Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

Abstract

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 extensive 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 society’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. … In consequence, they will make appeals through the eye to the 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 community,” as the Executive Committee of the AASS states (Wright). A central component of the anti-slavery appeal, the image provided both graphical accuracy and emotional effectiveness.