Prints depicting the caning of Charles Sumner quickly emerged.25 One notable image was John L. Magee’s 1856 lithograph Southern Chivalry—Argument versus Club’s [sic].
The caricature portrays Brooks savagely beating the defenseless Sumner as he lays bloodied on the floor holding a pen and a document against slavery’s expansion in Kansas. In the background, Congressman Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina brandishes a cane to hold back other members of Congress who might come to Sumner’s aid, yet most smile in amusement. Magee—a Philadelphia-based engraver and lithographer—projects an antislavery message. His goals were akin to those of others who had visualized an abolitionist stance: persuade the public to rally against the institution of slavery. This gentle form of persuasion—as visually striking as it was—would fall short in the United States, most notably in the South. The issue of slavery would be decided through war.
4
Abolitionism as Autonomy, Activism, and Entertainment
GRAPHIC AGITATION WAS NOT the only visual method used by abolitionists to deliver an antislavery message. One of the more obscure media was the moving panorama, a precursor to the motion picture that employed paintings on canvas rather than negatives. Each image of the “moving picture” was painted, then the sequence was spliced together, installed on large spools, and mounted behind a cut-out stage that hid the mechanics of the operation. The audience would watch a series of continuous images—sometimes ten feet in height and five hundred to eight hundred feet in length—scroll past, accompanied by music and narration.
Illustration of Banvard’s Moving Panorama Machinery (Scientific American, volume 4, issue 13, December 16, 1848; University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries)
One of the most unique performers to harness this medium was Henry “Box” Brown. Brown himself had quite a story to tell. He was born into slavery and escaped by an ingenious method. On March 29, 1849, he mailed himself to freedom. Devastated by his forced separation from his wife and children, who had been sold to a plantation in North Carolina in 1848, Brown fled slavery by enclosing himself within a small wooden box, three feet long by two feet wide, and shipping himself by rail from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia. He arrived twenty-seven hours later at the doorstep of an abolitionist sympathizer.
Brown’s arrival and “resurrection” from the box made him a celebrated figure among abolitionists, who championed his escape as further proof of the extreme measures that slaves would take for their freedom. His fame was even further heightened when his book, The Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself. With Remarks Upon the Remedy for Slavery, was released in 1849. However, Charles B. Stearns, the ghostwriter who penned the illiterate Brown’s story, took liberties with the text and employed it as a vehicle to emphasize his own convictions on how to end slavery. Stearns’s patronizing text mirrored the often unequal power dynamics that fugitive slaves faced when they collaborated with white abolitionists who felt entitled to direct the movement.
Brown faced a further predicament: his appearances at abolitionist events served the movement’s greater agenda, yet he was dependent on others for the invitations to these events and beholden to the formats they followed. Brown likely realized that he could not financially survive off the small donations given to him by abolitionists, so he created other income sources. He sold copies of his book and had a lithograph, The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia (which is assumed to be the work of Samuel W. Rowse), produced.
Unidentified artist, assumed to be Samuel W. Rowse, The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, 1850 (LC-USZC4-4659, Library of Congress)
The print depicted Brown’s celebrated arrival in Philadelphia and, much like Stearns’s version of Brown’s story, blurred fact with fiction. The image showed Brown when he first arose from the box, yet failed to correctly identify the people who were in the room at the time. Instead, three stand-ins are added to the scene, the most notable being Frederick Douglass, who replaces abolitionist William Still.1 The addition of Douglass was an odd choice, for he was outspoken in his belief that abolitionists and fugitive slaves should never reveal to the public their means of escape. In his own narrative, Douglass had concealed his escape method, and in 1855 he wrote, “Had not Henry Box Brown and his friends attracted slaveholding attention to the manner of his escape, we might have had a thousand Box Browns per annum.”2
Other abolitionists disagreed and felt that publicizing Brown’s remarkable escape would stir public resentment against slavery more than keeping the story quiet would. More so, Brown felt it imperative to broadcast his method of escape because it was his main source of income. Regardless of the debates within the abolitionist community, Brown was determined to forge his own path on his own terms.
The lithograph print was in fact part of Brown’s larger plan to raise funds to create a mammoth antislavery panorama that would both help the abolitionist cause and earn him a living. In 1849, he partnered with James C.A. Smith, a free African American who had aided him with his escape from Richmond, to go into business touring an antislavery production. The two men hired Boston-based painter Josiah Wolcott to lead a team of artists to create the panorama to their specifications, and on April 11, 1850, the six hundred-foot-long panorama Mirror of Slavery opened at Washington Hall in Boston.
Based in part on an obscure fictional poem, “The Nubian Slave,” the panorama contained forty-nine scenes that took the viewer on a journey from African life before capture to the Atlantic slave trade and daily life enslaved in the South to escape and a hopeful vision of universal emancipation. Brown included two scenes from his own life that illustrated his escape from slavery. He also included a scene of Henry Bibb’s escape, as well as a scene celebrating the abolition of slavery within the British Empire. The paintings themselves were eight to ten feet tall. Brown would narrate the panorama, and both he and Smith would sing songs. The evening often ended with Brown answering questions from the audience.
