Picture Freedom

Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century

Jasmine Nichole Cobb

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479890415
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the decades leading up to the end of U.S. slavery,many free Blacks sat for daguerreotypes decorated in fine garments to document their self-possession. People pictured in these early photographs used portraiture to seize control over representation of the free Black body and reimagine Black visuality divorced from the cultural logics of slavery. In Picture Freedom, Jasmine Nichole Cobb analyzes the ways in which the circulation of various images prepared free Blacks and free Whites for the emancipation of formerly unfree people of African descent. She traces the emergence of Black freedom as both an idea and as an image during the early nineteenth century. Through an analysis of popular culture of the period—including amateur portraiture, racial caricatures, joke books, antislavery newspapers, abolitionist materials, runaway advertisements, ladies’ magazines, and scrapbooks, as well as scenic wallpaper—Cobb explores the earliest illustrations of free Blacks and reveals the complicated route through visual culture toward a vision of African American citizenship. Picture Freedom reveals how these depictions contributed to public understandings of nationhood, among both domestic eyes and the larger Atlantic world.

1. “A Peculiarly ‘Ocular’ Institution”

An amorphous Atlantic took shape around the enslavement of African peoples. Black bondage fortified a perimeter around the Atlantic world and constituted a burgeoning U.S. identity, as both New England and the U.S. South “flourished under slavery.”1 The execution and the abolition of slavery in the United States functioned to constitute the early republic as part of the Atlantic. As the Atlantic world expanded, playing host to a sprawling dispersal, “changes across [its] time, space, and jurisdiction” appear at the intimate level of a single household up through the remote relations of metropole and colony.2 Visual culture provided measures for the assessment of fitness or belonging, as both pictures and practices represent sites of confrontation among unfree African descendants and Whites who held them in captivity.

Fugitive Freedom in the Atlantic

Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman sat for her portrait (figure 1.1) as a free woman in 1811.3 This amateur painting by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick pictures Freeman well dressed in Federalist-period clothing. In addition to her blue dress, Freeman dons a white fichu to cover her cleavage and a white bonnet to cover her head. Her clothing choices depict Freeman as a respectable free woman in possession of her own body, while the adornment of her gold necklace adds a flourish of conspicuousness to the image (figure 1.2). Freeman’s portrait reflected her “regal love of the solid, & the splendid wear” of fine “chintzes and silks.”4 Although her body sits askew from the artist, Freeman’s side-eye stare meets the viewer of her portrait. This image, in a gilded frame, pictures a woman who achieved emancipation by confrontation and by a clear sense of entitlement to the founding values that defined the colonial United States in the context of an evolving Atlantic world. Freeman’s decision to sit for a portrait represents a conscious invocation of the visual on her part, a moment in which she applied her sense of self-possession to the terms of looking and being seen that, in part, defined chattel slavery.

Figure 1.1. Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, 1811. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)

Freeman’s other very poignant disrespect to slavery’s structure of the visual is central to the story of her formal pursuit of freedom. Catherine Maria Sedgwick drafted a lengthy account of Freeman’s life as a free and paid servant to the Sedgwick family, which the English literary magazine Bentley’s Miscellany published in 1853.5 According to Sedgwick, “action was the law” of Freeman’s “nature,” and thus, for her, “servitude was intolerable.”6 Sedgwick’s account of Freeman’s life begins with an account of Freeman’s servitude under her abusive former violent mistress, Ms. Ashley. One day, when “making the patrole of her kitchen” [sic], “Madame Ashley” observed that Freeman’s sister Lizzy, “a sickly timid creature,” had reserved scraps of dough from a “wheaten cake” she had baked for the Ashley family in order to make her own. Madame Ashley, enraged, labeled Lizzy a “thief” before she “siezed [sic] a large iron shovel red hot from cleaning the oven, & raised it over the terrified girl.” However, before the shovel could land on Lizzy, Freeman “interposed” her body, taking the blow instead. Ashley cut Freeman to the bone with the hot shovel, leaving her with “a frightful scar” for the rest of her life. However, in a recurring act of resistance, Freeman regularly brandished the scar to visitors of the Ashley home. When Freeman reflected on the incident, she explained that although she had “a bad arm all winter,” she made sure that “Madam had the worst of it.” Freeman refused to cover the scar, and when visitors asked Freeman what happened, she replied, “ask Misses.” Freeman displayed her wounded body to undermine Ashley’s womanhood, purposefully using her insurrectionary exhibition to pose the question, “Which was the slave, & which the real mistress?” Freeman’s question queried domesticity as a White woman’s gender norm as well as a privilege determined by the space of the home. The sympathy Freeman intentionally invoked from visitors when exposing her scar potentially dislodged Ashley’s designation as “mistress” of the house, even if briefly. Freeman used the scar to assert her own domesticity and to punish Mistress Ashley. Where the home served as the arena for White women to display domesticity, Freeman’s presentation took up that space as a site of refutation and reassertion. She ignored slavery’s customary practice of denying Black pain and White culpability, she undermined predeterminations of domesticity through the way in which she maneuvered within the Ashley home, offering her body as evidence of her owner’s malfeasance.

