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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

Author(s): Teresa A. Goddu

Source: MELUS , Summer 2014, Vol. 39, No. 2, Visual Culture and Race (Summer 2014), pp. 12-41

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective Teresa A. Goddu

Vanderbilt University

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 exten-

sive 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 societ/ 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

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 commu-

nity," as the Executive Committee of the AASS states (Wright). A central compo- nent 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 percep- tual 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). 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 atten-

dant 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

© MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

1 2 MELUS • Volume 39 • Number 2 • (Summer 2014)

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

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 posi- tion. Through a distanced, yet seemingly all-encompassing point of view, anti-

slavery 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 posi-

tions 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 fiilly 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 - broadsides, woodcuts in newspapers and almanacs, and engravings in slave narratives - I show how the anti-slavery movement utilized this perspective not only to reveal the truth of slavery to its Northern white viewers but also to

school them in their own social position and political power. Anti-slavery visual

culture successfully converted Northern viewers to its cause by presenting in its

mirror of slavery a reflection of their own empowered subjectivity. This domi-

nance was performed not just through the anti-slavery image's subjugation of the slave but also through its appropriation of the slaveholder's commanding per-

spective. By identifying itself with national icons and presenting its panoramic perspective as both more powerful and more benevolent than the slaveholder's

panoptic viewpoint, anti-slavery visual culture articulated the supremacy of white

Northern nationalism. Anti-slavery visual culture, I argue, is as much about the

consolidation of white Northern power through the panoramic perspective as it is

about the extension of liberty or its perspective to the slave.7 Within anti-slavery

visual culture, freedom is represented not just as a geographical space but also as a perspectivai position.

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Goddu

In what follows, I analyze anti-slavery's panoramic perspective as a means of

illuminating the formation of white Northern subjectivity in the nineteenth cen-

tury. In consolidating class through a racialized and regionalized visual held, the anti-slavery movement played a crucial role in configuring vision's relation to

power in the period. Radier than simply focusing on how anti-slavery visual cul- ture represented the subject of slavery or the slave, I attend to the points of view

its images encode and produce. Emphasizing the process of seeing instead of the object of the gaze makes the construction of whiteness more visible. This essay

begins by delineating the range of practices white anti-slavery activists deployed to project the power of Northern whiteness in the visual field. It then attends to anti-slavery images that spoke back against the consolidation of white Northern

power by foregrounding the Northerner's complicity with the slaveholder. It ends

with an analysis of how African American anti-slavery activists contributed to this

visual discourse by creating a counter-visuality that both critiqued the North's unwillingness to extend liberty's perspective to the slave and appropriated the panoramic perspective to assert the slave's "right to look" (Mirzoeff 1).

The predominant visual mode of the AASS's 1830s campaign was the "view" of slavery. These views brought the distant scene of slavery before Northern observ-

ers' eyes and made slavery accessible and perceptible by providing evidence of sights unseen. Equating vision with knowledge - as The Emandpator writes, pictures can "bring before the 'mind's eye' more vividly than the arbitrary signs of the Alphabet can, the reality of the things of which we speak" ("Pictorials" Feb. 1836) - the anti-slavery movement drew on its culture's conviction that see-

ing was believing.8 Most often, these views represented the cruelty of slavery: the

torture, selling, and separation of slaves. Their graphic imagery documented slav-

ery's injustices and evoked sympathy for the slave's suffering. By placing the tor-

tured or shackled body of the slave at the center of its visual field, the anti-slavery

"view" sought to change its audience's point of view on the subject of slavery. Beyond asserting sight as a privileged form of social knowledge, anti-slavery' s

"views" of slavery also instantiated a particular perspective - the "overview" of

the panorama. Arising at the end of the eighteenth century and tied to landscape paintings and city views, the panorama became a popular optical entertainment

in the nineteenth century. Begun as a gigantic circular painting in England with an

unobstructed 360-degree view and then translated into large-scale serialized, hor- izontal views in the United States' moving version, the panorama was produced from and instructed its viewer in a particular perspective - die bird's-eye view.9

Taken from an elevated vantage point (a lofty prospect point such as a lookout, a state house, or a cathedral), the panorama provided viewers with an expansive view that extended to the distant horizon. Whether actually situated in this heightened viewpoint (as the audience was in the circular version, standing on a high platform) or more figuratively inhabiting it (as in the moving panorama, where the vistas unrolled before the seated spectator), viewers were offered a

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

commanding position from which to survey the field of vision. As an all-seeing

eye, they became, by implication, all-knowing and all-powerful. Like the panoptic

perspective that arose at the same time (Jeremy Bentham's plans for his tower

and Robert Barker's panorama emerged almost simultaneously in the early 1790s),10 the panorama's aerial viewpoint and its "magisterial gaze" provided its viewers a sense of superiority and control (Boime 38). The panorama's all- encompassing view produced not only a comprehensive totality but also a privi-

leged subject position of scopic mastery.

Anti-slavery used the panorama and its perspective in several ways. First, it

employed the panorama's wide-angle view to present a comprehensive survey of slavery's cruelties. As small-scale panoramas, anti-slavery's "views" drew on

the panorama's verisimilitude to expose slavery's inner workings and on its ency-

clopedic comprehensiveness to display anti-slavery's knowledge of and mastery

over the subject of slavery. Second, anti-slavery identified the panoptic perspec-

tive inherent in the panorama's form with the slaveholder's scopic power, coding

it as coercive and cruel. Third, it provided its viewer an alternate aerial vantage point with which to identify - one that encompassed the superiority of the slave-

holder's perspective but that was based on sympathetic identification rather than

surveillance. Through these moves, anti-slavery's panoramic views were able to

assert the movement's scopic dominance over the landscape of slavery while also producing a powerful but morally benign perspectivai position for its Northern audience.

Anti-slavery's panoramic views came in two forms: the individual view of slav-

ery, which often located particular scenes of slavery within a broader panoramic

landscape, and composite views, which assembled a variety of pictures on a single sheet to produce a serialized story of slavery, much like the moving panorama

that integrated single scenes into a continuous format. For instance, prints pub-

lished by the AASS in the second half of the 1830s, such as Views of Slavery (1836),

Slave Market of America (1836), Illustrations of the American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840 (1840), and A Bird's Eye View of American Slavery (1837), 11 which consist of a series of cuts that work together to tell the larger story, resem-

ble miniature panoramas. In both the individual and serial forms, scenes of slav-

ery are aggregated to reveal slavery's horrors to be systemic rather than singular.

Utilizing foreground and background, anti-slavery views situate their compelling

particulars, which are meant to arouse the emotions, within a wider perspective,

which provides a rational overview of slavery's structures. By representing slavery

as a panoramic landscape, anti-slavery views provide a comprehensive ocular knowledge of slavery that also produces sympathy for the slave's suffering.

