thought it really had something to tell us. The question about why the British are so interested is obviously a very important one. Anti-slavery activity really begins in Great Britain in the 1790s with an effort to try to end the international slave trade, the African slave trade, and the British ultimately end their participation in 1807, and America signs on and agrees to end their participation in 1808. Other countries continue well into the 1860s, so the international African trade continues for decades. The British end slavery in their colonies in 1838, so international anti-slavery activity moves from ending the slave trade, and then after they end the trade it turns towards the condition of slaves in the West Indies and ultimately to ending slavery in the West Indies which is officially completely ended by 1838. But those who had been involved in the anti-slavery world wanted then to extend their anti-slavery activity to the rest of the world, right? They believed very strongly that slavery was wrong, a moral evil, and needed to be extinguished, so some of the really important anti-slavery activists continue in Great Britian, and there’s enormous energy there and enormous activity between American anti-slavery activists and British anti-slavery activists. And so there’s a lot of talk and a lot of exchange of materials back and forth across the ocean. And as we know, the U.S. is not the last to end slavery. Both Cuba and Brazil go well beyond the United States, so slavery is a New World issue, not just a U.S. issue, but this is a very important part of that story.
- (Audience Member) Thank you for your presentation. Did he visit the slave auction houses in Alexandria, Virginia or here in Washington, D.C. while he was in America?
- (Maurie McInnis) He was in Washington [D.C.], but nothing from what he writes indicates that he visited the slave auction rooms in Alexandria. Many of you, if you’re from D.C., probably know that one of the largest and really most important early slave traders had rooms in what Alexandria was at the time still part of the District of Columbia, and at least one building of the larger slave trading compound survives on Duke Street, and if you haven’t been there it’s very much worth a trip. They have a small museum in the basement of that building talking about the traders who were resident there over several decades. So, no, I don’t think…his time in Washington was very tight, and I don’t think he got to those slave rooms. He did in Richmond and Charleston.
- (Audience Member) Yeah. The slave auction house was here on, I think, 4th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. It’s since been torn down, yeah.
- (Maurie McInnis) That’s right. Exactly. There were a number of slave trading places in D.C., in the District, that was obviously one of the major elements of the legislation that became known as what we call the Compromise of 1850, and that was to stop the slave trade in the District of Columbia, but by then Alexandria was now part of Virginia, and it continued there not very far away.
- (Audience Member) Hi. I really enjoyed this history that you were able to bring to the fore, and one of the things that I found particularly interesting was this idea of aestheticizing the slave in order to make the slave a commodity, and so I couldn’t help connecting that to artworks as commodities. So my question is whether you can speak more to that and whether the artist Crowe was conscious of his own aestheticization of the slave trade in order to make pictures. I mean, was his painting sold? Was slavery as an image a commodity in England or elsewhere?
- (Maurie McInnis) Great questions, and I spent a lot more time in the book talking about this process of turning the bodies into commodities, and it’s really quite shocking and painful to really pay attention to what a sort of systematized process it was of bringing slaves into the jails and then they’re undergoing a process of transformation to prepare them for sale, everything from feeding them well in order to fatten them up, to putting oil on the body to make it look right, to using wax to cover scars, to plucking gray hair or dying hair, and then dressing for sale. And for many of the women this goes even a step further for the sale of women because there’s a whole trade in women that were known as “fancy girls” who were being sold for sexual commodification. For them they were often dressed in very, very fancy dresses and sometimes given gold earrings. There’s a whole process of transforming bodies, which is really very painful to think about. The question of whether Crowe is that self-aware is a great question and one that I have no way of answering. Nothing that he writes certainly gives me the sense that he has that level of sensitivity and awareness, and one doubts that a kind of, you know, middleclass white artist in Victorian London does. He does not sell any of…well, we don’t know that he manages to sell any of these pictures in the 1860s, but we also don’t know what happened to these pictures between their exhibition and their reemerging in the Modern Art market in the middle of the 20th century. So they kind of go underground. They’re clearly in private collections, but if they’re selling, it’s not quite obvious. There’s an article written about them in the Art Journal in 1864, and at least at that point they appear all unsold because the critic kind of comments on the fact that most of the British audience doesn’t want to look at the subject matter. And yet, I think he was very astute at knowing that he would get attention for painting this because there was so much attention to it. So what sells and what is of interest to critics are not always the same thing.
- (Audience Member) There is that expression, “sold down the river,” and we know with Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson one of his slaves who was a chronic runaway, and he sold him down the river. And so then there was that and the life expectancy that if you were sold down the river it was much lower. So you alluded to these slaves perhaps landing up in Mississippi or whatever, so do you know, was that place chosen for that reason, or, give us a little history about that.
