Tracing Footsteps: Visual Art and the Landscape of the Slave Trade

Mary Chesnut was walking through the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, on a spring day in 1861, when she turned a corner and saw "a Negro woman sold upon the block at auction." The slave was "magnificently gotten up in silks and satins. She seemed delighted with it all, sometimes ogling the bidders, sometimes looking quite coy and modest; but her mouth never relaxed from its expanded grin of excitement." The sight made Chesnut feel "faint, seasick" as she tried to reason it away, arguing to herself that white women sell themselves in marriage all the time. "Poor women, poor slaves," she concluded. One week later, Chesnut was walking these same streets with Mrs. William Montague Browne, trading quips about the awkward manners of statesmen, when they happened upon the same auction block. "'If you can stand that," Chesnut murmured to her friend, "no other Southern thing need choke you.'" In response, Mrs. Browne "said not a word." Was her silence due to shock at seeing a human being sold to another human being? Or did she wordlessly ponder whether she could ever become inured to such a sight? Or was it the silence of acquiescence, of empathy not for the slaves but for her South Carolinian friend? Chesnut put forth another explanation. "After all, it was my country," she wrote in her diary, "and she was an English woman."¹

Mary Chesnut's encounter with this Montgomery slave auction is usually presented as evidence of her complicated relationship to Southern slavery on the eve of the Civil War; Chesnut was a slaveholder and a white woman who often chafed at the restrictions placed upon her own freedoms of speech and movement—"poor women, poor slaves." But critics often overlook the presence of Mrs. Browne in this later confrontation with the auction block. Mrs. Browne's Englishness becomes a way for Chesnut to dismiss the prospect of her disapproval, connecting beliefs about the moral rightness of slavery to national identity, and to geographic distance.

Mrs. Browne was one of many thousands of British expatriates and visitors living and traveling through the United States during the antebellum period and the Civil War. Among these were journalists, novelists, and artists who recorded their observations of American "scenes"—and Southern slavery—for British audiences. In her ambitious new book "Slaves Waiting for Sale": Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade, Maurie D. McInnis introduces readers to one of these artists, Eyre Crowe. An aspiring painter, Crowe accompanied the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray on his lecture tour of the United States in 1853, acting as his location scout and secretary. They visited several major cities including Boston, New York, Richmond, and Charleston. When he was not attending to Thackeray's needs, Crowe set out on urban perambulations, sketching scenes of interest to English audiences. One morning, as he ate breakfast in his Richmond hotel, Crowe saw an advertisement for a slave auction; this discovery "set in motion events that led to the creation of a series of images that depict the process of the domestic slave trade" (p. 23). Crowe made numerous sketches during his American travels, but McInnis is most interested in three of them: Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Va. (1853; 1856; 1861); "Slave Auction at Richmond" (1856); and After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond (1854). This polyptych joined a profusion of abolitionist images of slave auctions and coffles circulating in the 1850s and '60s; McInnis argues that these paintings and illustrations enabled viewers to move "from the rhetorical to the visual, from the abstract to the personal," creating sympathy for slaves and revealing the political power of images of slavery during this period (pp. 23, 24).

McInnis does not have any major quarrels with scholars who have previously written about visual representations of slavery,² and her arguments regarding the significance of illustrations, paintings, and material objects in abolitionist culture are not very...