Visual Legacies of Slavery and Emancipation

The history and memory of slavery and emancipation endured in the bodies and lived experiences of both former slaves and the generations of black Americans born in slavery’s wake. The extent and meanings of black people’s freedom, in their daily lives and on the national stage, took shape unevenly, haltingly, and often incompletely.

—Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer

The 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation provides an occasion to reflect on the ways visual artists have responded to and envisioned the impact of that life-changing declaration on the experience of slavery and the meaning of freedom. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation declared, “All persons held as slaves are, and henceforward shall be free.” But what did it mean to be free? How would freedom take shape? The careful wording and conditions of the Emancipation Proclamation and its timing in relationship to the Civil War is worth noting if we consider how a range of period and contemporary artworks selected for the exhibition We Hold These Truths … chronicle and reflect on its significance over the years.¹ For, although the Emancipation Proclamation gave slaves who sought refuge behind Union lines a legal claim to freedom, the freedom it promised required the Union to win the war. Absent from the proclamation were any instructions or provisions on how formerly enslaved people could make their way into a free world. Questions remained about how newly freed slaves would support themselves or build economic self-sufficiency. How might families torn apart by slavery become reunited with loved ones or imagine new communities of their own? When would formerly enslaved people enjoy the full rights of citizenship or at least witness a shift in local and national power relations, so that they might participate in the political system? In We Hold These Truths … both the promise and lack of clarity surrounding these issues inspired artists of the day and today to question and consider—to enter into a conversation about the meaning of slavery and emancipation. These conversations, presented as a sort of visual call and response, are reflected in the pairings of works from the past and present and related works on similar themes. A conversation that probes how we make sense of the legacy of emancipation in historic documents and the artistic imagination is one worth having on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Cause for Celebration

Some of the earliest artistic responses to the Emancipation Proclamation were celebratory, if not cautiously optimistic about the future. Some chronicled the unfolding meaning of emancipation in popular prints and widely circulated publications, such as the engravings of Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly, while others sought to capture the moment for perpetuity in works of memorial sculpture, as in the works of John Quincy Adams Ward and Daniel Chester French. In John Quincy Adams Ward’s bronze The Freedman, a bare-chested man wearing only a loincloth reflects on the moment of freedom. Completed in 1862, Ward’s The Freedman, unshackled and looking upward to a brighter future, perhaps anticipates the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Thomas Nast portrays the tenacity and triumph of A Negro Regiment in Action in a wood engraving published in the March 14, 1863, issue of Harper’s Weekly. Lincoln added a declaration to the final Emancipation Proclamation stating that liberated slaves would “be received into the armed services of the United States,” which led to the creation of regiments of US Colored Troops. Another engraving by Nast published in the same issue of Harper’s Weekly, Colored Troops, under Colonel Wild, Liberating Slaves in North Carolina, expanded on the subject depicting the liberated as liberators. A noted observer of American life, especially during the Civil War, Thomas Nast was known for his vivid historical tableaux and sweeping narrative vignettes pitting past against present, good over evil, and triumph over tragedy. Such is the case in his celebratory wood engraving The Emancipation of the Negros, January, 1863 – the Past and the Future, published in Harper’s...