Race in Transit: Intoxication and Slavery in the Art of Charles Deas

Abstract

Walking the Chalk, a recently rediscovered painting by the American artist Charles Deas (1818–1867), depicts a man in the midst of a sobriety test. In this, and other of his paintings, Deas articulates boundaries that mark inexorable transformations from moderation to excess—changes that entail a concomitant muddling of racial identities. Frequently in Deas's art, a subject's loss of self‐control, self‐agency and sobriety is expressed in racially coded visual language. Formal analysis of paintings such as Walking the Chalk and The Devil and Tom Walker, as well as contextual location of the painting in relation to the writings of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) and Washington Irving (1783–1859), uncovers a set of racial aesthetics during the antebellum period that reveal blackness—and whiteness—as transitory categories.

Keywords:

• Genre Painting
• Race
• Temperance
• Deas, Charles (1818–1867)
• Irving, Washington (1783–1859), The Devil and Tom Walker (1824)

Acknowledgments

I thank Dan Forrest, Debra Day, Selina Langford and the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office at the Western Kentucky University Libraries for their research assistance. I am also grateful to Carol Clark, Maria Gindhart, Veronica Keyes, Emily Neff, Kevin Scott and Christine Sundt for their invaluable help with the preparation of this article.

Notes

1. Deborah J. Johnson, William Sidney Mount: Painter of Everyday Life (New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1998), 33.

2. Alfred Frankenstein, “William Sidney Mount and the Act of Painting,” American Art Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 36.

3. On the isolation of the figure, and his ambiguous gaze, see Karen Adams, “The Black Image in the Paintings of William Sidney Mount,” American Art Journal 7, no. 2 (November 1975): 45.

4. See, e.g., Adams, “Black Image,” 44–45, which notes Mount's musical connections to minstrelsy through his uncle Micah Hawkins. Also see Kevin Michael Scott's discussion of the folk drawing Dancing For Eels, 1820 Catherine Market in “The ‘Negro Touch’ and the ‘Yankee Trick’: William Sidney Mount and the Art of Race and Ethnicity” in this issue, in which the drawing is illustrated as Figure 2.

5. On the breakdown's origins as an African American dance, its connections to minstrelsy and its potential bearing on Mount's Bar‐room Scene, see Judith A. Barter et al., American Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 153. Barter notes that when the painting was exhibited in 1835 at the National Academy of Design, it was known only as Bar‐room Scene, but its name had been changed to The Breakdown when it entered the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1939. At present, there is no record to my knowledge that reveals the point during the intervening years that this change took place. Nevertheless, someone during that time identified the dance being performed by the central figure as one with African American origins. The toggling of the painting's two titles over the course of its history—one determined by race, and the other by alcohol—only strengthens the theory that discourses of race and intoxication are, in this painting, analogous.

6. “The Good Woman,” New York Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Art, 1 January 1846, 15.

7. “Great Discovery,” Scientific American 5, no. 25 (9 March 1850): 194.

8. Daniel Drake, A Discourse on Intemperance (Cincinnati, OH: Looker & Reynolds, 1828), 58.

9. Drake, Discourse on Intemperance, 59.

10. I take my cue here from Allen S. Weiss, who writes that: “Drunkenness, in this respect, follows its own laws, even if such laws now reveal the lineaments of inexactitude, indeterminacy, and the aleatory. The calculable, quantitative, isotropic coordinates of Cartesian mathematics no longer suffice to describe perception; space and time are now understood in strictly phenomenal, qualitative, heterotropic terms” (Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002], 34).

11. The grid's role in the alignment of order, vision and power in Enlightenment projects of social control is well documented (see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Pantheon Books, 1977], 195–228). For a consideration of these ideas within the purview of early American urbanism, see Dell Upton, “The City as Material Culture,” in The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, ed. Ann Elizabeth Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1992), 51–74, esp. 53–55. See also David C. Ward, Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 178–179; William H. Truettner, “Plains Geometry,” Winterthur Portfolio 38 (2003): 199–220.

12. I borrow the terms “intensive” and “extensive” here from Alan Wallach, “Making a Picture from the View of Mount Holyoke,” in American Iconology, ed. David Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 83.