Views of Slavery (see Figure 1) exemplifies both the individual and serialized

panoramic forms. Taken on its own, the upper left image depicts a panoramic landscape of a sugar plantation with the bucolic scene of slave labor in the fore-

ground and the scene of torture, a slave being whipped, in the background.

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Goddu

Figure 1. Views of Slavery (1836), lithographic print. Image courtesy: Library Company of Philadelphia.

By allowing its viewers to see to the horizon, the panoramic picture extends their

sight beyond what the slaveholders would have them see - a peaceful work scene - to the truth of the slave system - its cruelty. Anti-slavery's panoramic

perspective exposes what slaveholders attempt to hide when they paint a pretty

picture of slave life. By situating this scene along with five others in a grid-like

pattern, the print comprehensively details the various aspects of slavery - plantation life, modes of punishment, slave auctions, slave separations and kidnappings, and the slave trade - and synthesizes its visual knowledge into a

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

cohesive whole. Taken together, the scenes provide an extensive overview of slav-

ery even as they foreground for the viewer its most shocking aspects - the slave

hanging by his wrists being whipped, the slave mother begging not to be sepa-

rated from her children, and the slave being sold at auction. Like the print as

a whole, which works to assimilate its parts into a single picture of slavery's inhu-

manity as the framing words instruct, each panoramic image places its particu-

larities within a larger landscape to expose slavery's systematic cruelty. The long

line of coffled slaves marching in the distance toward a ship in the lower right image, for instance, speaks to the greater Atlantic economy of slavery that under-

pins the economic negotiations in the foreground; the tortured, auctioned, or separated slave that stands or kneels at the center of the images, often framed

on either side by the next victim, is represented as one in an endless line that

the system of slavery will process. In emphasizing the distant horizon line and providing a wide-angle view, these panoramic pictures promise their viewers full

access to the scene of slavery even as they show how slavery's system extends far

beyond their frame.

Anti-slavery views use the panorama's expansive perspective to train their viewers to produce an assimilative knowledge. In addition to providing an over-

view of slavery's cruelties, they teach their audience to coalesce each part into a

single whole - to see slavery as a merciless system of brutality. The Emancipator,

for instance, advertised the broadside A Bird's Eye View of American Slavery, illustrated with seven engravings, with the tag line: "ALL AT ONE VIEW" ("All"). Whether literal or figurative (the print itself is not extant), the bird's-

eye view offered by this "LARGE SHEET" ("Catalogue") unites its particular details, multiple "cuts of the various 'instruments of cruelty,'" into a unified whole, the "bloody system" of slavery ("All"). In placing its multiple scenes under

the totalizing heading "ONE VIEW," the print instructs its audience in the pan-

oramic perspective's holistic mode of seeing. Whether created vertically from above through the bird's-eye view's aerial perspective or horizontally from below

via the sequential logic of the moving panorama's scrolling images, the pano- ramic perspective produces an authoritative and comprehensive "ALL." By appropriating this perspective, anti-slavery visual culture made slavery legible and coherent. Moreover, through composing a singular scene of slavery, it represented its view as the "right" view on the subject.12

Besides asserting its own perceptual power, its ability to make slavery visible

and hence knowable as a cruel system, anti-slavery's panoramic images also chal-

lenge the slaveholder's scopic power by depicting slavery as coercive. Anti-slavery

visual culture represents Southern plantation slavery as a visual complex where

power is produced scopically. As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, plantation slavery is

the "foundational moment" of a modern visuality that transmits authority (6). Slaveholders, according to Mirzoeff, employed a system of "visualized surveil-

lance" to claim and disseminate white power (10). Utilizing a panoptic

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G o d d u

perspective, overseers mapped the plantation as a "sovereign space" through visual surveillance and oversight (50). Anti-slavery visual culture explicates and critiques the slaveholder's powerful sight lines. Throughout its iconography,

the "over"seer embodies the vertical vision of the elevated perspective, while the

slave occupies an oppressed position within the landscape that restricts vision. Through his specular dominance over the subjugated body of the slave, the slave- holder asserts his social control as well as his social status. Depicted on horseback

leading a slave gang, standing over the kneeling slave who begs for mercy, or aggressively poised with an instrument of torture in his hand raised high above the slave, the slaveholder is always situated above the slave, his superior vantage

point denoting his mastery. In addition, the slaveholder's appropriation of visual

technologies, such as the rifle, signifies his visual dominance over the slave as absolute. In one image from The Anti-Slavery Record captioned "A Fact with a

Short Commentary" (1836), the slaveholder looks down the barrel of a rifle at a runaway slave lying horizontally on the ground, threatening to shoot him in

the eyes at close range (1). There is no escape, the image argues, from the visual

surveillance of slavery. However, the slaveholder's raised whip or other instru-

ment of torture, which represents and extends his panoptic perspective, marks

his visual authority as highly suspect. Slavery's panoptic perspective, anti-slavery

visual culture argues, is coercive and cruel. Its visual regime depends upon pun-

ishment, its power on oppression.

Anti-slavery's iconographical system relied on a consistent visual vocabulary that articulated the slaveholder's power as perspectivai. The movement's most iconic image is that of the slaveholder standing over the slave with a whip in his hand, as in the image "Torturing American Citizens" from George Bourne's

Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (1834) (129). This repeated image articulates anti-slavery's most basic message: the slave, who is often liter-

ally tied to the landscape and always embedded in it, is powerless, while the cruel

slaveholder, whose whip always hovers above the landscape, is omnipotent. Each

figure's perspective reinforces this meaning. The slave's head is often bowed down in these images, his eyes focused on the ground and either obscured or cov-

ered. When he is looking up, it is often into the face of a white master, pleading for

his life. The slaveholder's eyes, on the other hand, are usually trained on the black

body from above. Whether or not he is physically positioned above the slave in

the image (which he often is), the raised whip, as an extension of his own body, provides him access to that aerial view. The meaning of the visual message is straightforward: slavery's cruelties are violently oppressive and the slaveholder's

power, both physical and scopic, is absolute. Despite its negative critique of the politics of the plantation's panoptic

perspective, mainstream anti-slavery visual culture does not construct a counter-visuality. Instead of dismantling the panoptic aspects of the slaveholder's

perspective, it appropriates slavery's scopic power for its own cause. From its

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

Figure 2. "United States' Internal Slave Trade" (1823), woodcut. Genius of Universal Emancipation Jan.

1823: 97. Image courtesy: ProQuest LLC.

earliest images, the US anti-slavery movement offers a critique of slavery's oppressive visual power even as it reproduces that perspective with a key differ-

ence: if slavery's panoptic perspective is oppressive, anti-slavery's panoramic per-

spective is liberating. While the anti-slavery image may promise freedom to the

slave, its principal purpose is to construct an unfettered perspective for its Northern viewers. Anti-slavery visual culture offers white Northerners an aerial

perspective from which to assert their sovereignty and superiority over the South.