- (Maurie McInnis) So Richmond is the largest, by the 1850s, the largest slave trading center in the Upper South, meaning kind of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and the vast majority of those slaves are to populate the cotton South. So when the international slave trade closes in 1808, there really aren’t the cotton-producing states, right? Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, these places the cotton boom hasn’t taken off, and there are really no slaves there. Then cotton hits, and they need slaves. Where are they coming from? They’re coming from the Upper South. And so a very sophisticated business enterprise emerges starting in the 1820s with the traders who are in Alexandria where they hire a bunch of traders to be out in the different counties, and they would go around, visit planters, knock on the door and say, “Do you have anybody you can sell?” And almost every single one of those sales resulted at that moment in the breakup of slave family, right, because what they were selling off were the individual one here, the people between 15 and 30 who were either going to be excellent in the field or excellent at producing children. So slave families are broken up at that moment. They’re brought into trading centers, whatever’s closest, Baltimore, Alexandria, and by the 1850s Richmond is the biggest. Most of the people who are buying in the trade in those cities are traders who then take them over land down South to a variety of different places. It begins in the earlier decades where they’re being marched in coffles over land, a journey that took many, many weeks. They would walk kind of 25 to 30 miles a day, the men shackled together, the women usually trailing behind, a trader at the front, a trader at the back, both with guns. In a performative sort of way they’d have somebody playing the fiddle and this sort of, you know, expectation that slaves appear happy. By the time the railroads became extensive most traders were using the railroad network, and then when you sit down with the New Orleans newspapers, which is the largest market in the Lower South…Natchez is also a large one, but New Orleans is by far the largest, you see newspaper advertisements that say, “Just arrived from Virginia and Maryland a new lot of slaves.” And in Hector Davis’ account books, which are the most extensive account books that survive, and they’re at the Chicago History Museum, two of his account books survive and thousands and thousands and thousands of names recorded of people sold, to whom they are sold, and many of the traders listed there are also traders we find working in New Orleans. So the people would come to Richmond, buy a hundred slaves or so, put them on the railroad, take them to New Orleans, and resell them there. So it’s a very extensive commercial network that in many ways is part of what ties the political fates of the Upper South with the Lower South and why when you finally get to the question of succession eventually the Upper South which had been much slower to succeed comes and stays with because there is an economic tie that’s undeniable.
- (Audience Member) Thank you.
- (Audience Member) Two things. Is there any rainbow here, that is, were the women able to keep the clothes or any gifts?
[Laughter]
- (Audience Member) [laughter] And what’s the symbol or the hourglass on the man in the back?
- (Maurie McInnis) Oh, that’s just the Microsoft…
[Laughter]
- (Audience Member) Oh.
- (Maurie McInnis) Okay. That’s all that is. We don’t really know for sure. There are certainly instances where people mention they’re able to keep the set of clothes, and probably in most instances they did. They certainly are reported quite often in the coffles as either being well dressed, or we know sometimes they were given new sets of clothes for the trip and then expected to change once they got to New Orleans. So that’s a tougher one to know for sure.
- (Audience Member) Thank you. Thank you for your work.
- (Audience Member) My question is, if someone has not read your book or heard your eloquent presentation today and just saw the painting, what would suggest to them that this visualized the horrible institution of slavery and was to make an anti-slavery statement?
- (Maurie McInnis) Right. I think it’s the problem with this picture, isn’t it, and why it needs the kind of really careful thinking about the choices made because it doesn’t in any way capture that horror that we all feel when thinking about the American slave trade. And yet, once you begin to understand the system and the process and the way that their fine appearance actually makes it more horrible, right, because it’s about the commodification of them as not individuals and not people, but as products to be sold. And when you look at the expressions and you understand the way that slaves used that to try to exert what control they could over their circumstances, you understand the slave trade in a new way. But I think for the challenge for us is to understand the visual language of what’s possible to be represented in the 19th century, and there’s no doubt that this is a picture by a white artist of something he saw, but could not fully understand. But we don’t have a corollary, right? We don’t have a picture created by an African American who went through this experience and who, therefore, chose and was able to depict it. So that’s why it needs that very careful explication in order to understand it.
- (Audience Member) I’d like to thank Dr. McInnis for our talk today, and I’m sure she’ll be able to entertain questions out in the reception which will take place in the lobby just outside the auditorium, so please thank her again for the talk, and please join us for the reception.
[Clapping]
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