Figure 1.2. A bracelet of gold beads made from Freeman’s necklace. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)

Freeman confronted the racial visual order of slavery, both through the portrait and through the ability to conjure sympathy via the display of her wound. Freeman refuted the daily practice of Black women’s subjugation within the intimate confines of the home and at the hands of White women through recourse to the visual. Social interaction in the context of slavery required that unfree Black women like Lizzy and Freeman live and work as invisible helpmates who made life easier for White women like Ashley. Freeman challenged these conventions by drawing attention to White crimes and Black women’s corporeal needs. In this context, Freeman’s acts functioned as cultural transgressions. Freeman’s offering of a free Black woman for portrait and her confrontation with Mistress Ashley represent measures that destabilized slavery’s architecture of visual domination. In the intimate proximity of the master’s home, Freeman used her body in defense of her sister, Lizzie. She then revealed her body to shame Mistress Ashley in front of others, and finally, she covered her body but focused her eyes for the sake of creating a picture. In all of these instances, Freeman defied a visual terrain steeped in the suppression of Black women’s self-possession and unaccustomed to Black women’s self-appointed pictures.

My aim in this book is to discuss the ways in which picturing freedom intervened in slavery’s institutionalized visual culture and to reveal exhibitions of freedom as disruptive to this visual landscape. Although the picturing element of this scenario involves some actual illustrations, like Freeman’s portrait, we can also think of the flickering glance that might have accompanied the display of her wound as another tool that Freeman used to force Ashley to picture freedom. Each of these appeals to the visual divulges the way in which Black people’s demonstrations of freedom in the context of slavery were problematic. In this chapter, I describe the way in which the organization and maintenance of chattel slavery intertwined the racial and the visual. I argue that this intricate formulation made the appearance of freedom a difficult thing to discern in its earliest occurrences. Drawing on the language of the “peculiar institution,” I describe slavery as a “peculiarly ocular institution” that utilized an unstable visual logic of race to enslave persons of African descent and to protect Whites from the threat of the gaze. The term “peculiar institution,” coined by South Carolina senator John Calhoun in the nineteenth century, describes slavery as oddly intransient given its conceptual necessity to White prosperity.7 Referring to slavery as “the peculiar institution” helped to diminish the unpleasant realities of slavery and allowed its advocates to argue for the perpetuation of bondage while removing the human connotation associated with the term. Offering a theory of the “peculiarly ‘ocular’ institution,” I mean to underscore slavery’s visual culture as an impediment to recognizing freedom. Moreover, I offer this notion to contextualize Black visuality as shaped by and resistant to slavery’s visual culture. This theory of the peculiarly ocular nature of slavery frames the reception of freedom and the new tactics of spectatorship that I describe throughout this book.

The mediation of slavery was also central to the institutionalization of this peculiar visual culture as early print media helped to circulate a set of racio-visual codes to readers and viewers throughout the Atlantic world. Much of the print material involved in the transatlantic transport of Africans for enslavement, from auction advertisements to runaway notices, emphasized physical traits, sometimes with the help of illustrations, and targeted White viewers. I offer an analysis of these items below to explain how media conjured a racio-visual logic in support of slavery. Thinking through visual culture as a “generative” site for the deployment of slaving ideologies, I describe the runaway and the mediation of the runaway as distinct, but interrelated, examples of slavery’s visual assumptions.8 Whereas media supporting slavery helped proliferate the visual construction of race, the runaway forcibly destabilized these presumptions.

Media in support of slavery points to the runaway as a distinctive problem, but I collect these reclamations of freedom under the rubric of fugitivity. While slavery alone was enough to initiate a perpetual state of “not belonging” for people of African descent, the fugitive conditions of homelessness and obscurity also correspond to exhibitions of freedom in the context of slavery. Whites often curiously regarded demonstrations of freedom among Black people in the context of slavery, receiving such displays as out of place. Even someone like Freeman might have been somewhat of a mystery to Whites, both in her ability to manipulate the visual terms of slavery in the Ashley house as well as in her demonstration of freedom through portraiture. Yet, the confounding nature of Black freedom in the context of slavery did not result from the “fugitive vision” of exceptional Black people who transformed from unfree to free cultural producers, but from the way in which slavery intertwined race and visuality.9 I argue that displays of Black freedom took up the questions of legibility and home that defined fugitivity and haunted the transatlantic. The idea and the image of the Black fugitive symbolized insurgence against both a specific master who properly “owned” the runaway, and against the state, which depended upon Black people’s compliance with slavery as the rule of law. Blacks who ran away were fugitives from justice but also fugitives from an evolving conception of the Atlantic world as home. While slavery constructed people of African descent as legible and comprehensible, freedom and fugitive freedom took up illegibility as permanent conditions that countered the parlor’s reliance on slavery.