Take, for example, the woodcut print "United States' Internal Slave Trade" (1823), published in one of anti-slavery's earliest newspapers, Benjamin Lundy's Genius of Universal Emancipation (see Figure 2).13 The picture produces

a familiar panoramic landscape of slavery. The overseer, sitting on a horse, leads a gang of shackled slaves that extends beyond the picture's frame, his whip held

high above their bowed heads. The slaveholder's whip cuts through the sky, extending its perspectivai sight line toward the sun. The whip is the oppressive

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Goddu

force that frames the line of slaves, figuratively pushing their heads down toward

the ground from above. As the address "TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE" below the

image states, this is but a "faint picture" of slavery's power: the " detestable traffic

in human flesh, carried on by citizens of this Republic in the open face of the day,

and in violation of the fundamental principles of our government, the maxims

and precepts of Christianity, and the eternal rules of justice and equity." In response to a slave power that operates in plain sight, blatantly defying the rule

of nation, God, and law, viewers are urged to "LOOK AT IT, again and again and

then say whether you will permit so disgraceful, so inhuman, and so wicked a

practice to continue in our country." The directive to "LOOK" insists on the view-

er's responsibility to see the detestable nature of slaver/ s power, and in so doing,

counter it through anti-slavery action. The command, while coercive, also empowers its Northern viewers since their responsibility to see assumes their inherent "right" to look. Viewers are disciplined through the visuality of type - "LOOK AT IT" - to own their scopic authority and wield it against the slaveholder.14 Moreover, by framing the picture of slavery on all four sides with ironic words - such as "A GLORIOUS SPECTACLE!!!" and " Hail Columbia,

Happy Land.1" - which mark the distance between the United States' ideals and slavery's realities, the image asserts the ability of anti-slavery as well as of its viewers to reframe the debate. The slaveholder may hold scopic power over the slave within the picture, but in the larger page view, he is visually contained: his vertical power is framed horizontally by the newspaper's headings and its lines

of type that announce abolition's plan for slavery's downfall. Situated beneath the

anti-slavery masthead Genius of Universal Emancipation and positioned as the object of the gaze of Northern reformers, who sit in judgment above the slave- holder as they read the newspaper below them on their laps, the slaveholder is

positioned as being under anti-slavery's scopic control. Anti-slavery visual culture

may portray the power of slavery's visual regime, but its ultimate goal is to assert

anti-slavery's dominance over the visual field. Within the picture, anti-slavery's visual supremacy is symbolized by the flag.

Placed near the center of the image, the flag serves as a counter to the slave- holder's whip and provides the viewer another high-flying vantage point with

which to identify. Cutting through the sky like the whip, the flag has a similar abil-

ity to structure the landscape below. Always at an equal, if not higher, point as the

whip in anti-slavery images, the flag offers the slaveholder's elevated vantage point with a crucial difference: it promises freedom rather than oppression. A symbol of the national ideals of liberty and equality that the anti-slavery peri- odical announces as its own when it places a quote from the Declaration of Independence directly beneath its masthead, the flag stands for anti-slavery' s views as well as its viewpoint. Held by the slave rather than imposed over him

like the whip, the flag represents liberty as a perspectivai position: the free- floating and commanding perspective of the bird's-eye view. As an extension

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

of the slave's body, the flag provides the slave symbolic access to this aerial position. By aligning anti-slavery's aerial perspective with the slave's and by asso-

ciating it with the nation's core values of liberty and equality, the flag provides

anti-slavery a superior vantage point. While the flag and the whip are equally

elevated in the image, the flag is its moral center. By casting anti-slavery's panoramic perspective as one of access and equality

against slavery's perspective of surveillance and coercion, anti-slavery visual cul-

ture pictures its elevated perspective as morally superior. Unlike the whip's ver-

tical, hierarchical perspective, the flag's horizontal features promise a more inclusive, democratic viewpoint. In siding with the flag and converting to anti-

slavery, Northern viewers gain access to the panorama's commanding perspective under the cover of moral benevolence.15 Their power is equal to the slaveholder's

but remains innocent because it serves the slave and upholds the nation's ideals.

Unlike the visually compelling figure of the cruel slaveholder, who attracts through his powerful stance both desire and dread, the flag provides a morally

just and socially respectable point of identification through which viewers can

access their own privilege. The picture, then, is more about the North's freedom than the slave's. The slave may hold the promise of liberty, but he does not yet

have access to its elevated perspective. Marching through the landscape in an anonymous, faceless line with no subjectivity or perspective, or even a for- ward-looking view, the slave can only long for the freedom that the Northern viewer has already attained. Positioned in the gloomy black sky as a beaconing

symbol like the North Star, the flag may create a small open space of freedom

above the head of the slave who carries it - cutting a window into the oppressive

sky that bows the head of the slave at the end of the line - but that space, like its

freedom, is figured as white. The flag simultaneously promises the slave liberty

even as it asserts a racial hierarchy similar to the whip. It creates a space of free-

dom and resembles a piece of the harsh sky; it provides the slave access to the vertical view even as it boxes him in from above. Like the whip, it encodes white

superiority and black subordination. In identifying with the flag, Northern view-

ers reaffirm their freedom and consolidate their privileged position through racial

hierarchy.

The flag and whip imagery that dominates anti-slavery visual discourse achieves several aims. First and foremost, it allows anti-slavery to formulate its

panoramic perspective as commanding yet benevolent. In doing so, it provides a compelling configuration of Northern subjectivity - benign power. Anti-slavery

visual culture allows the Northern viewer to appropriate the slaveholder's point of

view even as it delegitimizes it by painting his perspective as cruel and degener-

ate. Accessed under the cover of the flag, however, Northern power is made legit-

imate. The images encode the power struggle between North and South over the body of the slave. The whip and the flag, which vie for perspectivai dominance

throughout these images, emblematize the fight over which side will ultimately

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Goddu

Figure 3. "United States Slave Trade" (1830), copper engraving. Genius of Universal Emancipation July

1830: 50A. Image courtesy: ProQuest LLC.

control the national landscape. Anti-slavery's images are more about the North's

freedom from Southern power than the slave's emancipation. Its visual system, which identifies whiteness with power and blackness with powerlessness, is about

consolidating the power of Northern whites rather than supplying the slave with

sight.