13. My thinking here has benefited from a range of scholarship that investigates notions of diversity and unity, particularity and abstraction, point and field, and microscopic and macroscopic regimes across a variety of social, political and aesthetic projects. See Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), esp. 74, 102, 161–163; Alan Wallach, “Wadsworth's Tower: An Episode in the History of Landscape Vision,” American Art 10, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 8–27; Christopher Looby, “The Constitution of Nature: Taxonomy as Politics in Jefferson, Peale, and Bartram,” Early American Literature 22, no. 3 (1987): 252–273; Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still‐Life and Selfhood (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001), esp. 43–58, 176–184; Wendy Bellion, “‘Extend the Sphere’: Charles Willson Peale's Panorama of Annapolis,” Art Bulletin 86, no. 3 (September 2004): 529–549.

14. Although I use the terms interchangeably here, antebellum Americans used the word “drunkard” or “inebriate” rather than “alcoholic,” which was not coined until the twentieth century.

15. John W. Crowley, “Introduction,” Drunkard's Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair, and Recovery (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 7. The most comprehensive history of the movement is Leonard U. Blumberg, with William L. Pittman, Beware the First Drink! The Washingtonian Temperance Movement and Alcoholics Anonymous (Seattle, WA: Glen Abbey Books, 1991).

16. Sylvester Graham emphasized that the over‐stimulation brought on by over‐eating, excessive drinking or even lascivious daydreams entailed a problem of perception, writing: “When incited by passion, man cannot easily perceive the lines of truth which should govern his conduct, and therefore, if he does not adopt some general rules of action, which are consistent with the constitutional laws of his nature, he is sure to run into excesses, and draw evil upon himself and others” (A Lecture to Young Men [Providence, RI: Weeden & Cory, 1834], 32; emphasis added).

17. See “Temperance Society at Fort Snelling,” Army and Navy Chronicle, 12 May 1836, 298.

18. “More Indian Troubles,” Niles' National Register, 1 May 1841. Nevertheless, Deas's small landscape painting, Fort Snelling (1841), now in the collection of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, depicts the fort in an ideal and peaceful mood. On Deas's Fort Snelling, see Carol Clark, “Charles Deas,” in American Frontier Life: Western Painters and Prints (New York: Crown: 1989), 54.

19. For an excellent discussion of these stereotypes, see Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. 11–28.

20. For an analysis of these attitudes, see Randy Mills, “‘It is the cause of all mischief which the Indians suffer’: Native Americans and Alcohol Abuse in the Old Northwest,” Ohio Valley History 3, no. 3 (2003): 3–16.

21. James Ducatel, “A Fortnight among the Chippewas of Lake Superior,” United States Catholic Magazine and Monthly Review (February 1846): 94.

22. From a native perspective, the very same thing could be said for the white man, who—after all—was responsible for introducing ardent spirits to Native Americans in the first place. As one author opined: “Fire water, introduced to them by white men, has been effectual in their destruction as if arsenic had been administered. Our cupidity and avarice have been melting away this unfortunate people” (“Temperance Among the Cherokees,” New York Evangelist, 8 January 1846, 7).

23. “A Parody,” The Every Body's Album: A Humorous Collection of Tales, Quips, Quirks, 1 December 1836, 89.

24. Elizabeth Johns notes that when white Americans employed “such stock assessments of blacks as childlike, lazy, and natural (sensual), they thereby distinguished them from the vast hordes of otherwise undistinguished white citizens who—putatively, at least—had the innate capacities for equality: mental acumen, economic drive, and self‐control” (American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991], 100).

25. My description of the parade is based upon the account in Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 124.

26. Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 124.

27. Frederick Douglass, “Intemperance Viewed in Connection With Slavery: An Address Delivered in Glascow, Scotland, on February 18, 1846,” Glasgow Saturday Post, 21 February 1846, in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One—Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John Blassingame et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 1: 165; available online at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Web site: http://www.yale.edu/glc/archive/1068.htm (accessed on 8 July 2006).

