"Rosebloom and pure white," or so it seemed

American Quarterly

Volumn 54, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 369-410

  Mitchell, Mary Niall ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW ORLEANS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949599044     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2002.0027     Document Type: Review

References (106)

1. Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene (1938; New York: Dover Publications, 1964), ch. 8
2. For a technical index of cartes de visite and their uses, see William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth-Century Photography (Gettysburg, Penn: William C. Darrah, 1981)
3. Kathleen Collins, "Portraits of Slave Children," History of Photography 9 (July-Sept. 1985): 187-88
4. Banks appointed a Board of Education in March of 1864 to direct the establishment of freedpeople's schools. But by then at least seven black schools already had been established and fourteen hundred students enrolled in what was, arguably, the first major effort at public education for freedpeople in the South. See Donald R. Devore and Joseph Logsdon, Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans 1841-1991 (Lafayette, La.: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1991), 57
5. Collins, "Portraits of Slave Children," 187-210
6. Collins, "Portraits of Slave Children," 189
7. In images, according to W.J.T. Mitchell, "what expression amounts to is the artful planting of certain clues in a picture that allow us to form an act of ventriloquism, an act which endows the picture with eloquence, and particularly with a nonvisual and verbal eloquence." W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 41
8. See also Allan Sekula, "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning" in Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography (London: MacMillan Education Press, 1982.)
9. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 26
10. The figure of the child often becomes a metaphor for adult desires and political aims. See Carolyn Steedman, Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography, and History (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1992), 194
11. Steedman makes a theoretical distinction between this figure and children as a group: "'the child' is an historical construct," the product of adult imagination and projection, whereas "children" are individuals experiencing childhood. For further explorations of this idea see Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986)
12. and Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995)
13. The notion of the United States as a "white nation" was not new. Historian Joanne Pope Melish has noted that in the eighteenth century, many residents of the New England states imagined that gradual emancipation in the North would somehow "restore" the region's homogeneity, that "a free New England would be a white New England." Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998), 164
14. On race and emancipation, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 117-18
15. Elsa Barkley Brown makes this point about the "relational nature of difference" in the lives of black women and white women. See Barkley Brown, "Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for Women's History," History Workshop 31 (spring 1991): 86, 88
16. Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990)
17. Most abolitionists came from the middle class, although there were substantial numbers of "skilled" workers and artisans and a very small percentage of "unskilled" workers involved in the movement as well. See Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1998), ch. 11, esp. 145-17
18. Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionist Constituency (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), ch. 6
19. The "displacement" of class issues with the language of race and gender was characteristic of antebellum sentimental fiction. See Amy Schrager Lang, "Class and the Strategies of Sympathy" in Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992)
20. Ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass believed that the defeat of slavery could only come with the support of the working class. "It is not to the rich that we are to look," he said in 1852, "but to the poor, to the hardhanded working men of the country; these are to come to the rescue of the slave." Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 36
21. Carol Wilson and Calvin D. Wilson, "White Slavery: An American Paradox," Slavery and Abolition 19 (Apr. 1998): 1-23
22. have chosen to use the term "white slaves" instead of "white slavery" in the interest of clarity and historical accuracy. Most accounts I have seen pertaining to the subject at hand discuss "white slaves" rather than "white slavery." The latter term also has a trickier history. White northern workers and labor advocates used "white slavery" (as well as "wage slavery") in the 1830s and 1840s as a critique of the labor system. As historian David Roediger has noted, "white slavery" was a complicated term that seemed to identify white workers with slaves (problematic since many laborers did not favor any association with black Americans), while it also suggested that the enslavement of whites was more objectionable than that of blacks. By the 1850s, labor advocates dropped the term in favor of "free labor." See David E. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), ch. 4
23. and Margit Stange, Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)
24. Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 48
25. Mary Chestnut's Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 29
26. The life of Alexina Morrison illustrates well the furor that racially ambiguous people could create in the antebellum South. See Walter Johnson, "The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s," The Journal of American History 87 (June 2000): 13-38
27. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985)
28. Leslie Williams, "The Look of Little Girls: John Everett Millais and the Victorian Art Market" and Carol Mavor, "Dream Rushes: Lewis Carroll's Photographs of the Little Girl," both in Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone, eds., The Girl's Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830-1915 (Athens, Ga.: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994)
29. Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998), ch. 3
30. Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1992)
31. Taft, Photography and the American Scene, 140
32. Heinz K. Henisch and Bridget A. Henisch, The Photographic Experience 1839-1914: Images and Attitudes (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1994), ch. 2
33. Nell Irvin Painter has noted the importance of dress and "props" in cartes de visite portraits "self-fashioned" by antislavery activist and former slave Sojourner Truth. Truth used knitting yarn, reading glasses, and books to convey motherliness and wisdom. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), 196
34. Sojourner Truth was also one of the first antislavery activists to employ the camera's potential for representation (through portraiture) and the carte de visite as a means of fundraising. See Painter, "Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth's Knowing and Becoming Known," The Journal of American History 81 (Sept. 1994): 461-92
35. and Painter, Sojourner Truth, ch. 20
36. Fundraising through the sale of photographs became especially popular during the Civil War. Kathleen Collins, "Photographic Fundraising: Civil War Philanthropy," History of Photography 11 (July-Sept. 1987): 173-87
37. and Collins, "Living Skeletons: Carte de visite Propaganda in the American Civil War," History of Photography 12 (Apr.-June 1988): 103-20
38. Gillian Brown, "Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin," American Quarterly 36 (Fall 1984): 505
39. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston, 1861), repr. and re-edited by Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987)
