The Former American Slaves by Winslow Homer
Homer captures the joyless transition from slave labor to wage labor after the U.S. Civil War.
Cover photo: The Cotton Pickers, oil on canvas, by Winslow Homer (1876). Via Wikipedia.
The Art of Labor
At the height of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, American workers — including children — suffered twelve hour work days and seven day work weeks. Labor Day originated in 1882 as an annual mass rally in New York organized by socialists and leftist organizations to demand shorter hours, higher pay, safer working conditions, and a labor holiday. President Grover Cleveland would declare Labor Day a federal holiday in 1894.
COVID-19 has revealed who are the essential workers and who performs the unnecessary “bullshit jobs”. This once-in-a-century pandemic has also demonstrated the global interdependency of resources, labor, and supply chains — what we commonly refer to as globalization.
Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and likely their healthcare. This has inspired me to create a new series on the art of labor through the centuries, with a focus on how work has been valued and represented.
Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States, compiled from the census of 1860 drawn by E. Hergesheimer, engraving, by Th. Leonhardt (1861). Via the Library of Congress.
Slavery in the Americas
Between the 1440s and 1860s, an estimated 8-11 million African slaves were transported to the Americas, with a peak of 6 million in the 18th century. Historians regard the arrival of slaves to the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 as the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first North American colony to legalize slavery.
While slavery had existed in Africa prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, lucrative trade with European colonists gave competing African kingdoms additional incentive for war. Africans often sold slaves for ammunition, which allowed for the more efficient capture of neighboring tribesmen. More arms begat more slaves which begat more arms and so on. This vicious cycle decimated the African population. It is estimated that by 1800, slavery had reduced the continent’s population by half.
Women played vital roles in abolitionism and suffrage. Harriet Tubman served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, escorting slaves to safety in the North. In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered her famous speech Ain’t I A Woman at the Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio.
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?
Prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade and the import of African slaves, American colonists had enslaved indigenous peoples. “Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas,” estimates associate professor of history Linford D. Fisher. The indigenous population was unable to satisfy the colonists’ labor demands however, because as many as 90% died due to smallpox and other diseases brought from Europe.
19th Century U.S. and British Slave Population and Cotton Production
Cotton
“The cotton could be wet with a chilly dew, which could wet your clothes, but worst of all its [sic] softened your fingers so the sharp point on the cotton burrs pricked your fingers until they might bleed, but you kept on picking,” recalled J. B. Coltharp, a man raised on a cotton farm in the 20th century.
Picking cotton, dry plate negatives, by William Henry Jackson and Detroit Publishing Co. (1843 - 1942). Via the Library of Congress.
Professor of African-American Studies, Ronald Bailey wrote, “Prior to the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793, cotton production languished. So dismal were the prospects of an expanded market for raw cotton that southerners agreed in 1787 to a constitutional compromise that prohibited the importation of slaves into the U.S. after 1808.”
“Cotton production, of course, was constrained by the difficulty of breaking the tenacious grip of seeds without tearing the fiber. Until the 1790s, slaves could cultivate far more cotton than they could clean with the venerable roller gin, which had been in use for centuries in India and pinched seeds from the fiber gently but all too slowly,” writes associate professor of history, Anthony E. Kaye.
“Profits from cotton soared after 1793, when producers’ long-standing plans for a commercial economy paid off,” notes Joyce E. Chaplin, assistant professor of history. Following the invention of the cotton gin, production grew from 1.5 million pounds in 1790 to as much as 2,275 million pounds in 1860.
“By 1800 the United States was producing some 40 million pounds of cotton, about 570-640 pounds per worker,” Chaplin calculates. Bailey concludes, “between 1820 and 1860, cotton provided just over 46 percent of the dollar value of all U.S. exports, reaching 57.5 percent in 1860.”
Bailey writes, “by 1860, cotton manufacturing has become the leading industry in the United States as measured by the amount of labor and capital employed, and the net value of the product.” The American South had come to account for two-thirds of the world’s cotton production.
Cotton warehouse, drying cotton, Charleston, South Carolina, GIF from stereograph, by B.W. Kilburn and N.H. Littleton (circa 1879). Via the Library of Congress.
