When 19th-century artists painted plantation scenes, they usually began with preparatory sketches made while standing in front of a planter’s house or somewhere slightly below it.
From either position, their gaze — and that of anyone who looked at their paintings — was necessarily directed upwards. Viewing a plantation house from that perspective, one experienced a sense of the presumed authority of its owner. Artists painting plantations rendered images as seen by an upturned face, one that implicitly signaled submission and respect.
As important as position and gaze were the features of content that artists decided to highlight. Especially revealing of planters’ concerns was the way in which slavery was depicted.
Any successful plantation needed a reliable source of manpower, and southern planters secured the workers they needed by purchasing Africans, and later African Americans, who as the victims of chattel slavery would become laborers for life.
Over the course of two and a half centuries, the approximately 500,000 persons brought from Africa would increase eightfold; by 1860, almost 4 million captive blacks were counted in the federal census. This sizable slave presence was not only an indicative feature of the American South but the definitive characteristic of a plantation.
Yet, prior to the Civil War, surprisingly few black figures appeared in plantation paintings. The exclusion of slaves from paintings of plantations was, like the choice of the view from below, a powerful tactic that artists used to suggest a planter’s undisputed command over his estate.
If there were no blacks to be seen in a plantation landscape, then white people, by default, would have to be recognized as the primary occupants. Images of rural estates that presented no black figures, or only a few, were intended to flatter planters and their families by offering them visual confirmation of their claims to power and authority.
Given that the fortunes of slaveholders were in fact dependent on the efforts of a black majority — a population that on several noteworthy occasions opposed their captivity with acts of full-scale rebellion — members of the planter class were perpetually plagued with feelings of anxiety.
The pervasive whiteness of an idealized planter’s prospect offered, at least in symbolic terms, a reduction of the ominous black threat. By rendering slaveholding estates in a manner that either hid or diminished the presence of African Americans, those paintings functioned as documents of denial. Such paintings offered a soothing propaganda that both confirmed and justified the social dominance of the planter class.
Excerpted by permission from
The Planter’s Prospect ($24.95)
by John Michael Vlach
University of North Carolina Press
P.O. Box 2288
Chapel Hill, NC 27515-2288.
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