“A Peculiarly ‘Ocular’ Institution”
An amorphous Atlantic took shape around the enslavement of African peoples. Black bondage fortified a perimeter around the Atlantic world and constituted a burgeoning U.S. identity, as both New England and the U.S. South “flourished under slavery.”1 The execution and the abolition of slavery in the United States functioned to constitute the early republic as part of the Atlantic. As the Atlantic world expanded, playing host to a sprawling dispersal, “changes across [its] time, space, and jurisdiction” appear at the intimate level of a single household up through the remote relations of metropole and colony.2 Visual culture provided measures for the assessment of fitness or belonging, as both pictures and practices represent sites of confrontation among unfree African descendants and Whites who held them in captivity.
Fugitive Freedom in the Atlantic
Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman sat for her portrait (figure 1.1) as a free woman in 1811.3 This amateur painting by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick pictures Freeman well dressed in Federalist-period clothing. In addition to her blue dress, Freeman dons a white fichu to cover her cleavage and a white bonnet to cover her head. Her clothing choices depict Freeman as a respectable free woman in possession of her own body, while the adornment of her gold necklace adds a flourish of conspicuousness to the image (figure 1.2). Freeman’s portrait reflected her “regal love of the solid, & the splendid wear” of fine “chintzes and silks.”4 Although her body sits askew from the artist, Freeman’s side-eye stare meets the viewer of her portrait. This image, in a gilded frame, pictures a woman who achieved emancipation by confrontation and by a clear sense of entitlement to the founding values that defined the colonial United States in the context of an evolving Atlantic world. Freeman’s decision to sit for a portrait represents a conscious invocation of the visual on her part, a moment in which she applied her sense of self-possession to the terms of looking and being seen that, in part, defined chattel slavery.
Figure 1.1. Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, 1811. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)
Freeman’s other very poignant disrespect to slavery’s structure of the visual is central to the story of her formal pursuit of freedom. Catherine Maria Sedgwick drafted a lengthy account of Freeman’s life as a free and paid servant to the Sedgwick family, which the English literary magazine Bentley’s Miscellany published in 1853.5 According to Sedgwick, “action was the law” of Freeman’s “nature,” and thus, for her, “servitude was intolerable.”6 Sedgwick’s account of Freeman’s life begins with an account of Freeman’s servitude under her abusive former violent mistress, Ms. Ashley. One day, when “making the patrole of her kitchen” [sic], “Madame Ashley” observed that Freeman’s sister Lizzy, “a sickly timid creature,” had reserved scraps of dough from a “wheaten cake” she had baked for the Ashley family in order to make her own. Madame Ashley, enraged, labeled Lizzy a “thief” before she “siezed [sic] a large iron shovel red hot from cleaning the oven, & raised it over the terrified girl.” However, before the shovel could land on Lizzy, Freeman “interposed” her body, taking the blow instead. Ashley cut Freeman to the bone with the hot shovel, leaving her with “a frightful scar” for the rest of her life. However, in a recurring act of resistance, Freeman regularly brandished the scar to visitors of the Ashley home. When Freeman reflected on the incident, she explained that although she had “a bad arm all winter,” she made sure that “Madam had the worst of it.” Freeman refused to cover the scar, and when visitors asked Freeman what happened, she replied, “ask Misses.” Freeman displayed her wounded body to undermine Ashley’s womanhood, purposefully using her insurrectionary exhibition to pose the question, “Which was the slave, & which the real mistress?” Freeman’s question queried domesticity as a White woman’s gender norm as well as a privilege determined by the space of the home. The sympathy Freeman intentionally invoked from visitors when exposing her scar potentially dislodged Ashley’s designation as “mistress” of the house, even if briefly. Freeman used the scar to assert her own domesticity and to punish Mistress Ashley. Where the home served as the arena for White women to display domesticity, Freeman’s presentation took up that space as a site of refutation and reassertion. She ignored slavery’s customary practice of denying Black pain and White culpability, she undermined predeterminations of domesticity through the way in which she maneuvered within the Ashley home, offering her body as evidence of her owner’s malfeasance.
Figure 1.2. A bracelet of gold beads made from Freeman’s necklace. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)
Freeman confronted the racial visual order of slavery, both through the portrait and through the ability to conjure sympathy via the display of her wound. Freeman refuted the daily practice of Black women’s subjugation within the intimate confines of the home and at the hands of White women through recourse to the visual. Social interaction in the context of slavery required that unfree Black women like Lizzy and Freeman live and work as invisible helpmates who made life easier for White women like Ashley. Freeman challenged these conventions by drawing attention to White crimes and Black women’s corporeal needs. In this context, Freeman’s acts functioned as cultural transgressions. Freeman’s offering of a free Black woman for portrait and her confrontation with Mistress Ashley represent measures that destabilized slavery’s architecture of visual domination. In the intimate proximity of the master’s home, Freeman used her body in defense of her sister, Lizzie. She then revealed her body to shame Mistress Ashley in front of others, and finally, she covered her body but focused her eyes for the sake of creating a picture. In all of these instances, Freeman defied a visual terrain steeped in the suppression of Black women’s self-possession and unaccustomed to Black women’s self-appointed pictures.
My aim in this book is to discuss the ways in which picturing freedom intervened in slavery’s institutionalized visual culture and to reveal exhibitions of freedom as disruptive to this visual landscape. Although the picturing element of this scenario involves some actual illustrations, like Freeman’s portrait, we can also think of the flickering glance that might have accompanied the display of her wound as another tool that Freeman used to force Ashley to picture freedom. Each of these appeals to the visual divulges the way in which Black people’s demonstrations of freedom in the context of slavery were problematic. In this chapter, I describe the way in which the organization and maintenance of chattel slavery intertwined the racial and the visual. I argue that this intricate formulation made the appearance of freedom a difficult thing to discern in its earliest occurrences. Drawing on the language of the “peculiar institution,” I describe slavery as a “peculiarly ocular institution” that utilized an unstable visual logic of race to enslave persons of African descent and to protect Whites from the threat of the gaze. The term “peculiar institution,” coined by South Carolina senator John Calhoun in the nineteenth century, describes slavery as oddly intransient given its conceptual necessity to White prosperity.7 Referring to slavery as “the peculiar institution” helped to diminish the unpleasant realities of slavery and allowed its advocates to argue for the perpetuation of bondage while removing the human connotation associated with the term. Offering a theory of the “peculiarly ‘ocular’ institution,” I mean to underscore slavery’s visual culture as an impediment to recognizing freedom. Moreover, I offer this notion to contextualize Black visuality as shaped by and resistant to slavery’s visual culture. This theory of the peculiarly ocular nature of slavery frames the reception of freedom and the new tactics of spectatorship that I describe throughout this book.
The mediation of slavery was also central to the institutionalization of this peculiar visual culture as early print media helped to circulate a set of racio-visual codes to readers and viewers throughout the Atlantic world. Much of the print material involved in the transatlantic transport of Africans for enslavement, from auction advertisements to runaway notices, emphasized physical traits, sometimes