Labor and Capital
“In the early nineteenth century, African slavery was the foundation of social and economic life in the American South. Millions of Black workers were owned as property by wealthy planters, who denied them education, controlled their family lives, and reaped the fruits of their labor,” explains historian Matthew Karp.
Professor of economics, Gerald Gunderson wrote, “In the eighteenth century some slavers were held in almost all colonies, but a very distinctive regional pattern of slave holding was beginning to develop. Slavery disappeared from northern states and thereafter was limited to states south of the Mason-Dixon Line.”
Slavery was necessary in the South, as describes historian Gavin Wright, because it constrained “workers to tasks and geographic settings they would not voluntarily have chosen.” In the North, wage labor proved more efficient. “Slavery bestowed a mobile, flexible labor force on the South, […] a critical precondition of capitalism in another form,” argues Kaye.
Picking cotton, Savannah, Georgia, early Negro life, albumen print, by Launey & Goebel (between 1867 - 1890). Via the Library of Congress.
“Slave societies themselves, were “pre-capitalist,” for slavery prevented waged labor from becoming the predominant system of labor. Wage labor is crucial to capitalism because it transforms relations of production and exchange,” Kaye writes, adding, “Wage relations pare away social obligations between laborers and employers and enable capitalists to increase production, reduce costs, and raise profits.”
In President Abraham Lincoln’s second address to the nation, in 1861, he declared, “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
Historian James Oakes writes, “For a long time, industrial capitalism based on wage labor existed in a kind of codependent relationship with the slave labor systems spawned by merchant capital, even though they were very different forms of social organization.”
The Northern and Southern states had previously enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, with Northern banks providing investment to Southern plantation owners for slaves, land, and tools, and in turn the South sent raw cotton to factories in the North. The relationship soured after disagreements over the expansion of slavery to Western territories.
The Civil War was the inevitable manifestation of the “growing divergence between the free [wage] labor system of the North and the slave society of the South,” Oakes concludes, noting that “plantation slavery was—almost by definition—incompatible with urban and industrial development.”
The friction between these two systems ultimately led to confrontation. The Civil War would embody a violent “shift away from an agricultural slave-labor economy towards industrial capitalism,” as describes historian James McPherson. This was a vital event as, Gunderson argues, “In the absence of emancipation by such forces as the Civil War, [slavery] would have been economically profitable indefinitely.” In 1860, the market value of U.S. slaves totalled some 2.7 billion dollars.
Lee’s surrender, Civil War, wash drawing, by James Fuller Queen (1865 or 1866). Via the Library of Congress.
American Civil War
In 1859, with the aim of starting a slave insurrection, White Northerner and militant abolitionist John Brown led a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Although the raid failed, and Brown was hanged for treason, the event inspired hope and terror throughout the United States.
In his cell, just prior to his death, Brown wrote, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
“The tide of anger that flowed from Harpers Ferry traumatized Americans of all persuasions, terrorizing Southerners with the fear of massive slave rebellions, and radicalizing countless Northerners, who had hoped that violent confrontation over slavery could be indefinitely postponed,” writes historian Fergus Bordewich.
In 1860, German philosopher Karl Marx wrote to his friend Friedrich Engels (the two had co-authored and published The Communist Manifesto in 1848), “In my opinion, the biggest things happening in the world today are, on the one hand, the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”
President Abraham Lincoln with Army Gen. George B. McClellan, facing the president, and McClellan’s staff at Antietam, Maryland, Union (1862). AP Photo/Alexander Gardner and via The Washington Post.
Throughout much of the 1850s, Marx had been a London-based foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, contributing over five hundred articles. Lincoln was a devoted reader of the Tribune; he and Marx even corresponded.
Marx described capitalism as “veiled slavery” and hoped that the Civil War would bring an end to both slave and wage labor.
While Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis hoped for a peaceful resolution, he warned, “a war is to be inaugurated the like of which men have not seen.” Following Mississippi’s secession, Davis would become President of the Confederacy. The Civil War erupted soon after.
Lincoln did not sign the Emancipation Proclamation until 1863, which allowed for the enrollment of freedmen in the Union army. General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate States Army, finally surrendered in 1865. In Lee’s farewell address to his army, he wrote, “After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.”