Reviews from the show’s first run were positive and hailed the panorama as an effective piece of antislavery propaganda. The Boston Daily Evening Traveler wrote, “We wish all the slaveholders would go and view their system on canvas,” and the Worchester Massachusetts Spy added, “No one can see it without getting new views and more vivid conceptions of the practical working of the system than he had before.”3 The latter review also commended Brown for his ability to “carry out so ingenious a mode of providing for the public amusement at the same time that it brings home to the people a representation so faithful, of the great evil, to which most of them are, directly or indirectly, accessory.”4
The Spy review adequately understood the show as both activism and entertainment. Brown and Smith were gifted performers, and they tailored the show to specific audiences, improvising and improving their craft as they toured Mirror of Slavery throughout New England by train and wagon.
Brown and Smith’s Mirror of Slavery tour had been going less than six months when it came to an abrupt halt after the Senate passed the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850. This law was designed to ease slaveholders’ ability to recapture slaves in the North. It replaced the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which gave state officials the option (taken by few) to enforce the law. The new bill provided no such option. It forfeited the rights of African Americans to a jury trial and allowed a slave catcher to claim ownership simply by means of an affidavit, whereas the person accused had to produce paperwork documenting his/her freedom. It also called for Northerners to play an active role in the capture of fugitive slaves, turning ordinary citizens into slave catchers. Abolitionists immediately denounced the law, vowing instead to protect fugitives from slave hunters who were prowling the North.
The effects of the law were felt immediately. Less than a week after the bill’s passage, Brown barely escaped being kidnapped by slave catchers in Providence, Rhode Island. Realizing that it was no longer safe to be a fugitiv
e in the United States, Brown and Smith fled to England and arrived in Liverpool on November 1, 1850. Among the few possessions they brought with them was the panorama, and by November 12, less than two weeks after their arrival, the two were performing before their first British audience and making plans to tour the panorama throughout the British Isles with the help of abolitionist contacts.
Favorable press helped their cause. The Liverpool Mercury wrote, “We would urge our readers to visit this panorama; and if any of them have thought lightly of the injustice done by America to three millions and a half of our fellow-creatures, we feel assured they will leave the exhibition in another frame of mind.”5
Organizing a tour and competing against other traveling shows was not an easy task. Brown and Smith’s income depended upon ticket sales, and they had to constantly update their show, adapt it to changing tastes, and hope that positive reviews continued.6 Both men quickly realized that audiences were drawn to the songs, so they changed their promotional advertisements to read “Mr. Henry Box Brown, The Fugitive Slave, and Mr. James Boxer Smith, Who Sing Plantation Melodies, Serenades, Duets, and Anti-Slavery Songs”7 Thus their production was aimed at their market, and they made full use of both the power of their story and antislavery sentiments in the UK. In essence, they were selling Brown’s escape and abolitionism, retold numerous times and packaged as entertainment.
Brown could also play the sympathy card. A reviewer in the Liverpool Mercury noted that proceeds from the show would help Brown purchase his wife and three children, who were still held in slavery, for the fee of $500 each.8 This cast the performance and its intentions in a different light. Jeffrey Ruggles explains:
By describing the exhibition as a means to rescue Brown’s children, the Liverpool letter cast Mirror of Slavery as a charitable rather than as a commercial enterprise. With local antislavery activists thus assured that their assistance served a higher purpose, Brown would more readily gain their help.9
The problem was that the report in the Liverpool Mercury was disingenuous, for there is little evidence that Brown had ever sought to purchase his family. If anything, he seemed intent on forgetting his past family life, especially once he’d arrived in England. His obsessive rehashing of his personal narrative began at the moment of his escape and continued throughout his life. Perhaps revisiting the memory of his family being sold away was too painful, or maybe he simply did not want to give credence to the slave system by offering payment.
Brown eventually married an Englishwoman, had a daughter, and did not return to the United States until 1875, a decade after slavery had ended. No evidence exists that he ever attempted to reconnect with his prior family. Did the reporter simply make up the story of Brown’s intentions to purchase his family out of slavery? Did Brown mention it in passing to gain traction for his tour? Any answer would be speculative.10
What remains clear is that Brown’s relationship with Smith and his good standing within the abolitionist community began to unravel during his first year in England. Brown haggled with Smith over money, broke the partnership, and took sole ownership of the production, leaving Smith flustered, hurt, and with little income to show for his work. Meanwhile, abolitionists complained bitterly about his excessive showboating.
Brown perhaps fulfilled his critics’ accusations by reenacting his famous escape. On May 22, 1851, Brown had himself placed inside the original box he used to escape. Next, Brown was loaded onto a three-hour train from Bradford to Leeds. At Leeds, the box was then placed onto a wagon and paraded through the streets, accompanied by a marching band. Finally, Brown emerged from the box onstage before an audience that had gathered to watch the Mirror of Slavery panorama. In doing so, Brown held nothing back in celebrating his freedom as both an escaped slave and an artist.
