Chromolithography and the Civil War

Henry Louis Stephens, "The Christmas Week" in Journey of a Slave from the Plantation to the Battlefield, c. 1863. Chromolithographic trade card. Harvard Art Museums (120.1976.24

The chromolithographic trade card set, Journey of a Slave from the Plantation to the Battlefield, tells the story of a slave who is sold to a brutal plantation owner, liberates himself from slavery, and escapes to a Union camp to fight for his freedom. During the Civil War, major chromolithographic printers celebrated the medium’s potential as an enlightening and educational force at this critical moment of juncture in the nation’s history. This set was distributed to white Union soldiers to humanize escaped slaves, as seen by the protagonist dancing with his wife in “The Christmas Week.”

Chromolithography not only embodied the potential for a democratizing turn in aesthetic education, but also represented a critical shift in the presentation of blackness. Previous modes of print relied on “grotesque” engraved lines to represent dark skin tones in contrast with empty planes that signified whiteness. Designed on the premise of color separation, a chromiste would dissect and image into blocks of color which would be printed one on top of another. The development of translucent inks suddenly allowed printers to layer colors in ways that expanded their palette, introducing a spectrum of skin tones.

Specimen sheet. Gordon Pfeiffer Collection. Special Collections, University of Delaware. Newark, Delaware.

As a staunch Union supporter and influential chromiste in Philadelphia, James Fuller Queen demonstrated this potential by creating two different skin tones for our protagonist and his beloved. Black lines are only used to suggest facial features and three-dimensionality as opposed to the “grotesque” line to denote race. This card demonstrates that race could be shown a spectrum of different colors, undermining the binary system used to justify slavery.

While chromolithography broadened visual literacy of race among Americans, tonal mixings slowly separated again into flat tropes that aligned with the five most popular base colors in chromolithography: yellow, red, brown, blue, and black. This palette limitation constrained the spectrum of skin-representation, re-hardening racial boundaries. New categories of distinction were introduced, including the “yellow,” “red,” and “brown” races, ultimately giving a visual form to new modes of racism, particularly against Chinese immigrants leading to the Chinese Exclusion act in 1882 and Native Americans during the Indian Wars. Yet for a moment in1863, chromolithography carried a potential to communicate racial diversity that proposed kinship instead of difference.

References:

Peter C. Marzio. The Democratic Art: Pictures for a 19th-Century America. Boston: David R. Godine, 1979.

Kirk Savage. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1997.