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

Today most Americans recognize them as the creators of the Christmas card and calendar Americana. In the nineteenth century, however, Currier and Ives called their company "The 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 the people." In the process they created a legacy of over 7000 prints that sold in the uncounted millions of copies-at one time 95% of all lithographs in circulation in the United States (Currier and Ives I: xxxviii-xxxxi, Karshan 31). Currier 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-- century America that would be attractive to their largely middle-class clientele. As Harry T. Peters, the most prominent collector of Currier and Ives prints and related materials, wrote decades ago: "Currier and Ives were businessmen and craftsmen ... but primarily they [were] mirrors of the national taste, weather vanes of popular opinion, reflectors of American attitudes.... In their prints can be found the whole florid panorama of our national life in the mid-nineteenth century" (Peters 7). Currier and Ives created a pictorial record of nineteenth-century America, but not as conscious historians. They operated on terms the 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 the 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 the concerns or fears of their audience. This was especially true of Currier and Ives's images of African Americans, few of which have been included in the many published collections and retrospective exhibitions of the past century. I do not have the space-nor is it necessary-to review the history of American attitudes toward African Americans in the nineteenth century. Instead, I would like to briefly examine Currier and Ives's representation of African Americans from the 1840s through the 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 the horror of slavery, from which the company quickly retreated; the withdrawal of African Americans into the background of prints on life in antebellum America; their being summoned during the 1850s, '60s, and '70s as the cause of sectional politics and civil war; and finally, at the end of the 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 the final stage of this pictorial narrative as told in the company's best-selling Darktown series-a large collection of prints all but unknown today. As one might expect, slavery was the subject of hundreds of prints in the antebellum period. The majority reflected the prevailing stereotype, in the North and South, of the "happy, contented slave," a laughing, simple-minded retainer who thrived under the paternalism of his kindly master, and that, given his innate inferiority, was better off as part of the South's "peculiar institution" than he would be in the competitive, free-labor system in the North (Thompson 283). Several artists were critical of the 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 the amused admiration of his sister (holding a black doll by the hair), whips a second black doll, stripped to the waist and tied to the chair (Williams 28). But they did not reflect the majority opinion on slavery, even in the North. …