ABOUT THIS BOOK
In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia.
This innovative book uses Crowe’s paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the evolving iconography of abolitionist art, and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe’s trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London—where his paintings were exhibited just a few weeks after the start of the Civil War—Maurie D. McInnis illuminates not only how his abolitionist art was inspired and made, but also how it influenced the international public’s grasp of slavery in America. With almost 140 illustrations, Slaves Waiting for Sale brings a fresh perspective to the American slave trade and abolitionism as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
REVIEWS
“Slaves Waiting for Sale is a stupendous contribution to the field of nineteenth-century racial representation. It is canny in its structure, astonishing in the depth of its research, and immensely sophisticated in the deployment of research details—all in the service of a deeply rewarding argument. Using Crowe’s painting as the backbone of the book is very smart, and the sequence of chapters, as McInnis charts the landscape of slavery from Richmond to Charleston to New Orleans, and the resulting visual representation of that landscape, is engrossing. It’s a book that will speak to readers in many different fields.”
— E. B. Robertson, University of California, Santa Barbara, E.B. Robertson, University of California, Santa Barbara
“With this book, Maurie McInnis consolidates the reputation, earned in her prizewinning book about Charleston antebellum architecture, as a forerunner in the integration of art and broader cultural studies. This latest brilliant integration brings a new dimension to our understanding of American slavery.”
— William W. Freehling, author of Road to Disunion
“Slaves Waiting for Sale epitomizes the best of scholarship. Beautifully crafted, compellingly argued, and powerfully original, this book guides us through Crowe’s painting in a far-reaching narrative that cuts across the antebellum South and transatlantic debates over the human cost and deeply contested ideologies of slavery. Her analysis brings to bear the evidence of works by other artists, archaeological excavations, literature, and personal accounts in a reading of Crowe’s work and its array of contexts that is sophisticated, accessible, and truly exemplary.”
— Bernard L. Herman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“This book reveals an iconic work of art in remarkable depth and breadth. With ingenious research and imaginative writing, Maurie McInnis unites places and facets of life too seldom joined. No one will be able to see the slave trade—or nineteenth-century America and England, for that matter—in the same way after reading this powerful book.”
— Edward L. Ayers, University of Richmond
“This is an attractive book about an unattractive subject. Author Maurie D. McInnis . . . has produced a splendid art book that looks at the ugly face of slavery in the antebellum south.”
— Washington Independent Review of Books
“A wealth of information for visual studies and social science scholars looking for a comprehensive overview of the visual language of slavery and abolition.”
— Visual Studies
“McInnis takes the reader deep into the grim but lucrative workings of antebellum slave commerce through careful study of visual and material culture contextualized by meticulously gathered period descriptions, public records, statistics, photographs, and maps. . . . [Her] exemplary book makes a significant contribution to new scholarship and initiatives that document and share this unvarnished history.”
— Virginia Magazine
“Maurie McInnis has produced a most significant and sustained piece of work that takes up several neglected aspects of the visual archive generated around the North American slave–sale systems in the mid-nineteenth century. In its methodological and formal diversity, the work is nothing short of a triumph. . . . “McInnis’s close reading of Eyre Crowe’s remarkable masterpiece is a triumphant proof of the imaginative realignments that this book insists upon. This author’s insights will be working their way through slavery studies for many years to come. I think Maurie McInnis for producing this morally centered and precisely written contribution to the semiotic study of slave sales.”
— Marcus Wood, Slavery & Abolition
“As we follow Crowe to the slave auctions he sketched, McInnis vividly reconstructs the geographies and everyday life of the cities that supported the slave trade and that Crowe tried to navigate for his eyewitness accounts. She also . . . thoughtfully compares the slave trade in Charleston and New Orleans, where auctions were staged theatrically in hotels and on city streets, with its less conspicuous, though no less integral, presence in Richmond.”
— Journal of American History
“Chronicling the thematic, topical and aesthetic developments in depictions of transatlantic and domestic slave trading, selling and auctioning, Slaves Waiting for Sale provides a nuanced examination of the nexus of visual culture and politics on the eve of the Civil War. . . . Its showcase of new and diverse primary source material, fashioned into a compelling case for the centralization of art in the study of the American slave trade, asserts Maurie D. McInnis’s [book] as a critical and necessary contribution to current scholarship on American slavery.”
— Journal of American Studies
“Slaves Waiting for Sale is a welcomed addition to the visual portrait of slavery seen through the vision of nineteenth-century artists and a study that scholars of the domestic slave trade will want to read.”
