Early Representations of African Americans in Currier & Ives' Prints

     Currier & Ives (1835-1907) was a print firm that created hand-painted images of life in the United States. For most of its history the firm was owned and managed by two men: Nathaniel Currier (1813-1888) and James Merritt Ives (1824-1895). Ives did not join the firm until 1857, thus all the images produced before this date are marked “Lith & Pub. By N. Currier.” The prints, known as lithographs, were made via a process of drawing on stones, applying ink to the image, then pressing paper onto it in order to make a copy—a quick process that enabled the firm to rapidly create and cheaply print mass produced images which portrayed a vast array of subjects and topics. [1]

     These pictures were always commercial, never “arty,” and were marketed initially towards to the new white middle class created by the Market Revolution of the early nineteenth century. [2] Indeed, most of the scenes Currier & Ives made were idealized images of a white America. The themes generally reflected notions of prosperity, wealth, leisure, military victory and paternalist grandeur (the Founding Fathers and presidents were especially popular), pastoral life, and the Victorian trinity of home, Christian devotion, and motherhood as well as the Cult of Domesticity. [3] Currier & Ives also produced comics and political satire, often portraying immigrants, Native Americans, Asians, and especially African Americans as foolish, naïve, and disorderly.

     In 1845, at the suggestion of abolitionists such as Horace Greely, Nathaniel Currier created the print Branding Slaves on the Coast of Africa Previous to Embarkation (1845) [4]—the only image the firm would ever produce that honestly portrayed the terrifying and horrid conditions suffered by enslaved blacks. [5] This lithograph, apparently, was not a best-seller. Bryan F. Le Beau in his Currier & Ives: American Imagined writes that the company’s “notable silence on slavery following publication of Branding Slaves spoke legions.” [6] In short: the white American middle class did not seem interested in purchasing such contentious pictures; nor, perhaps, did they appreciate the sympathetic view toward slavery put forth in the image itself. As a commercial enterprise catering to the whims of a white audience, Currier & Ives knew that there was danger in producing unpopular themes—and a particular risk of alienating customers in the slaveholding South. [7] Remarking on the prints of the pre-Civil War period, Harry T. Peters writes that it is “surprising to discover that the subject of emancipation, which was receiving universal attention at that time, was almost completely neglected by the firm.” [8] However, taking into consideration the dominant cultural motif and national presence of white supremacy during the period, it actually seems hardly surprising. There simply was not a market for abolitionist images such as Branding Slaves.

     Le Beau mentions in his article “African Americans in Currier & Ives’s America: The Darktown Series” how the firm in subsequent prints “drew slaves back into the environment” and placed them “strategically” among whites so that they become “nearly invisible in a typical plantation scene.” This would continue in post-Reconstruction prints, where blacks are pictured laboring in southern cotton fields or dancing and playing music in front of idealized slave cabins in prints such as A Cotton Plantation on the Mississippi (1884) (Fig. 1) [9] and The Old Plantation Home (1872) (Fig. 2) [10]. These could very easily be construed as antebellum views of slavery and race relations. [11] In its political cartoons, however, Currier & Ives were much more blatantly racist. An Heir to the Throne, or The Next Republican Candidate (1860) (Fig. 3) [12] depicts a black man with a malformed head leaning on a stick before Barnum’s American Museum. He is flanked by Horace Greely and Abraham Lincoln, who are praising the man as a “virtue of Black Republicanism” and an “intellectual and noble creature” who could “run as our next candidate for the presidency” while the black man, who states “What, can dey be?” is portrayed as baffled by what Greely and Lincoln are saying.

References

1. Harry T. Peters. Currier & Ives: Printmakers to the American People. (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1942), 2. 

2. Peters, 2.

3. Peters, 2. 

4. Currier & Ives. Branding Slaves, On the Coast of Africa Previous to Embarkation., 1845. Harry T. Peters, Currier & Ives: Printmakers to the American People, Plate 81.

5. Walton Rawls, The Great Book of Currier & Ives’ America, (New York: Abbeville Press, 1979), 19.

6. Le Beau, Currier & Ives: America Imagined, 218.

7. Walton Rawls, The Great Book of Currier & Ives’ America, 19.

8. Peters, Currier & Ives: Printmakers to the American People, 39. 

9. Currier & Ives. A cotton plantation on the Mississippi., 1884. [New York: Currier & Ives] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/91722891/.

10. Currier & Ives. The Old Plantation Home., ca. 1872. [New York: Currier & Ives.] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2001700365/.

11. Bryan F. Le Beau. “African Americans in Currier and Ives’s America: The Darktown Series”, Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 19, no.1 (2001), 72. https://doi-org.ezproxy.bgsu.edu/10.1111/j.1537-4726.2000.2301_71.x.

12. Currier & Ives, and Louis Maurer. An Heir to the Throne, or the Next Republican Candidate., ca. 1860. New York: Published by Currier & Ives. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003674574/.