African Americans in Currier and Ives's America: The Darktown Series

Abstract

Today most Americans recognize them as creators of Christmas card and calendar Americana. In nineteenth century, however, and Ives called their company Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints. They proudly advertised themselves as the best, cheapest, and most popular firm in a democratic country, providing colored engravings for people. In process they created a legacy of over 7000 prints that sold in uncounted millions of copies-at one time 95% of all lithographs in circulation in United States (Currier and Ives I: xxxviii-xxxxi, Karshan 31). and Ives never intended to create or promote fine art, or even to produce prints of great value. Rather, they sought to produce images of nineteenth-- America that would be attractive to their largely middle-class clientele. As Harry T. Peters, most prominent collector of and Ives prints and related materials, wrote decades ago: Currier and Ives were businessmen and craftsmen ... but primarily they [were] mirrors of national taste, weather vanes of popular opinion, reflectors of American attitudes.... In their prints can be found whole florid panorama of our national life in mid-nineteenth century (Peters 7). and Ives created a pictorial record of nineteenth-century America, but not as conscious historians. They operated on terms buying public-certainly a huge number-would accept. By-and-large they avoided conflicting reality and controversy, and when persuaded to take a stand on such subjects, they chose the side of heaviest artillery. But they were not entirely positive, either. Many prints conveyed critical, negative, or at least cautionary messages, in obvious and subtle ways, again reflecting concerns or fears of their audience. This was especially true of and Ives's images of African Americans, few of which have been included in many published collections and retrospective exhibitions of past century. I do not have space-nor is it necessary-to review history of American attitudes toward African Americans in nineteenth century. Instead, I would like to briefly examine and Ives's representation of African Americans from 1840s through 1880s which, in fact, reflects that history in all its twists and turns and complexities. What we find in that fifty-year run of prints is an initial inclination to picture horror of slavery, from which company quickly retreated; withdrawal of African Americans into background of prints on life in antebellum America; their being summoned during 1850s, '60s, and '70s as cause of sectional politics and civil war; and finally, at end of century, their being pictured as completely incapable of advancing beyond their previous condition of servitude to live like civilized whites. My primary focus will be on final stage of this pictorial narrative as told in company's best-selling Darktown series-a large collection of prints all but unknown today. As one might expect, slavery was subject of hundreds of prints in antebellum period. The majority reflected prevailing stereotype, in North and South, of happy, contented slave, a laughing, simple-minded retainer who thrived under paternalism of his kindly master, and that, given his innate inferiority, was better off as part of South's institution than he would be in competitive, free-labor system in North (Thompson 283). Several artists were critical of South's peculiar institution. See, for example, David Claypoole Johnson's Early Development of Southern Chivalry (undated), in which a smiling Southern boy, much to amused admiration of his sister (holding a black doll by hair), whips a second black doll, stripped to waist and tied to chair (Williams 28). But they did not reflect majority opinion on slavery, even in North. …