This visual power dynamic is evident in another image from the Genius of Universal Emancipation, "United States Slave Trade" (1830) (see Figure 3). 16 In this panoramic image of the US slave trade, the foreground is dominated by the slaveholder's power: he sits on a horse and directs the viewer's gaze by point-

ing the line of shackled slaves toward the ship that will transport them farther

south. His ability to command the scene through his pointing finger depends on the whip tucked under his arm; his pent-up power is made explicit by the raised whip in the background and the unfurled one in the foreground and by

his elevated position, which parallels slavery's other aerial viewpoint in this image - the ship's mast. With his horizontal outstretched arm and whip, the slaveholder's body resembles the ship's mast - his head situated at the top of the triangle his body forms. The horizontal lines of the image (the horizon, which

itself contains another line of slaves working under the overseer's whip, the masts, the ship's hold's crosshatchings that depict it as a prison, along with the slaveholder's whip and arm) reinforce the oppressive power of the slave- holder's panoptic perspective: like the masts that press down on the slaves on the deck, it denies the slaves aerial access. The only part of the picture free from

slavery's scopic command is the image of the Capitol dome (just recently com-

pleted in 1824) that peeks out from behind the hills in the far background on

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

the right side. Marked by the hills' curved aperture, it alone hovers above the lin-

ear oppression of the image. Set at the same height as the slave ship's mast (and

mimicking its triangular structure since the central dome, which has a flag on top,

is flanked by two smaller domes on either side), it alone has the power to van-

quish slavery's scopic power. It visually anchors the right side of the picture, its flag drawing the viewer's eye away from the slaveholder's directional power. With its flag and its symbolic placement as a city on the hill, the dome is a pow-

erful beacon of freedom. By locating the dome directly above the female slave's

head, mimicking its curvature, the image frames the anti-slavery viewpoint as

both protective (she is a mother with two children) and liberating. By visually

planting the flag on the slave's head, the image provides her symbolic access to the bird's-eye view of freedom. However, this aerial liberty remains for the slave a dream on the far horizon. The slave's immediate fate is to march under

the watchful eye of the overseer.

Once again, this image pictures anti-slaver/ s panoramic perspective as commanding - equal to slavery's power - yet benevolent - focused on liberation

rather than oppression. The dome's strong vertical lines that extend upward through the flag pole are softened by its curvature and the horizontal stripes of

the flag. At the center of the image, however, is not the slave and her quest for emancipation but the powerful white slaveholder. The slave remains one in a line

of barely differentiated, blackened figures that stand either at the water's edge,

awaiting transport, or across the hold of the ship. The slaveholder's commanding position on the horse at the center of the picture draws the viewer's eye. As with

most of the whip images, it is the slaveholder, with his aggressively active stance,

not the passive black body, that compels the viewer's attention. As the image's figure of whiteness, he serves as a surrogate for the Northern white viewer who is at once asked to identify with his perspective and to censure his cruel power. Sitting at the apex of the image's inverted triangular spatial layout (the dome, the ship, and the slaveholder), the slaveholder mediates between the image's two opposing sides, the ship of slavery and the dome of freedom. In actively refusing the slaveholder's direction and allowing their eyes to fly up to the flag, taking refuge in its more benevolent power, viewers enact their alle-

giance to anti-slavery. In doing so, they gain a perspective that is not only morally

innocent but also supported by the power of the state.

By utilizing national icons of liberty - the flag, the Capitol, and the eagle - as

emblems of its cause, anti-slavery appropriated the state's aerial perspective and

its political authority. The Genius of Universal Emancipation, for instance, utilized

the Capitol dome and the eagle on its masthead in the late 1820s.17 Both are icons

of federal power (the eagle carries e pluribus unum in its talons). By suturing anti-slavery authority to centralized power, these images accrue influence for

anti-slavery and directly align Northern interests with this cause. The Genius of Universal Emancipation's panoramic image of the slave trade pits Southern

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imperial economic power (the slave ship) against Northern nationalism (the dome).18 Meant to impress upon the viewer the threat of Southern imperialism

to the country's nascent nationalism, the image argues that Northern interests

can only be upheld through the adoption of anti-slavery views. By associating those views with a particular viewpoint - the bird's-eye perspective of the eagle

or the panoramic view of the seat of power - anti-slavery provides its Northern

viewers a superior position from which to assert their dominance. The rays ema-

nating from the Capitol dome in the Genius of Universal Emancipation's masthead

project anti-slavery and the nation as frilly consolidated projects (still nascent formations in the late 1820s) by associating them with two power centers: the

sun (the curved dome with its rays looks like the sun emerging on the horizon)

as well as the omniscient eye of God (curved with lashes, it emanates the light of truth). The slaveholder may be in the center of the picture, directing the viewer's

gaze to follow his own toward the ship, but the ultimate eye of power lies hidden

behind the hills, occupying the place of the sun. By placing anti-slavery's power in the background rather than the foreground,

the image would seem to cede the center of the visual field to slavery. However, locating the anti-slavery perspective on the far horizon provides anti-slavery the

superior panoramic viewpoint: the more distance viewers have on the scene, the greater their comprehension and command. Situated high above in the hills, the dome provides an elevated yet far away vantage point from which Northern

viewers can look down upon the scene of slavery - casting aspersions on its lack

of liberty and offering sympathy to the suffering slave - and assert their powerful

benevolence. Separated by the hills, this panoramic viewpoint also keeps the viewer safely divided from the scene. Between its physical placement and its moral cover, the dome offers a protected perspective, free from implication in

the corrupt activities below. This vantage point reiterates Northern viewers' actual position: unlike the slaveholder who occupies the center of the picture, Northern viewers stand outside of its frame, looking at it. They may witness the scene of slavery, but they play no part in it except through their benevolent actions to end it.

This position of unimplicated power is further produced through the abstrac-

tion of anti-slavery's perspective into iconic symbols. Associated with national

emblems rather than specific figures, anti-slavery's panoramic perspective liber-

ates its viewers from their bodies, enabling their vision to fly free. Unlike the slave

who is fully embodied in the landscape or the slaveholder who remains embodied despite his access to an elevated point of view through his whip, the anti-slavery

viewers' eyes float powerfully over the landscape rather than being subjected to it.

Liberated from the body, anti-slavery viewers can adopt an omniscient yet inno-

cent perspective. Ungrounded, their perspective is both everywhere and nowhere.

Emancipated from the land - they are above it, not located in it as the slaveholder

is or pictured as working it like the slave - anti-slavery viewers also consolidate

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

their class status. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson's transparent eyeball, which con- ceptualized the middle-class subject as a disembodied, aerial observer (39), anti-slavery's panoramic perspective provides Northerners an abstracted view-

point from which to observe other people being subjugated to the land, and in

so doing, to affirm their own freedom from it. Moreover, by transforming the

landscape from a utilitarian space into an aesthetic object and by teaching its viewers to read the landscape symbolically, anti-slavery's panoramic views also

constructed their audience as the cultural elite. For, as Angela Miller argues, the "ability to appreciate the landscape as an aesthetic commodity emerged as a defining attribute of an urban middle-class market-oriented public" ("Landscape" 342). The slaveholder may wear the top hat in the image, but it is the middle-class Northern viewer with his limitless view and untainted perspec-

tive, his association with centralized power and acts of moral benevolence, who gains the superior social position.