Even the juridical demand for freedom took up the issue of fugitivity in the face of the transatlantic slave trade. Freeman’s reclamation of liberty explicitly proposed questions about home and belonging in a transatlantic landscape. Freeman managed both local and large-scale notions of domesticity in the process of resisting slavery. She was one of the first people of African descent to sue for liberation in the United States, filing one of the earliest “freedom suits” in the state of Massachusetts in 1781.10 In Sedgwick’s narrative of Freeman’s life, she reports on Freeman’s experience of hearing a public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Sheffield, Massachusetts, from which Freeman discerned that U.S. Americans’ right to liberty from England translated to her right to freedom from Whites and from slavery. On hearing “that paper read yesterday that says ‘all men are born equal—&, that every man has a right to freedom,’” Freeman asked, “‘wont the law give me my freedom?’”11 Freeman’s idea that the Declaration of Independence applied to her is indicative of her notion of a transatlantic belonging as a precedent to U.S. national identity. Her pursuit of emancipation was not yet about her right to U.S. citizenship, but about her right to the freedom to which people in the colonial United States were entitled in the Atlantic world.

My interest is about how the fugitive element of exhibitions of freedom in the context of slavery called attention to the ways in which people of African descent confronted the visual conditions of slavery by acting outside its institutional presets of interracial interactions. Spectacular exhibitions of freedom problematized and abraded the visual culture of slavery. Fugitive free Blacks reveal that the enslaved might outwardly appear resigned even while calculating escape. Fugitive free people of African descent masterfully understood assumptions about race, vision, and visuality, and then used this knowledge to steal themselves and upend the foundational assumptions of slavery’s visual culture. The ascertainment of freedom by way of fugitivity suggested a calculated incongruence between the outward appearance of the Black body and the internal perceptions of the unfree person. Freeman’s commitment to her sister may have made running away a less likely choice for her—a notion consistent with the fact that most runaways were men.12 Nonetheless, her method of achieving liberty still conjured questions of domestic belonging and an opaque display of freedom meant to torment her abuser. My description of slavery’s peculiar visual culture is meant to situate early exhibitions of freedom within a fraught and domineering context for reception. This chapter explains the visual culture of slavery as one undergirded by an unreliable praxis that depended on “visible” signifiers of race to conflate seeing and subjectivity, to racialize the eye/I. Whereas the practices of transatlantic slavery institutionalized a visual construction of race and racial ways of seeing, late-eighteenth-century assertions of Black freedom offered interruption.

A Peculiar Ocularity

Slavery functioned as a peculiarly “ocular” institution. Its daily execution thrived in a racio-visual economy that determined ways of seeing and ways of being seen according to racial difference. In trying to imagine the visual culture of slavery, one might most immediately consider the routine monitoring of bondspersons’ behavior on plantations since this was central to slavery’s policing tactics. C. Riley Snorton asserts that “plantation governance schemes” and the role of the overseer, in particular, were chief among slavery’s practices of visual domination.13 Additionally, the whole process of chattel slavery relied heavily upon visual culture wherein the idea of the eye was a matter of racialization. Indeed, to possess both the eye and an “I” was a matter of raciality in the context of slavery. The divisions of social power into White or Black also parsed the faculty of sight into discrete racial categories. More specifically, slavery organized an omniscient White eye/I to police and manage Black bodies, constructing sight as a racially distinct experience, and as the sovereign domain of Whiteness. Summarily, slavery parsed visibility along racial lines as well, distinguishing and racializing people of African descent from Whites through the presumption of an innate visibility. Whereas practices of enslavement relied on the eye within social encounters, the visual culture of slavery constructed race and racialized the act of seeing.

But slavery’s peculiar ocularity was more than the mere visual habits that made slavery possible. By slavery’s peculiar ocularity, I mean the very specific visual idiosyncrasies and contradictions utilized within the visual logics of slavery that were at once contrary and commonplace in early U.S. life. These visual logics of racial decorum were irrational, unreliable, and often collided with one another, even as they were crucial to enslavement philosophies. For example, while Whites exercised visual authority over Blacks, there were also numerous instances of Black overseers or “drivers”; these Black overseers could be as cruel or more benign than their White counterparts, but their race meant that their authority was limited by law. Black slave drivers existed somewhere between official White overseers and enslaved Blacks in this peculiar visual culture.14 To think of slavery as a peculiarly ocular institution is to think of how systemic bondage fetishized a connection between vision and race in w...