A year before he was elected president, Abraham Lincoln spoke at the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee in 1859. Lincoln advocated for self-sufficiency; he praised Americans who “work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.”
Former slaves had been promised 40 acres and a mule by the Special Field Order No. 15, but for many this never materialized, prompting freedmen to toil as wage labor for their previous masters. As free laborers, they were paid wages that made little difference in their material conditions. One former slave by the name of Jennie Webb lamented, “when the war came on to set us free, we was told that we would get 40 acres and a mule. We never did.”
President Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth just five days after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender. President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a sympathizer with the South, overturned the Special Field Order No. 15 less than a year after his inauguration.
The 13th Amendment was officially ratified in 1865, reading in full, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The Cotton Pickers, oil on canvas, by Winslow Homer (1876). Via Wikipedia.
Cotton Pickers
American painter Winslow Homer is credited as one of the first artists to broach the subject of American slavery. He was raised in the then-rural village of Cambridge, Massachusetts. A trained lithographer, Homer proceeded to work as a freelance illustrator, covering the Civil War for the new Harper’s Weekly magazine.
As a correspondent embedded with Union troops, Homer bore witness to the horror of battle. “This was the first war with widespread illustrated representation,” notes Keely Orgeman, an assistant curator at Yale University Art Gallery. These artist-reporters were required to be quick draftsman, accurate observers, and talented storytellers. At the war front, Homer risked injury, starvation, and disease.
Following the war Homer turned to painting, devoting himself to nostalgic images of America’s agrarian past. Having spent ten months in Paris, starting in 1866, Homer was influenced by European aesthetics, specifically those of Jean-François Millet.
In his 1876 painting, The Cotton Pickers, Homer depicts two former slave women, standing upright, carrying the titular crop. Cotton plants span the entirety of the landscape. The women are not jubilant in newly-found freedom but solemn.
Crossing the Pasture, oil on canvas, by Winslow Homer (1871). Via the Amon Carter.
The work makes for an interesting comparison with Homer’s earlier painting Crossing the Pasture, which employs a similar composition of two figures in the center of the canvas, surrounded by the natural landscape. Homer captures a similar hesitance in the two boys as he does the disillusioned women, however the boys emanate a sense of wonder and excitement as well.
Over a century after the painting’s creation, in 1996, New York Times culture critic, Michael Kimmelman observed, “Stately, silent and with barely a flicker of sadness on their faces, the two black women in the painting are unmistakable in their disillusionment: they picked cotton before the war and they are still picking cotton afterward.” Homer portrays the inevitability of labor.
One freedman, by the name of Houston Hartsfield Holloway, wrote, “For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them.” The Jim Crow era of racial segregation would shortly begin.
Inmate firefighters battle the Kincade Fire, California, United States of America (2019). Noah Berger/AP and via NPR.
Today
The history of slavery has been largely unaddressed in the United States. The nation never passed reparations, and remains a largely segregated country. Only recently, have protests against Confederate statues begun to gain national attention.
Slavery remains legal throughout the U.S. prison system. Prisoner slaves have been used as firefighters in California, producers of hand santizer in New York, and clothing makers across the country.
Today, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. Following deindustrialization in the late 20th century, lawmakers responded to the decrease in jobs and correlated increase in crime with policies of mass incarceration. These policies disproportionally affected the poor and marginalized. In 2004, the lifetime risk of imprisonment for Black men was estimated to be 28.5% compared to just 4.4% for White men.
Monopolization and deindustrialization destroyed jobs across the nation. In 1910, Black farmers accounted for approximately 14% of all farmers in the United States, however that number would fall due to discriminatory lending practices. Over a century later — when Black Americans constitute over 13% of the U.S. population — Black farmers make up less than 2% of US farmers and own less than 1% of all American farmland. In the latest COVID-19 relief bill, $5 billion is earmarked for Black farmers.
Author of the 2010 book The New Jim Crow, civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander explains, “The school-to-prison pipeline is another metaphor—a good one for explaining how children are funneled directly from schools into prison. Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.”
Renaldo Hudson, a recently released inmate, explained, “Most states do not have death sentences. But being incarcerated can be a death sentence if you die inside. They’re putting people in body bags.”