The image, however, works to occlude Northern power. By abstracting anti- slavery's viewpoint, it also naturalizes it as transparent. The image, which seems

to be first and foremost about slavery and the unveiling of its cruel practices, actu-

ally covers for another agenda: the identification of anti-slavery with Northern

nationalism and the consolidation of the white, Northern, middle-class subject

as all-powerful. By providing Northerners a perspective through which to consol-

idate their class status as well as their economic and political interests, anti- slavery installs itself as a driving force of middle-class culture. Moreover, by eliding the ways in which Northern identity is also constructed through race,

anti-slavery provides moral cover for this constitution of power. Anti-slavery is successful precisely because it makes the construction of Northern whiteness

invisible. Rather than undoing slavery's visual complex, then, anti-slavery appro- priates its structures to secure white Northern power and privilege.

Not all anti-slavery images, however, allow the North's power to remain invis-

ible or its viewers to evade implication. The cover image for The American Anti-

Slavery Almanac for 1843 (1842), edited by Lydia Maria Child, presents a familiar,

yet starkly different panoramic picture (see Figure 4). It utilizes the same stock

figures - the Capitol dome with the flag on top, the tortured slave lying prone in the landscape, and the eagle of power - but with a crucial difference: there

is no slaveholder in this picture to take the brunt of the blame. Rather, it is the eagle, with its strong talons and aggressively pointed beak, who is the figure

of cruelty and oppression. The eagle is no longer the benevolent figure of protec-

tion (the slave mother plays that role to her child) but the instrument of torture,

creating the scars on the slave's back instead of the whip. Its horizontally linear

head and wings visually press the slave down, holding her to the ground. Powerfully embodied, the eagle is not an abstracted emblem in this image but

a bird catching its prey. Having landed on the ground, it no longer flies above and apart but is fully engaged in the scene. The viewer may still have access to

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Figure 4. Front Cover of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for ¡843 (1842). Image courtesy: American Antiquarian Society.

the .flag's more innocent and elevated bird's-eye view in the distance, but it remains an ideal perspective yet to be achieved. The Capitol dome in the back-

ground, like the ironic poem below the image, which states, "Oh, hail Columbia! Happy land! The cradle land of Liberty!" marks the distance between

the nation's realities and its ideals. The flag, situated above the eagle's head rather

than the slave's, beckons the eagle upward, perhaps urging it to carry the slave and her child to freedom. While the background image may promise Northern

viewers a panoramic perspective through their adoption of anti-slavery views and actions, it resists providing that perspective's innocent position by fore- grounding Northerners' complicity with the slaveholder's powerful sight lines. Moreover, unlike most anti-slavery images, it provides the slave with the ability

to look back. Pictured as reverse images of each other - the eagle has a white head and black body, whereas the slave has a black head and white dress - the

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

Figure 5. Back Cover of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1843 (1842). Image courtesy; American

Antiquarian Society.

slave and eagle meet each other's eyes at similar heights. The eagle may be on top,

but the slave is looking back, not down. Rather than passively waiting for the North to emancipate her, she stares at the eagle, exposing the contradiction between the North's action (or inaction) and its ideals. If the power struggle between North and South, flag and whip, occurs in the realm of abstraction above

the head of the black body in previous images, here Northern power is staged

on the black body. Trained throughout anti-slavery iconography to identify with the eagle, viewers here become the object of their own gaze. In refusing view-

ers the protection of the eagle eye's panoptic position - to see without being seen - the image implicates its viewers in the scene of slavery, unmasking their

sympathy as voyeurism. The back cover of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac heightens this visual

critique by figuring the flag as a whipping post (see Figure 5).19 Here the flag

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is firmly planted in the ground rather than located above. The flag takes the position of the whip in this image. Its stripes, as the poem below makes clear,

are a metonymy for the scars the whip inflicts; its unfurling in the wind is similar

in shape to the serpentine outline of the raised whip. The flag, with its horizontal

stripes and its tied rope, also oppresses and imprisons the slave. Northern liberty,

as symbolized by the flag's white stars, exists not only above but also alongside

Southern slavery, as signified by the black stars of "shame." Unlike the flag- versus-whip images, which present an opposition between North and South, free- dom and oppression, this image of the flag-as-whip (or liberty pole as whipping

post) internalizes that conflict within the flag itself - the stars of the white man's

liberty are connected to the stripes of the slave's servitude. The only way to access

the bird's-eye view in this image is through the liberty cap located at the top of the

flag/liberty pole. This cap, which hovers high above the slave's upturned head

ratifier than sitting squarely on it, symbolizes the promise of emancipation. However, rather than emblematize or enable his liberty, the flag visually blocks

the slave's view of it. The flag-as-whip, covered in stripes (or lashes) and stars

of shame, actively impedes the slave's access to the aerial viewpoint of freedom

by tying him down. In claiming the cap's vantage point, not only will the slave become free but the flag, no longer hovering oppressively over the slave in bond-

age, will also reclaim its symbolic status. Rather than constructing white freedom

through the oppression of blackness, this image argues that Northern whites can

only fully embrace their liberty when blacks do so as well. As The American Anti-Slavery Almanac's more radical imagery makes clear,

the whip and the flag are not so different. Their visual resemblance (both wave in the wind) underscores the similarity between the specifically white panoramic

perspectives they produce. Each image frames the slave horizontally from above,

forcing his gaze down and trapping him within the landscape. Each subjugates the

slave in order to assert its own power. Cruelty and benevolence encode a similar

power dynamic. In both cases, the black body becomes a vessel for white privi-

lege. The slave who bows under the whip and the slave who bends under the domed curvature of the Genius of Universal Emancipation's kneeling slave mast-

head are refused access to an aerial perspective.2 Anti-slaver/ s curvature of power, its arched perspective of liberty, is simply a softer version of slavery's

harsh horizontal lines of oppression. Whether through scopic surveillance or spectatorial sympathy, the slave remains the object of the gaze.

How, then, did black subjects gain access to the visual field and look back? How did they also inhabit the powerful panoramic perspective? The answer is, of course, not a simple one.21 As slave narratives, from Moses Roper's with its

spectacular images of torture to Harriet A. Jacobs's with its garret panopticon,22

make clear, gaining a panoramic perspective was difficult for the slave under the

scopic regime of slavery. Moreover, once free, former slaves also had to negotiate

a vexed visual field that frequently sought to limit their liberty. Often dependent

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

upon images already in circulation for their texts, former slaves such as Henry

Bibb, who reproduced a variety of earlier abolitionist images in his slave narra-

tive, or William Wells Brown, who reprinted more critical images from Child's

The American Anti-Slavery Almanac on the front and back cover of his songbook

The Anti-Slavery Harp (1848), worked to "recast ... the established illustrational

and graphic codes which permeate white abolition publication" (M. Wood, Blind

118). Like their white counterparts, black anti-slavery activists both critiqued the

panoramic perspective and appropriated it.