40. What made Jacobs's narrative so effective was her description of the household in the slaveholding South as "the ground of the institution's most terrifying intimacies." See Hortense J. Spillers, "Changing the Letter: the Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed," in Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, eds., Slavery and the Literary Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 28
41. See also Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), ch. 2
42. Laura Wexler, "Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye" in Marianne Hirsch, ed., The Familial Gaze (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1999), 256
43. Elizabeth B. Clark, "Sacred Rights of the Weak: Pain and Sympathy in Antebellum America," Journal of American History 82 (Sept. 1995), 476
44. Similar expressions of empathy arose in the writings of antislavery feminists, who paralleled their plight as women with that of the enslaved population at the South. See Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 50
45. Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1968)
46. Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: the Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981)
47. Mary Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity 1830-1860 (New York: Institute for Research in History and the Haworth Press, 1982)
48. Richard Broadhead, "Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America," Representations 21 (winter 1988): 67-96
49. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, "Temperance in the Bed of a Child: Incest and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America," American Quarterly 47 (Mar. 1995): 4
50. The figure of the "daughter-as-redeemer" displayed both moral purity and strength of character. See Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press), 42
51. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (1852; New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 247
52. See also "The Meaning of Little Eva," the introduction to Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)
53. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 249
54. Freedmen's Journal, quoted in the American Missionary, Nov. 1864, p. 276
55. American Missionary, June 1865, p. 126
56. American Missionary, Mar. 1859, p. 68
57. American Missionary, Oct. 1860, p. 234
58. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 5
59. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 43, 496
60. "White and Colored Slaves," Harper's Weekly, Jan. 30, 1864, p. 71
61. Ex-slave narrators throughout the nineteenth century had to concern themselves with the authentication of their narratives. This involved using specific names and places in their accounts and providing a written introduction by a white sponsor in order to prove their autobiographies were true and not simply the creation of abolitionists. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986), 26
62. See also Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Slave's Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985)
63. John Sekora, "Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative," Callaloo 32 (summer 1987): 482-515
64. nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Howard Univ. Press, 1988), ch. 4
65. Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), ch. 3
66. Yellin, Women & Sisters, ch. 5
67. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 75, 82
68. Sánchez-Eppler, "Temperance in the Bed of a Child," 15
69. James Kincaid, Child Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13
70. Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 36-39, 122-32
71. Leslie Williams, "The Look of Little Girls: John Everett Millais and the Victorian Art Market," in The Girls: Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830-1915 (Athens, Ga.: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994), 124
72. See also Pamela Tamarkin Reis and Laurel Bradley, "Victorian Centerfold: Another Look at Millais's Cherry Ripe," Victorian Studies 35 (winter 1992): 201-6
73. Robert M. Polhemus, "John Millais's Children: Faith, Erotics, and The Woodsman's Daughter," Victorian Studies 7 (spring 1994): 433-50
74. Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), ch. 9
75. See also David M. Lubin's discussion of Guy and Carroll in Lubin, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), ch. 5
76. Ronald J. Walters, "The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism," in John R. McKivigan, ed., History of the American Abolitionist Movement, vol.1, Abolitionism and American Reform (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999)
77. On the literature of the "tragic mulatto," see Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters, 71-76
78. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1993), ch. 1
79. and Susan Gillman, "The Mulatto, Tragic or Triumphant? The Nineteenth-Century American Race Melodrama," in Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment
80. American Missionary, June 1863, p. 131
81. Catherine S. Lawrence, Autobiography or Sketch of Life and Labors of Miss Catherine S. Lawrence who in Early Life Distinguished Herself as a Bitter Opponent of Slavery and Intemperance, and Later in Life as a Nurse in the Late War; and for Other Patriotic and Philanthropic Services, rev. ed. (Albany, N.Y.: James B. Lyon Printer, 1896), 140. Thanks to Mary L. White, a participant at the 1999 Berkshire Conference for the History of Women & Gender, for bringing Lawrence's memoir to my attention
82. Sentimental fiction was intended to have similar effects on readers. See Samuels, ed., Culture of Sentiment
83. and Fisher, Hard Facts, ch. 2
84. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000), passim
85. Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), 100, 3-4
86. Clark, "'The Sacred Rights of the Weak,'" 467-68
87. See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "The Legs of the Countess," October 39 (winter 1996), 98
88. Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty, 18, 23
89. On southerners' readings of a "white" woman enslaved see Johnson, "The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s"
90. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst, Mass.: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 78
91. H.W. Diamond, Lancet, Jan. 22, 1859. p. 89
92. For a history of the "American School," see William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-1859 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960)
93. Agassiz is quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981; New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 77
94. See Brian Street, "British Popular Anthropology: Exhibiting and Photographing the Other" in Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), 130
95. These images, found in a cabinet in 1976, were never published by Agassiz. See Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), 53-56
96. Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians, 3-4
97. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 23-24
98. National Antislavery Standard, Feb. 21, 1863
99. Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1997), 112-14
100. Harper's Weekly, "White and Colored Slaves," p. 71
101. On white nationalism and "free soil" ideology in the antebellum and Civil War years, see George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny 1817-1914 (1971; Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1987). ch. 5
102. See also Melish, Disowning Slavery, ch. 6
103. Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty, 7
104. One can find similar images of white women and black slaves in antislavery literature. For example, the frontispiece to an almanac printed in London in 1853 in honor of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin depicts Liberty as a white woman reading from the Bible to a group of black children with chains around their feet, repr. in Clare Midley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 147
105. For a fuller discussion of these photographs see Mary Niall Mitchell, "Raising Freedom's Child: Race, Nation, and the Lives of Black Children in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana" (Ph.D. diss., New York Univ., 2001), ch. 3
106. On some missionaries' attempts to fill white northerners' requests for young black workers after emancipation, see Mitchell, "Raising Freedom's Child," ch. 3