emergence of independent Haiti in 1804—their uprising unnerved supporters of slavery and inspired Black people throughout the Atlantic world. The Haitian Revolution unsettled practices of enslavement not only under French rule, but throughout the Americas, as news of the insurrection inspired resistance in other locales.33 Whereas the Atlantic world served as a setting for cycles of human chattel and imported goods, it was also host to contemplation about the meaning of freedom. The Atlantic world functioned as what Mary Louis Pratt calls the “contact zone,” a space of clashing and combining “asymmetrical relations of power,” to include both slavery and its abolition.34 Laws such as the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade passed by British Parliament in 1807 attempted to maintain an interconnected Atlantic world through suppressing the transportation of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean.
Just like Britain and France, the U.S. scenario for slavery carried with it specific attributes that were relevant to the Atlantic world as a contact zone. First, unfree Blacks and White slavers lived together in the domestic confines of the nation, and thus White lawmakers could not geographically disaggregate the question of Black freedom, such as was the case for European metropoles and colonies. European visitors to colonial America gave “particular attention” to U.S. slavery, since there was no “European equivalent of the plantation slave system as it existed in the American South.”35 In this context, Black freedom in the United States posed immediate questions relating to home and nationality. Under what conditions do people of African descent belong within the United States? Second, and related to this, lawmakers decided the judicial abolition of slavery on a state-by-state basis in the United States, making the early republic “a microcosm of the multiple judicial structures of freedom in the Atlantic world as a whole.”36 Unfree Black people from throughout the Diaspora who sued for their liberty in U.S. courts, much like White slave owners who used the law to retain their claims to human property, found the confluence of Atlantic world slavery laws in the U.S. court system.
Accordingly, this book emphasizes the northeastern U.S. territories for how they were explicitly conversant with an imagined Atlantic world. People in these locales circulated much paper about their early antislavery efforts, and Philadelphia plays an important, but not defining, role in efforts to picture freedom.37 To begin with, Philadelphia was of national significance to the early U.S. republic. It served as a temporary capital after the Revolutionary War, and by the turn of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was “the second largest city in the English-speaking world with a population of about 75,000.”38 From 1794 until the 1828 election of President Andrew Jackson, Philadelphia served as home to nationally important institutions, including the President’s House; Independence Hall, which served as the State House; as well as three important commercial banks.39 Slavery commenced alongside these landmarks, but by the first decades of the nineteenth century, free Black people developed a noticeable presence in the city. Literate and wealthy by the period’s standards, “middle-class” free people like Robert Douglass and his friends developed identifiable Black neighborhoods. Free people of African descent comprised the wealthiest 1 to 2 percent of all Philadelphians of the period.40 Although Black Philadelphia was distinguished by its wealth and size, people here suffered just like free Black people in other northern cities like Boston, New York, and Providence, where organized violence at the hands of White rioters destroyed Black institutions.41 However, Philadelphia was also home to the first ever U.S. lithograph—a highly innovative printing process that made color prints cheaply and quickly—so that this combination of finance and racial mixture resulted in great fodder for commercial artists.
Picture Freedom locates diverse conceptions of Black freedom in the parlor, and more specifically, the transatlantic parlor, as a place for dissimilar groups of people and cultural producers to convene around visions of Blackness separated from slavery. The parlor, as a historically specific architectural space, refers to an area within the home for receiving visitors and demonstrating the social status of the family. The parlor entailed its own “visual vocabulary,” inviting entrants to “read for its symbolism” in the material cultures contained within.42 The parlor is where families entertained guests, practiced piano, and enjoyed early print cultures—it was the best room of the home, and a place for representing home dwellers to outside visitors. Filled with luxurious upholstery and heavy decor, the middle-class parlor demanded formality even in posture, constricting the body to stiff, prescribed comportment through rigid furnishings and delicate bric-a-brac.43 In the United States, the parlor thrived from the colonial and early national periods, becoming most popular in the nineteenth century with the rise of urban versus rural culture.44 Later, the parlor took on a specifically British connotation and was called the “Victorian parlor” in association with Victorian arts and culture attributed to the reign of Queen Victoria beginning in 1830. This designation captures the way in which many Victorian parlors emphasized fantasy and contradiction in response to oppressive social conditions denoted with this era.45 Home dwellers frequently filled parlors with items competing for attention, weighing the room with covered surfaces draped with lace cloths, books, vases, decorative china, and ornaments. By filling parlors with consumer items that indicated their cost and value, inhabitants of the parlor used consumption to bring a sense of order to a time characterized by doubt and transition.46
Literature and popular cultures of the mid-nineteenth century illustrated the ideal parlor as a space for White women, specifically. Godey’s Lady’s Book, the preeminent U.S. women’s magazine, printed images of parlors alongside advertisements for furnishings and reading materials that should appear in the setting (see figure I.3).47 This color plate reveals a bedecked parlor along with a story detailing the decorative choices made in the room. Velvet furniture, curio cabinets, and mirrors characterize the parlor as a place for respite and display. The author further explained the parlor as “the face of a house,” demanding “a richer style of furnishings, and a more fastidious taste” to mark its distinction within the home.48 An accompanying floor plan indicates that in a two-story home, a parlor should be the largest room in the house. In the cultural imaginary, this room sheltered a delicate woman from the outside world with brocade curtains and draping. In design, the Victorian parlor was intended to convey beauty, respectability, and an astute lady of the house who was well versed in the demands of the woman’s sphere; it was a middle-class dwelling for the White “lady” who did not leave the house, but spent her day reading, sewing, playing music, and entertaining company. The parlor displayed her penchant for decoration, which was akin to her personal appearance. Victorian parlors included an overabundance of “decorative objects” that displayed the period’s obsessions with social status through the collection of things, the myth of privacy, and the rigid differentiation of the internal domestic space along gendered lines.49 Other terms for the parlor such as the “drawing room,” shortened from the “withdrawing room,” indicate the spatial impulses of concealment and the protection of White women. The drawing room as a “private place removed from more public reception areas” symbolized both social status and gender separation within the structure of the home.50 Existing as two things at once, “the domestic and the gala,” the parlor represented a stage for White women’s class presentations, portraying “ownership, possession, and permanence” through the parlor and its entailments.51
Figure I.3. “City Interiors—Parlor. For Description, see Household Furnishing Department,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, May 1884.
Only members of the community, friends of the family, or organizational associates entered one’s parlor for a visit or entertainment. The parlor’s constitution in multiple positions of privacy and publicity rendered it as a “parochial realm,” as a space that was both open to nonfamily members but closed off to people outside of the family’s social network. Bringing together friends as well as neighbors, “parochial realms” only welcomed visitors already acquainted with, or tangentially familiar with, the home dwellers.52 In its politics of inclusion, the philosophical underpinning of the parlor provided a barrier to individuals outside its classed derivations. Parlors were public in that they welcomed people from outside of one’s family into the space to witness the staged performances of middle-class and gender
