as a racial group happened through a number of processes in the U.S. context, and slavery’s visual culture was one of them. Matthew Frye Jacobson describes the “making” of “Caucasians,” where the cultivation of White raciality “is not merely [about] how races are comprehended, but how they are seen.” Jacobson exposes the intertwining of citizenship with Whiteness in the nation’s founding documents, simultaneous to questions of immigration, naturalization, and the abolition of slavery.28 Connecting Whites and citizenship made ascending to Whiteness a politically salient project for immigrants. Over time, White bodies became unmarked by race as the “possessive investment in whiteness,” from the colonial period onward, happened through the articulation of non-Whiteness, through emphasis on the specificity of Native, African, Asian, and Mexican American bodies.29 The importance of distinction helped to obscure White raciality by rendering Whiteness as an achievement, by making “White” a thing of racial ascendance for European ethnic immigrants trying to assimilate. To be recognized as White was to be recognized in relation to both Black and White servitude. Of the vast number of unskilled Europeans who immigrated to the colonial United States, one-half to two-thirds of them sold themselves into indentured service for five to seven years, facing hardships similar to slavery on a day-to-day basis, notwithstanding the “length of bondage and the involuntary and hereditary nature of slavery” as a unique and unfortunate distinction for African descendants.30 White servants in the colonial United States often identified as English, Scots, Irish, and German immigrants, and they also ran away from servitude because of brutal punishment. The appearance of “white” skin helped many indentured servants escape, although, at times, Celtic accents or tattered clothing gave them away, leading to their recapture.31 Nonetheless, these instances reveal how tracking down Whites to reinstitute their servitude required attending to multiple characteristics besides the appearance of the body. So while some would-be Whites could not instantly lay claim to slavery’s organization of White invisibility, the ability to call on the privileges of Whiteness in social interaction and, more importantly, the ability to be seen as other than a “slave” brought some degree of leverage for European immigrants that people of African descent were not afforded. A White “convict servant maid, named SARAH WILSON” ran away from her master and changed her name to “lady Susanna Carolina Matilda,” which she offered to make “the public believe that she was his Majesty’s sister.” Along with the name change, Sarah/Susanna made her clothes “with a Crown and a B” to support her story.32 Sarah/Susanna could move into another kind of visibility in the context of the colonial United States, transitioning from the object of surveillance to presenting herself as fit for observing others.
The remarkable White runaway Benjamin Franklin provides another useful example of how some indentured servants could utilize the visual apparatus of slavery to their advantage. Franklin’s body was rife for surveillance when he suffered a brutal apprenticeship under his brother James Franklin of Boston. Like other White indentured servants, Franklin lived under conditions that inherently involved scrutiny and management by some other more powerful person. However, Franklin quickly took to self-invention and began to act as free during his brother’s incarceration for printing seditious comments in his own newspaper. Franklin’s White privilege enabled him to establish relationships with other Whites and flee to Philadelphia under the auspices of “being” a free man.33 The idea of Franklin’s White body created opportunities for other kinds of visibilities, apart from servitude, allowing him to run away and pass into a class of seemingly self-made free White men. Franklin navigated the early republic as a nondescript, free White, and not simply a European ethnic, because of the ways in which the public received Whiteness in a slave society. Not only could he refuse the positions of surveillance that came along with servitude, but he could also presume visibility at his pleasure. When Franklin decided to publish essays and put his name on the masthead in his brother’s New England Courier newspaper, he assumed a right to be seen as a free White man, even as he remained unfree on paper.34 Franklin’s servitude and his freedom demonstrate how, although not every European descendant automatically achieved the full privileges allotted to Whiteness on a spectrum of race, they also were not visually barred from national inclusion solely and permanently on the basis of skin color. Franklin moved from indentured to free because he could rely on a viewing public to treat him as free, despite what his brother might say. White servitude illustrates ownership as a factor in the achievement of invisibility, although it is not the entire story. White servants could not claim invisibility in the same ways that White owners could, but many indentured servants aspired toward this visual role, and slavery’s racio-visual order provided various routes to this position. As David Waldstreicher writes, “Whites must be seen to be white,” and yet “whiteness as power is maintained by being unseen.”35 Slavery organized White invisibility around the cultivation of Whiteness as unhinged from the physical body. Whiteness existed in privileges exclusive of or closed off to people of African descent. Through slavery, Whiteness became the racial identity that seemed, strangely, least racialized and yet best able to morph into other racial performances at will.36 The emergence of Blackface minstrelsy exacerbated the constructed irrelevance of White corporeality within slavery’s visual culture. David Roediger explains that minstrel performers were self-consciously White, using Blackface to illustrate that fact for audiences, and issuing playbills that emphasized the contrasts between the “reality” of the White performer and the transformation into a performance of Black raciality.37 Visually, the peculiar institution helped to diminish the significance of White corporeality. Slavery’s peculiar ocularity advantageously denied the way in which the White body remained just as present in the act of slavery as the Black body. Whites used Black bodies in the most utilitarian sense, to plow, to build, to labor, to nurse, to pleasure, and although White bodies remained ever-present in these encounters, the position of visual authority helped to diminish White corporeality. Whiteness earned invisibility within the social processes of slavery by occupying multiple roles of surveillance within the procedures of enslavement. Unfettered by the physical body, the White I/eye could be everywhere, and always. Here, Whites were always on the lookout, and never to be looked at.
Mediating the Runaway
Media in support of slavery typically figured Whites as particularly gifted in the realm of sight. Print items hailed White viewers, objectified Black bodies, and nurtured Whiteness as a viewing position. A diverse array of print ephemera, such as auction advertisements, runaway advertisements, and pickup notices, traveled to readers throughout the northern and southern U.S. states. White viewership became essential to the institutionalization of slavery’s visual culture, as print media undergirded the slave economy. Slaving media, then, normalized Whiteness as a disembodied viewing position by excluding slavers, auctioneers, purchasers, owners, and catchers from the page. Instead, these items announced the arrival of new chattel for sale or called on the White viewing public to assist in the reclamation of enslaved property—all summarily emphasizing the specificity of the Black body and deemphasizing the White body. A still-burgeoning U.S. media industry became central to the buying and selling of chattel persons with advertisements that invited free White viewers, specifically, to visit auction sites and view scantily clad Black bodies for display and for purchase.
Print media offered a strong foundation for the reification of a peculiar visual culture. Various advertisements in support of slavery appeared in colonial newspapers and cheap broadsides during the first one hundred years of U.S. news printing, after the 1690 issue of the Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, and before the expanded circulation of the penny press.38 While real-time racialized practices of looking governed interracial encounters within domestic personal spaces such as the farm and the home, print cultures mediated Black bodies and Black freedom as unnatural and unlawful in the domestic space of the nation. These items buttressed a visual culture of domination by disseminating visual codes of race to larger and more varied audiences. While a limited number of free Whites might have been present to see a designated number of enslaved Africans sold at auction, the auction advertisement perpetuated this culture of looking at Black bodies by sharing information about the sale across a large geographical area to more viewers than might have been convened to witness the marketplace. With its wide and regular occurrence—printers could issue their papers on a daily basis by the late eighteenth century—the print media connected to slavery made the institution’s governing racial