— American Studies
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Waiting
With Thackeray in America - Maurie D. McInnis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226559322.003.0002
[eyre crowe, william makepeace thackeray, abolition, american slavery]
This chapter details young artist Eyre Crowe’s visit to America from late 1852 to 1853, where he accompanied celebrated author and satirist William Makepeace Thackeray on what was to be a six-month speaking tour of the United States. While Thackeray was won over by Southern slave owners and was skeptical of the claims of abolitionists, Crowe formed quite a different opinion about slavery. He made a series of sketches that formed the basis for his later widely published antislavery images and essays, and a series of paintings for exhibition. (pages 11 - 26)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Representing the Slave Trade - Maurie D. McInnis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226559322.003.0003
[eyre crowe, american slavery, slave trade, virginia, antislavery movement, abolition]
This chapter focuses on visual depictions of the American slave trade. The discussions include how visual arts played a vital role in Britain’s encounter with slavery; how Eyre Crowe’s decision to sketch the American slave trade connected him with the decades-earlier efforts to end the international African slave trade; and the influence of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the antislavery movement. (pages 27 - 54)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Mapping Richmond’s Slave Trade in 1853 - Maurie D. McInnis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226559322.003.0004
[eyre crowe, william makepeace thackeray, virginia, american slavery, virginians, slave trade]
This chapter describes Thackeray’s and Crowe’s visit to Richmond, Virginia, in March 1853. Thackeray and Crowe stayed in Richmond for six days; from there they went to Charleston and Savannah. While they spent less than a month in the South, both were able to observe slavery up close, which fueled their artistic production in the following decade: Thackeray’s novel The Virginians; and Crowe’s paintings and illustrations of slavery and the slave trade. (pages 55 - 83)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Red Flag - Maurie D. McInnis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226559322.003.0005
[slave trade, slave auctions, american slavery, red flags, slave traders, slave jails, anthony burns]
This chapter discusses the spaces, places, and mechanics of the slave trade. These include the use of red flags upon which are pinned small manuscript descriptions of slaves to be sold off; family separations caused by the interstate slave trade; the use of slaves to pay debts; descriptions of slave traders and slave jails; and the story of Anthony Burns, a former slave who successfully escaped from slavery in Richmond in 1854 but was captured in Boston. (pages 84 - 114)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Plates follow page 88
Dressed for Sale - Maurie D. McInnis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226559322.003.0006
[slave trade, slavery, slave traders, slave auctions]
This chapter discusses the spaces, places, and mechanics of the slave trade. These include the enslaved assistants of slave traders; slave auctions as public spectacles in Charleston, South Carolina; the degrading physical inspection of slaves by traders; artists’ attempts to capture the sense of visual drama generated at auctions; and costuming as an essential part of the theater of the slave auction. (pages 115 - 144)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Going South - Maurie D. McInnis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226559322.003.0007
[eyre crowe, slave trade, american slavery, slave auctions, paintings]
This chapter analyzes Eyre Crowe’s painting, Going South: A Sketch from Life in America, the first in his series about American slavery. The Going South movement begins on the left, as slaves are marched from their jails after being purchased at auction, and continues with the railroad car that will take them far away from the city. (pages 145 - 172)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Exhibiting the Slave Trade in England - Maurie D. McInnis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226559322.003.0008
[eyre crowe, slave trade, american slavery, paintings, george morland, françois Biard, hiram powers]
This chapter discusses artistic representations of slavery that were exhibited in Britain. These include Eyre Crowe’s paintings A Slave Sale in Charlestone [sic], South Carolina and Going South: A Sketch from Life in America; George Morland’s paintings Execrable Human Traffick and African Hospitality; François Biard’s Slaves on the West Coast of Africa; and Hiram Powers’ sculpture Greek Slave. (pages 173 - 213)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Epilogue - Maurie D. McInnis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226559322.003.0009
[slave trade, american slavery, slave traders, slave auctions, thomas satterwhite noble, nostalgia]
This chapter focuses on remembrances of the slave trade. Artistic representations of the slave trade largely disappeared after the Civil War. Among the few who used their art to continue to question the impact of slavery and the slave trade for African Americans in the post-war war era was the Southerner Thomas Satterwhite Noble, who painted two works immediately connected to the slave trade in the years following the war: The American Slave Mart (1865) and The Price of Blood. Around the turn of the century, a new form of public remembrance also arose. Largely connected to the growth in middle-class white tourism, this new form was nostalgia for an imagined idea of the South, a land of leisure and romance, a simpler place than the rapidly industrializing North. Central to that vision of the South was a benign view of slavery, one that imagined a harmonious relationship between masters and slaves, a natural hierarchy. (pages 214 - 227)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Notes
Index