African American use of the panoramic perspective is particularly evident in

the slave narrative, which, like the moving panorama, often consists of a series

of sketches of the landscape and makes a strong claim for verisimilitude. The

preface to Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (1837), for instance, states that the narrative will "introduce the reader ... to a view of the cotton fields, and

exhibit, not to his imagination, but to his very eyes, the mode of life to which the slaves on the southern plantations must conform" (12). Ball's narrative also

depicts his freedom as dependent upon achieving a panoramic perspective: he negotiates the landscape that seeks to imprison him (he describes it as fraught

with difficulty, darkness, and confusion) by climbing trees to gain knowledge of

and hence mastery over the topography. That perspective, however, is danger- ous and contingent. His pursuers not only look for him in trees, but he must always return to the ground to continue his journey North under the cover of

darkness. In order to gain a view, he must expose himself to filli view. Moreover, his view, like his freedom, is fleeting: he is constantly recaptured and placed back under the watchful eyes of jailers and overseers. When he does

make his final escape, it is in the hold of a ship where he must lie next to cotton

bales in full darkness until he arrives in Philadelphia. Replicating the middle passage and its curtailment of vision, Ball's liberation ends not with a celebra-

tion of his freedom but with the recognition of his scopic powerlessness: he laments that he is "without the least hope of ever again seeing [his] wife and children" (517, emphasis added). During his escape, Ball may gain momentary access to panoramic views that help to liberate him from the landscape of slav- ery, but finally, he is unable to escape slavery's scopic power or abstract himself

into freedom like the white anti-slavery viewer. His view is still grounded in his

body. Despite its achievement of a bird's-eye view, the slave's perspective remains embodied. As both object and subject of the narrative, even after attain-

ing freedom, the former slave continues to be a participant observer. He may be able, as a wide range of black panoramists did in the late 1840s and 1850s,23 to

adopt the panoramic perspective by depicting the landscape of slavery for others to see, but he remains securely within the picture's frame. As activist and slave, authoritative eyewitness and runaway, the slave narrator exhibits a double vision.

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While the slave's embodied position is one obstacle to the attainment of the

bird's-eye view, the Northern white power structure's unwillingness to allow blacks full access to that perspective is another. As Frederick Douglass makes clear in his narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), the panoramic per- spective remains the purview of the white subject in the North, just as it was in the

South. In the chapter "Liberty Attained," Douglass depicts his escape from slavery

through the fantastical image of balloon flight: "Disappearing from the kind reader, in a flying cloud or balloon, (pardon the figure,) driven by the wind, and knowing not where I should land - whether in slavery or in freedom" (335-36), he alights in New York "safe and sound, without loss of blood or bone"

after his "bold and perilous" flight. Once again, freedom is associated with the

perspectivai position of the panorama. By taking flight in a balloon, Douglass is able to throw off, much as a balloonist would his ballast, slavery's "heavy chain,

with a huge block attached to it" (336) that had dragged him down for so long.

Flight allows him to break free of the chain as well as the frame of slavery. By

taking to the sky, he escapes the oppressive landscape figured in the panoramic

pictures that introduce the first part of his narrative, "Life as a Slave" (1855) (see

Figure 6). This triptych depicts the slaveholder's absolute power in scopic terms:

the runaway slave at the top, who is trapped in the landscape as he runs through

foliage into a wall of darkness, is pursued by dogs and shot at by the scopic power

of the slave hunter's rifle; in the center image, the auctioneer stands high on the

block above the downward-looking slave, a raised mallet in his hand, in front of

the Capitol dome with its flag waving on top; and in the bottom landscape, the

slave master sits high on his horse, his two-story house behind him and a low-

standing slave cabin before him. The flags that flank the central image on either

side like spears are less beacons of hope and more signs of military power and white oppression. Like the Capitol dome in the center image, which acts as a backdrop to the scene of selling, the American flag, which peeks out from behind

two blank white flags, is allied with the power of whiteness and offers no redress

for the slave. Only by appropriating the balloon's superior bird's-eye view can

Douglass rise above slavery's powerful perspective and claim his freedom. By leaving the slaveholder in the dark, ignorant of his actual means of escape, Douglass is able to obscure the slaveholder's sight lines. Placed in the slave's visionless position, the slaveholder is "left to feel his way in the dark" and to "imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors, ever ready to

snatch, from his infernal grasp, his trembling prey" (324). However, according to Douglass, the attainment of the panoramic perspective

is fleeting, if not illusory, for the slave. First, the balloon is not a place of com- mand or control. Douglass describes the journey as perilous and the balloon as beyond his ability to direct. Driven by the wind, the balloon might as easily carry

him back to slavery as to freedom. Pictured as a "flying cloud" (My 335), the bal-

loon fails to provide an unobstructed panoramic view. By figuring his access to

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

Figure 6. Nathaniel Orr, "Life as a Slave" (1855), woodcut engraving. Douglass, My 33a. Image cour-

tesy: American Antiquarian Society.

the bird's-eye view of freedom through the embodied perspective and dangerous realities of balloon flight, Douglass critiques the very premises of the panoramic

perspective: that it can ever be disembodied, omniscient, or passively experi- enced. Second, once he arrives in New York, Douglass is quickly brought back down to earth. Despite having the "free earth under [his] feet" (336), he quickly finds that he is "still in an enemy's land" (337). The landscape of the urban North,

he argues, is as hostile as that of the rural South. Populated by slave catchers and

free blacks who will betray him, the North sits in the shadow of slavery. In the North, Douglass seems at first to attain the position of the viewing subject. Joining the hurrying throng to "gaz[e] upon the dazzling wonders of

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Broadway," Douglass becomes an urban flâneur. He represents the urban North as providing both a new social field and subjectivai perspective: "A new world burst upon my agitated vision" (336). His ability to negotiate this new visual ter-

rain remains tricky. Wandering the crowded streets of New York, Douglass is not

only cut free from the landscape he knows and the power structures he under-

stands, but his sight lines are also cut off. He loses "sight" of his only guide among

the throng and, once alone, becomes "an easy prey to the kidnappers" (338). It is

only once he is introduced to David Ruggles, secretary of the New York Committee of Vigilance, who becomes to Douglass as "[ejyes to the blind," that

he feels safe (341). Freedom, like slavery, Douglass argues, is a hostile landscape

with limited sight lines that require constant scopic negotiation.

Douglass's ability as author, if not as character, to master these negotiations is

made clear in the way that he figures his escape for Northern readers. In depicting

his escape as a balloon flight, he not only refuses, as he does in the Narrative of the

Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), to disclose to the reader his actual mode of liberation - thereby protecting his escape route for other slaves

and distinguishing himself from self-serving white anti-slavery activists who pub-

lish such accounts as a way to assert their victory over the slaveholder - but he

also places himself above and beyond the reader's line of sight.24 Rebuffing his

readers' gaze, he places himself outside of their view. Refusing to occupy the tra-

ditional position of the runaway in the landscape, he resists being re-imprisoned

within anti-slavery's iconography or by his Northern readers' voyeurism. In fore-

grounding to his "kind readerļs]" his use of metaphor by politely asking them to

"pardon the figure" of the balloon, Douglass asserts his right to his readers' class

position as well as their perspective. Through his metaphorical bird's-eye view,

Douglass performs the genteel class position of the lettered author, and in so doing claims the same cultural authority and social status as his white middle-

class reader. Moreover, as the maker of metaphors, Douglass is able to write himself out of embodiment and into abstraction. Through his mastery of language, he claims - even as he critiques it as fantastical - his Northern white

readers' bird's-eye view. Douglass's narrative performs this scopic power play in image as well as word.

