Emancipation’s Encounters: The Meaning of Freedom from the Pages of Civil War Sketchbooks

Abstract

The sketchbooks of Civil War-era soldiers and sailors offer a rich and largely untapped opportunity to explore one point of view in the complex drama that was emancipation. As complex as letters and diaries, the drawings of self-taught artists capture the questions that surrounded many sorts of encounters between Union men and enslaved and formerly enslaved people throughout the South. These images are striking for what they generally omit. Absent are representations based upon popular caricature techniques. Instead, sketch artists most often used their talents to carefully render black Americans as individuals rather than parodies. They also omitted antislavery’s visual tropes of punishment and the auction. These autonomous figures suggested a future for black Americans free from the express direction of whites. Most significantly, sketchbook images vividly expose the questions Union men held about who African Americans were and who they might be after slavery and with freedom. Their questions were about freedom, citizenship, and how the body politic of a post-slavery society might be organized. Their answers are more difficult to categorize. At their most insightful, sketchbook images reflect the multi-layered ambivalences that cast a shadow over the freedom claimed by African Americans. Depictions of African American dignity and competence are interwoven with images of ridicule and racism. Their visually rendered vignettes were part of personal reflections, camaraderie and curiosity in the field, and the raw materials of memory in the postwar decades. Emancipation’s encounters were one subject that few sketch artists would miss.