28. Douglass, “Intemperance Viewed.” The rhetorical alignment of intemperance and slavery, as well as the interpretation of intemperance as a form of self‐imposed slavery, was commonplace in the antebellum period (see, e.g., Eliphalet Gillet, Evils of Intemperance: A Sermon Preached at Hollowell, on the Day of the Annual Fast in Maine, April 12, 1821 (Hallowell, ME: Goodale, Glazier, 1821); Heman Humphrey, Parallel Between Intemperance and the Slave Trade: An Address Delivered at Amherst College, July 4, 1828 [Amherst, MA: Adams, 1828]). The frontispiece to Humphrey's volume juxtaposes an intoxicated white man who lazily leans, bottle‐in‐hand, against the side of an unidentified building, with a profile of Josiah Wedgwood's iconic emblem, Am I Not a Man and a Brother? Douglass, Gillet and Humphrey are examined in John W. Crowley, “Slaves to the Bottle: Gough's Autobiography and Douglass's Narrative,” in The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance and American Literature, ed. David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 115‐35. See also Cynthia S. Hamilton, “Dred: Intemperate Slavery,” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2 (2000): 257–277; Marianne Valverde, “Slavery from Within: The Birth of Alcoholism and the Dilemmas of Freedom in Late Victorian Britain,” Social History 22, no. 3 (1997): 251–268.

29. Jennifer A. Greenhill, “Playing the Fool: David Claypoole Johnston and the Menial Labor of Caricature,” American Art 17, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 38. There are a number of period accounts of drunkards who were, in fact, killed in this manner. See, e.g., the grisly description in “Railroads vs. Drunkards,” Robert Merry's Museum, 1 July 1851, 37.

30. Robert S. Levine, “‘Whiskey, Blacking, and All’: Temperance and Race in William Wells Brown's Clotel,” in Reynolds and Rosenthal, Serpent in the Cup, 93–114. See also Greenhill's analysis of the ape‐like features of Irishmen in David Claypoole Johnston's art. Greenhill notes that: “Middle‐class northeasterners often equated the Irish with freed blacks, who lived in the same slums and vied for the same low‐status, low‐paying jobs” (“Playing the Fool,” 34, 38). See L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), for an extensive analysis of this phenomenon. Intemperance and Catholicism were seen as subjugating Irish immigrants to external powers that they were unable to control and that rendered them “black” in the eyes of Anglo‐American Protestants.

31. Greenhill has analyzed a similar dichotomy between waking and sleeping, informed by temperance‐inflected racial stereotypes, at work in David Claypoole Johnston's watercolor Sound Asleep and Wide Awake (ca. 1855)—an image that shows a young boy who humorously paints a grinning face on the back of a sleeping drunkard's head (see Greenhill, “Playing the Fool”).

32. “National Academy of Design: No. IV,” New‐York Spectator, 17 June 1839.

33. “Exhibition of the National Academy—No. II.,” New York Literary Gazette, 11 May 1839, 118. In contradiction to the Gazette, The New‐York Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts claimed that: “Mr. Deas displays, in his pictures, much of the humor of Hogarth, without any of his grossness” (9 November 1839, 159).

34. My reading of Walking the Chalk here aligns with Bryan Jay Wolf's interpretation of John Quidor's (1801–1881) Anthony van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant (1839) in Romantic Re‐Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth‐Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 131–138. Of Quidor's art, Wolf writes: “By releasing forces inimical to the public good, energies unassimilable into the larger culture, they reveal behind that culture the deeper strains and wounds that its own rhetoric denies … Quidor's characters are not only nature's fools: they are its truth tellers” (132).

35. The racial discourse of two paintings by John Quidor that the artist based on Irving's tale has been recently elaborated in Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth‐Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 120–123. Burns also makes mention of Deas's picture (123).

36. Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1940 (San Francisco, CA: Bedford Arts; Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990), 26.

37. Washington Irving, “The Devil and Tom Walker,” Project Gutenberg, available online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13514/13514‐8.txt (accessed 27 June 2006). All subsequent quotations from “The Devil and Tom Walker” refer to this unpaginated text.

38. The devil remarks that “the red men have been exterminated by you white savages,” and also mentions that he is “the great patron and prompter of slave dealers.” It would seem counterintuitive for a Native American to speak of his own people in the second person, or for a black man to have anything to do with the slave trade. Irving likely included both phrases to reinforce the devil's racial indeterminacy.

39. See, e.g., Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. 111–135.

40. The “black mark” on Tom's forehead may also be a coded reference to the celebration of Ash Wednesday and, thus, a derogatory statement about Catholicism.