The triptych that faces his chapter "Liberty Attained" and announces the second

part of the narrative, "Life as a Freeman" (1855), pictures the panorama - and its

perspective - as the exclusive domain of whites (see Figure 7).25 Serving as a mir-

ror image to the original triptych of slavery, this illustration's upper image rep- resents the North as an industrious site of technology in the form of the train and

canal system along with the telegraph wire; in the middle image of the market

square (the buying of livestock rather than slaves), the North is associated with commerce, while it is connected to education in the bottom image of a school. The

church spires in the bottom two images and the lighthouse on the far horizon in the top image represent the North as a moral light of freedom. Lady Liberty,

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

Figure 7. Nathaniel Orr, "Life as a Freeman" (1855), woodcut engraving. Douglass, My 334a. Image courtesy: American Antiquarian Society.

sitting to the right of the central image in her flowing white robes and with her

liberty pole topped by a liberty cap and a shield that is decorated like the flag, emblematizes the soft benevolence of Northern freedom. The farmer to the left

of the central image, who works alongside his horses rather than sitting on them

like the slaveholder, a whip in his hand, embodies a landscape of free rather than

slave labor. Framed as a panorama and inviting that perspective, these images present the North to the Northern viewer as a bucolic scene of white nationalism

(the sheet that hangs from the line in the center oval and breaks its frame resem-

bles, with its stripes, the flag). Indeed, there are no black figures in these pictures.

The emancipated slave remains excluded from this space. The only visible figure of blackness in the image is the haunting shadow of slavery that lingers beneath

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G o d d u

the liberty cap. With her shield and her liberty pole that resembles the spears of

the earlier image, Lady Liberty defends the stars and stripes of white freedom

against slavery's lurking shadow. Through its exclusion of blackness, this image

critiques, as does the chapter that follows, the North's unwillingness to extend

liberty and its perspective to blacks. The liberty cap may represent the slave's

manumission, but it remains symbolic rather than actualized in the picture.26 Through the juxtaposition of black word to white image, the narrative discloses

the panorama's perspective to be largely self-reflective. Rather than providing a

window onto another world, the panorama acts as a mirror, reflecting back to its

viewer, in its oversized form, an inflated self-image.

In the chapter that follows, Douglass punctures his white Northern readers'

self-regard with his scathing critique of Northern racism and with his relegation of the Northern subject to the position of scopic object. Situated in a balloon on

the page facing the image, Douglass not only becomes a viewing subject but specifically looks down upon the Northern landscape on the facing page. The Northern subject, rather than the slave, becomes the object of the gaze. Douglass turns his exclusion from the picture to his advantage. Located outside of the frame, he gains the superior view that once belonged exclusively to the

white Northern subject. In disembodying the black perspective while also embodying the white Northern subject, Douglass turns the tables. As a character

within his story, Douglass may still be at the mercy of Northern whites who try to

circumscribe his perspective by excluding him from the train's panoramic view

or by undercutting his right to stand up high on the speaker's platform, but by

turning Northern subjects into the object of his gaze and hijacking their bird's-

eye view, the authorial Douglass claims his right to look. Moreover, by insisting

that the white freeman "cannot see things in the same light with the slave," that he

cannot "look from the same point from which the slave does" (My 339), Douglass

asserts the slave's viewpoint to be autonomous and unique. Douglass's narrative, then, works to disclose the racialized hegemony of the

panoramic perspective and to appropriate its power - however fantastical - for

the black viewing subject. He makes clear that the panoramic perspective is never

transparent or innocent, even as he insists upon the black subject's right to its

scopic power. More a projection than an actual position, Douglass argues, the panoramic perspective is at once imaginary and extremely powerful By critiquing

that perspective even as he adopts it, Douglass troubles - even if he is not fully able to reframe - the dominant field of vision. In laying bare the scopic power

inherent in white mastery, both North and South, Douglass disrupts the visual

hegemony by looking back. Anti-slavery's visual culture, then, is a contested one. While its dominant

mode, established by the AASS in the 1830s, appropriates and redeploys the scopic structures of slavery in order to assert Northern superiority and the power

of whiteness, it also contains strong critiques of this visual narrative from both

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

white and black activists. By identifying anti-slaver/ s crucial contributions to the

politics of sight and the formation of class in the antebellum era, we see how the

visual system of the plantation complex was imported into and extended by the

North. Slavery and anti-slavery worked similarly to configure visuality as a mode

of white power. Yet by looking at the ways in which anti-slavery's visual narrative

was interrupted, parodied, contested, and critiqued, we also begin to identify the

practices that can disrupt this alignment. As Douglass shows, though, these dis-

ruptions are difficult to sustain - or even to make visible - since they are often

figured only through their haunting absence. The panoramic perspective may be illusory, a fantasy of superiority, a projection of control, a dream of innocence, but its power to frame reality and construct subjectivity made it a nec-

essary mode for black activists to inhabit, deploy, and resist.

Notes

I wish to express my gratitude to Shawn Michelle Smith, Martha J. Cutter, and

the two anonymous readers for their careful comments. Thanks also to Dana

D. Nelson, Mark Schoenfield, Catherine A. Molineux, and the participants of Vanderbilt University's 2012-13 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on "The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World" for their helpful feedback.

1. For critical assessments of the visual culture of the American anti-slavery move-

ment, see Radiclani Clytus, Jennifer Juanita Harper, Phillip Lapsansky, Maurie D.

Mclnnis, Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., Marcus Wood (Blind), and Jean Fagan Yellin.

2. For discussions of the development of vision and visual technologies specific to the antebellum United States, see Laura Schiavo and Peter John Brownlee.

3. There is an extensive body of criticism that argues for the panorama's centrality

to the visual culture of the nineteenth century and its production of new types of

citizens and subjects. See, for instance, the standard histories by Richard D.

Altick and Stephan Oettermann along with work by Tanya Agathocleous, Wendy Bellion, Alison Byerly, Bernard Comment, William H. Galperin, Angela

Miller ("Panorama"), and Gillen D'Arcy Wood. 4. For an extended discussion of the panoramic perspective, see Byerly

("Prodigious"; Are 29-82). 5. Oettermann, for instance, argues that the panorama was an "apparatus for teach-

ing and glorifying the bourgeois view of the world" (7).

6. The role of race in the consolidation of class more broadly in the nineteenth-

century United States has been addressed by a number of historians and literary

critics such as Eric Lott, David R. Roediger, and Alexander Saxton.

7. My argument builds on the work of Saidiya V. Hartman, who discloses "the sav-

age encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent,

and protection" (5).

