The perfect shadow of his master: Proslavery ideology in American visual culture, 1700--1920

Although images of slaves are relatively few in number, they form an important part of American discourse about the issue of slavery. Abolitionist imagery has been well studied; however, a significant body of images of slaves and slavery which is proslavery in nature has not been previously examined. This dissertation examines proslavery images produced from the beginnings of the American republic until the early twentieth century. I argue that this body of imagery both reflected and influenced the debate over slavery, and that many of the pillars of proslavery argument were in fact part of mainstream American believes about slaves and slavery. Far from being marginal productions of radical proslavery ideologues, proslavery images were created both privately and publicly in both North and South until the early twentieth century.;In this dissertation I track the development of proslavery thought as reflected in a variety of visual culture materials. Some of the earliest pro-slavery defenses emerged not in the slave-saturated South but in the relatively less slave-invested North, where famous slaves were occasionally celebrated as examples of the uplifting, Christianizing experience of slavery, which provided them contact with 'civilization.' As the demographics of legal slave ownership shifted South, more proslavery imagery is found in Southern contexts, where private images of individuals served to reassure slave owners of the rightness of the system and the familiar affection it fostered. As sentimental domesticity became ever more important in Americans' imagination of the family, images of slave owner families began to incorporate slaves in compositions that suggest affection, familiarity, and paternalistic hierarchy. These proslavery arguments for the positive good of the institution are distilled even more into images of white children accompanied by slave companions and nurses. Finally, I examine the visual culture of death and dying slaves and masters and show how all the strains of proslavery, particularly the emphasis on slavery's family-like nature, survived intact into the twentieth century and became part of mainstream American popular culture.