Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb
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 precepts more permanent and prevalent in the public imaginary.
Media portrayals representing unfree Blacks calcified slavery’s peculiar ocularity by further enlisting White viewers into skewed visual dynamics. Although these materials targeted property-owning Whites, the cultivation of Whiteness as a viewing position cut across designations of free, indentured servants and property owners. At the level of interpellation, slaving media “hailed” White viewers, asking them to understand that print materials were speaking to them, directly.39 Print media called upon Whites to imagine themselves as the intended audience for the mediation of slavery and to participate in slavery’s culture of surveillance. Slavers readily enlisted print to help control the “slave population” by cultivating “a network of interested onlookers” to protect Whites from property loss.40 Slavery advertisements functioned as perceptual documents, as materials that taught Whites how to see Blackness, but also encouraged Whites to believe that Blackness was a thing to see, and that White subjectivity functioned as a domain for looking. Slavery’s media further promoted the development of a White eye/I by focusing attention on Black bodies and away from White bodies, especially away from Whites who were actively involved in the processes of enslaving others. Print media insinuated a White audience—a band of readers for whom literacy was not outlawed. It further invested Whiteness with the power to look, and encouraged Whites to remain on the lookout for people of African descent.
The runaway notice was the most prevalent and most powerful example of media used to develop White viewership. Runaway advertisements in regional newspapers circulated across state boundaries to inform the public, both literate and illiterate, that an owner or an overseer needed (and would pay for) assistance in retrieving fugitive property. Runaway notices are important to the visual archive because they were among the earliest pictures of Black freedom; they portrayed people of African descent more negatively than all of slavery’s media materials did. These items pictured Black freedom as stolen, situated among other kinds of theft; frequently, they marked runaways as unstable individuals who represented a danger to law-abiding persons. Runaway notices detail Blacks doing more than just absconding; Blacks are also depicted as stealing clothes, passing as White, and using “passes” given to run errands in order to escape. The accompanying illustrations are standard images of “free” men and women, Blacks depicted without chains and shown in motion, often with one foot off the ground. Images of an enslaved figure seemingly on the run, in possession of stolen goods, the body itself a stolen good, shown with an enlarged monetary amount on the page, called out to Whites to watch for Black fugitives and to remain attentive to free Black people, in general. Runaway materials imagined fugitive Black people as elusive figures who treacherously evaded visual attention by deploying various tricks to manipulate their bodies and to deceive White owners. Runaway notices picture freedom (unlike the abolitionist material I discuss later) as the sly cultivation of tropes that tricked the