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Goddu

8. See David Morgan for a discussion of this cultural belief (6).

9. The scrolling panorama became popular in the United States during the antebel-

lum period. Called "moving panoramas," they contained a series of connected scenes that unwound from two spools before a stationary viewer. An early

form of cinema, the moving panorama was one of the first forms of visual

mass media in the United States. The definitive work on the moving panorama is Erkki Huhtamo's Illusions in Motion (2013). For other discussions of the mov-

ing panorama, see Oettermann (63-66), Miller ("Panorama"), and Byerly {Are 41-47).

10. See Oettermann (38-41) for the history of the simultaneous emergence of the two

modes. Albert Boime names the panorama's superior viewpoint the "magisterial

gaze" and argues that, as a specifically American perspective, it "embodied the

exaltation of a cultured American elite before the illimitable horizon that they

identified with the destiny of the American nation" (38).

1 1 . A Bird's Eye View of American Slavery was first advertised in The Emancipator on

October 12, 1837. 1 have been unable to find an extant copy, but the advertise-

ments for it supply some information. Compiled by N. Southard (editor of several

issues of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac) and available from R. G. Wilhams,

publishing agent of the AASS, as well as from Isaac Knapp in Boston, the print

was clearly a production of the AASS. One advertisement also gives some insight

into how it was circulated. The Emancipator states: "It ought to be placed in every

shop, store, and public place, to remind us of the groans of the slave, which are

going up to God and calling for vengeance upon this guilty nation" ("All").

12. In addition, Miller argues that the panorama's assimilative knowledge is a marker of social class. The panorama's seamless movement from "the particular

to the general" or the "local to the transcendent" required an "aesthetic intelli-

gence marked by social class - literate and genteel, at several removes from

die crassly utilitarian" ("Everywhere" 214). 13. The Genius of Universal Emancipation ran semi-continuously from 1821 to 1839.

This particular image was reproduced in February 1823 above an ongoing column tided "The Black List," which in this issue offered evidence about the

"detestable traffic" of the internal slave trade ("Detestable").

14. See Marcy J. Dinius for a discussion of the visuality of font in the Genius

of Universal Emancipation as well as the radical type of abolitionist texts more

generally.

15. For a more general discussion of how "benevolent whiteness" was constructed in

the antebellum era, see Susan M. Ryan (5).

16. The Genius of Universal Emancipation describes this image as a copperplate

engraving, executed by "one of our ingenious Baltimore artists, from a design

furnished by the editor, and drawn by a young gentieman of this city." Prepared expressly for the Genius of Universal Emancipation , it was also available

"separately, on fine paper, with or without frames" (July 1830).

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Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

17. The Capitol masthead began July 4, 1827 and ran until the eagle masthead replaced it on September 2, 1829 (running until March 5, 1830).

18. Miller argues that Northern nationalism was crystallized through landscape and

discusses the "politicization of the landscape under the pressures of sectional- ism" (Empire 6).

19. Some scholars attribute this image to Patrick H. Reason, a black engraver who

was best known for his engraving of the kneeling slave titled "Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?" (1835). However, I have found no evidence to substantiate this attribution.

20. The kneeling slave masthead ran from April through September 1830.

21. There is a rich field of criticism that investigates how African Americans engage

the visual. For example, see Sarah Blackwood, Michael A. Chaney, Nicole R.

Fleetwood, Maurice 0. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, and Ivy G. Wilson. 22. See Chaney for a reading of Harriet A. Jacobs's panopticon (148-75).

23. Black anti-slavery activists such as William Wells Brown, Henry "Box" Brown,

James Presley Ball, and Anthony Burns toured both the northern United States

and England with panoramas of slavery. For discussions of how African Americans adopted the panorama form, see Daphne A. Brooks (66-130), Chaney (113-47), Clytus ("Envisioning" 194-270), Shelly Jarenski, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff.

24. Frederick Douglass critiques those who expose how slaves escape, stating that the "good resulting from such avowals, is of very questionable character. It

may kindle an enthusiasm, very pleasant to inhale; but that is of no practical ben-

efit to ... the slaves escaping - In publishing such accounts, the anti-slavery man addresses the slaveholder, not the slave' y (My 324).

25. Lisa Brawley argues that these images depict "the generic iconography of white

nationalism and portray a narrative of progress from which [Douglass] is excluded" (120). Brawley provides a detailed reading of how Douglass appropri-

ates the "descriptive power of the tourist in order to challenge a reconfigured national landscape into being" (124).

26. Marcus Wood shows how the liberty cap is taken from the slave and given to the

white female abstraction of freedom within Adantic emancipation propaganda in

order to retain freedom as the "property of the dominant white society" (Horrible

51). More generally, Wood argues that the "liberation fantasy" of freedom, gifted

by empowered possessors to the disempowered slave, is a self-serving rhetoric that reinforces white hegemony (2).

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Contents

p. 12
p. 13
p. 14
p. 15
p. 16
p. 17
p. 18
p. 19
p. 20
p. 21
p. 22
p. 23
p. 24
p. 25
p. 26
p. 27
p. 28
p. 29
p. 30
p. 31
p. 32
p. 33
p. 34
p. 35
p. 36
p. 37
p. 38
p. 39
p. 40
p. 41

Issue Table of Contents

MELUS, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 2014) pp. 1-261

Front Matter
Guest Editor's Introduction: Visual Culture and Race [pp. 1-11]
Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective [pp. 12-41]
"Making Good Use of Our Eyes": Nineteenth-Century African Americans Write Visual Culture [pp. 42-65]
Parallax, Transit, Transmotion: Reading Race in the Allotment Photographs of E. Jane Gay [pp. 66-92]
"Unashamedly Black": Jim Crow Aesthetics and the Visual Logic of Shame [pp. 93-114]
Seeing "As Others See Us": The "Chicago Defender" Cartoonist Jay Jackson as Cultural Critic [pp. 115-120]
Drawing Offensive/Offensive Drawing: Toward a Theory of Mariconógraphy [pp. 121-152]
The Optical Revolution of ADÁL's "Los Out of Focus Nuyoricans" [pp. 153-156]
Representational Static: Visual Slave Narratives of Contemporary Art [pp. 157-187]
Witnessing and Wounding in Suzan-Lori Parks's "Venus" [pp. 188-207]
"Dyaspora" All Up in the Mix: Jean-Ulrick Désert, Mapping Fragmented Archaeologies [pp. 208-210]
The Empire Sings Back: Glee's "Queer" Materialization of Filipina/o America [pp. 211-234]
Reviews

Review: untitled [pp. 235-237]
Review: untitled [pp. 238-240]
Review: untitled [pp. 241-243]
Review: untitled [pp. 244-246]
Review: untitled [pp. 247-249]
Review: untitled [pp. 250-252]
Review: untitled [pp. 253-255]

Contributors [pp. 256-259]
Journal Information [pp. 260-260]
Submission Information [pp. 261-261]
Back Matter