These theatrics were only the start of Brown’s transformation as a showman and, nearly two years after his initial escape, the abolitionist community seemed ready to completely distance themselves from him. Some of the harshest criticism came from William Wells Brown. The African American abolitionist and author (who also was in England at the time) wrote to the Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips in 1852:
Brown is a very foolish fellow, to say the least. I saw him some time since, and he had a gold ring on nearly every finger on each hand, and more gold and brass round his neck than would take to hang the biggest Alderman in London. And as to ruffles about the shirts, he had enough to supply any old maid with cap stuff, for half a century. He had on a green dress coat and white hat, and his whole appearance was that of a well dressed monkey. . . . Poor fellow, he is indeed to be pitied.11
Criticism aside, “Box” Brown elected to move even further into the realm of popular entertainment, a direction he may have taken with or without abolitionist support. He took on the role of magician and mesmerizer, experimenting with human magnetism and electrobiology. Brown even produced a moving panorama in late 1858, early 1859, that addressed India’s mutiny against the British occupation, but did so from the position of supporting Britain’s right to colonial rule. By doing so, Brown confused his political message and contradicted the call for freedom in his first panorama. He revealed himself as an opportunist and chameleon who would adapt his message to the whims of the current political climate.
Brown made it easy for people to dismiss his work. At the same time, Brown was in survival mode, as he had been his entire life. He was viewed as abandoning the abolitionist movement, but one wonders whether the movement would have eventually abandoned him, even if he had stuck to a more conventional script. This is impossible to gauge, but Box Brown’s desire to create opportunities on his own terms was not unlike what motivated Frederick Douglass to break from William Lloyd Garrison. Nor was it a far cry from Martin Delany’s call that “every people should be the originators of their own designs, the projector of their own schemes, and creators of the events that lead to their destiny.”12 Indeed, Brown was like the multitude of artists who seek their own path—but are instead celebrated for their sense of individuality. Brown gained his independence from both slavery and the abolitionist movement, and in the process raised numerous questions relevant to his time and ours. How does one’s own activism become compromised or enhanced when it breaks from the mainstream direction of a movement? How does one’s activism change when it becomes a commercial enterprise and/or the source of one’s income?
The fact that Brown continuously toured Mirror of Slavery throughout the British Isles for decades—retelling his escape story more than two thousand times—makes it apparent that the public responded favorably to his work.13 His path allows us to consider the importance of those who veer away from the standard approaches and boundaries that often define social activism. Brown’s antislavery message reached tens of thousands of people through an accessible medium that was rooted in popular culture. Ruggles concludes:
There was no other antislavery advocate quite like him, with his combination of personal experience of slavery and dramatic escape, a pointed and graphic antislavery exhibition, and longevity on the show circuit. Surely Brown was the only abolitionist to lead a parade through a town dressed as an African prince and brandishing a huge sword. Brown the showman no doubt reached audiences not addressed by more proper lecturers. Unsanctioned by any antislavery organization, Henry Box Brown continued to act in the campaign against slavery throughout the 1850s.14
5
The Battleground over Public Memory
A WAR MEMORIAL MIGHT be viewed as a peculiar symbol of social justice, but the Shaw Memorial in Boston is precisely that. The Shaw Memorial honors the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, a regiment of African American soldiers who had to fight to be allowed to join the Union armies during the Civil War. The memorial, unveiled in 1897, sits across from the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Street and features Col. Robert Gould Shaw on horseback with twenty-three black soldiers from his regiment marching beside him.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Shaw Memorial, 1884–1897,
Boston Commons (LC-D4-90157, Library of Congress)
The monument symbolizes how black soldiers helped shift the objective of the Civil War from preserving the Union to ending slavery by force. For more than a century, the Shaw Memorial carried this message through decades of white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, and the suppression of the historical memory of the pivotal role of African American soldiers in the war.1 The Shaw Memorial was unveiled two decades after the collapse of Reconstruction, one year after the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, and during the height of Confederate Lost Cause propaganda. It was one of thousands of soldier monuments built after the war, nearly all of which whitewashed the role of black soldiers and ignored the issue of slavery. At stake was control over public memory and the meaning of the Civil War. Cast in bronze, the Shaw Memorial asserted a powerful countermessage. It asserted that the root cause of the war was slavery and the outcome of the conflict was its abolition. It stood as a symbol of racial justice and reasserted an emancipation narrative into the landscape and the contested terrain of public memory.
Recruiting Black Soldiers
From the outset of the Civil War, the abolitionist community had fought to define the meaning of the Civil War during and after the conflict. On March 2, 1863, Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave, author, renowned orator, and abolitionist, published a broadside “Men of Color, to Arms!” that began with the following appeal:
When first the Rebel cannon shattered the walls of Sumter and drove away its starving garrison, I predicted that the war then and there inaugurated would not be fought out entirely by white men. Every month’s experience during these two dreary years has confirmed that opinion. A war undertaken and brazenly carried on for the perpetual enslavement of colored men, calls logically and loudly upon colored men to help suppress it.2
A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Page 6