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  • Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective
  • Teresa A. Goddu (bio)

From its outset, the US anti-slavery movement embraced new visual technologies and modes of visual display to bring slavery into focus. Pictorial representations of slavery were central to the campaign. In the 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) circulated some 40,000 depictions of slavery a year, ranging from woodcuts and broadsides to engravings and portraits (J. Wilson 354). This extensive iconographical system was deployed and recycled throughout the antebellum period. Emerging simultaneously with the rise of mass visual culture in the United States, the anti-slavery movement took full advantage of its society’s interest in the image and belief in the visual’s unique ability to persuade.1 As The Emancipator argues, “Abolitionists know the influence of visual impressions. . . . In consequence, they will make appeals through the eye to the heart and understanding.” According to The Emancipator, pictures were able to “excite the mind,” “awaken and fix attention,” and arouse feeling. The image’s immediacy, along with its perceptual capacities and emotive power, successfully turns its viewer into an “eye-witness” to slavery’s cruelties as well as a “partaker” of the slave’s woes (“Pictorials” Feb. 1836). The visual simultaneously produces a sense of the real—a “correct and vivid impression of living reality” as The Emancipator puts it (“Pictorials” 5 May 1836)—and arouses sympathy for the slave, since the eye is an “avenue to the heart and the conscience of the community,” as the Executive Committee of the AASS states (Wright). A central component of the anti-slavery appeal, the image provided both graphical accuracy and emotional effectiveness.

By utilizing the visual, the anti-slavery movement participated in the perceptual revolution under way in US culture. As Jonathan Crary and others have argued, vision was profoundly reconfigured in the nineteenth century, producing new types of observers, viewing practices, and forms of visual consumption (2-3).2 While the anti-slavery movement utilized a complex array of visual modes to make its appeal, this essay asserts the centrality of the panorama and its attendant bird’s-eye view to the anti-slavery argument. The panorama—along with its omniscient viewpoint—was a central visual mode in the nineteenth century.3 Responding to an emerging mass marketplace, urbanization, industrialization, and imperial expansion, the panorama’s perceptual mode enabled the eye to [End Page 12] organize an ever-expanding array of goods and geographies. Through its ability to encompass this proliferating whole, the panoramic perspective, as evident not only in the vogue for panoramas themselves but also in the popularity of prospect painting, city views, and ballooning during the period, became dominant.4 As a specifically bourgeois mode of seeing, the panoramic perspective provided emerging middle-class viewers a commanding point of view from which to assert their power and mastery over an increasingly complex social and natural landscape.5

In adopting the panorama as its dominant visual mode, the anti-slavery movement, I argue, not only established its perceptual power over the spectacle of slavery but also made its message powerfully appealing to a Northern white middle-class audience. Anti-slavery’s visual culture provided its audience access to knowledge about slavery as well as the perspective of a privileged class position. Through a distanced, yet seemingly all-encompassing point of view, antislavery observers were encouraged to learn about and sympathize with the slave even as they took visual possession of him. As an operation of social power, the panoramic perspective provided the white Northern viewer access to a position of specular dominance over the landscape of slavery as well as the body of the slave. Again and again, anti-slavery’s iconography embeds the slave’s body within the imprisoning landscape of slavery while drawing its viewers’ eyes to aerial positions of power. Through the scopic subjugation of the slave, white anti-slavery viewers gained access to their own mastery. Anti-slavery visual culture, then, reveals how fully the visual consolidation of class in the nineteenth century depended upon race.6

By locating the panoramic perspective in a wide array of pictorial examples produced by the anti-slavery movement from the 1820s to the 1850s...

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