1860-1910: learning resources

Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves

Key points

• As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act required the return of any escaped slave, even if they were in free states. This policy changed during the Civil War, when a series of Confiscation Acts allowed Union troops to free southern slaves as contraband of war. Many of these freed slaves provided intelligence and support to the Union Army.
• Eastman Johnson’s Ride for Liberty depicts a family of enslaved people escaping to the Union lines in the dim light of dawn. Unlike many contemporary images of African Americans, which marginalized or caricatured them, Johnson shows them as active and sympathetic figures. Although they are nearly silhouettes, he captures a sense of danger and resolve.
• Painted in the midst of the Civil War, Johnson claimed to have witnessed this scene on a battlefield in Virginia. Although he painted several versions of the subject, they were never publicly exhibited or sold during his lifetime.

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Envisioning Manifest Destiny, Leutze's Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

• In this study for a public mural at the U.S. Capitol Building, Emmanuel Leutze visualized the concept of Manifest Destiny, combining religious and patriotic imagery to glorify westward expansion.
• In an era when few Americans had traveled west, Leutze brings together a variety of landforms and artefacts to conjure this unfamiliar terrain and create a sense of drama and excitement. He depicted the land as uncharted territory, however, erasing its recent history as part of Mexico and the Native Americans who were displaced by American settlers.
• In the early years of the American Civil War, Leutze emphasized the west as a land of promise and opportunity that could restore national unity. After reading a draft of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, he added an African-American figure to the final mural in the Capitol Building.

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Mending America, women and the Civil War

Key points

• During the Civil War, women entered the workforce and contributed to the war effort. In the difficult years of the Reconstruction, their role was less clear, but many felt a patriotic duty to help restore the union. Along with freed African-Americans, an influx of immigration, and the vast number of young men injured in the war, this was a period of redefining the American workforce.
• Lilly Martin Spencer’s The Home of the Red, White, and Blue uses symbolism to establish the American family as essential to the restoration of the American union. She also highlights the role of women and immigrants as part of that future.
• Although, as a woman, she was barred from attending art school, Lilly Martin Spencer blended elements of academic art with her contemporary and familiar subject. The pyramidal composition directs the viewer to the central figures and suggests stability while her use of atmospheric perspective creates a sense of depth.

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Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, Knee-Pants at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen—A Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop

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Visiting the Lower East Side in 1905

Key ideas

• Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants came to America, making it the greatest period of mass migration in American history. Many recent Jewish immigrants had fled economic hardship and political violence within the Russian Empire.
• At the time Luks painted Street Scene, New York’s Lower East Side was home to approximately 500,000 Jewish immigrants, and it was the most densely populated place on earth. The tenement buildings that surround the scene blot out all but a small sliver of blue sky, adding to this painting’s sense of the congestion of this neighborhood.
• With growing Jewish immigration came rising nativist and antisemitic sentiment. While members of the Ashcan School, like George Luks, were revolutionary in their inclusion of unidealized urban subjects, their paintings preserved stereotypes and unequal dynamics of power. Luks had produced antisemitic caricatures for several publications during the 1890s, and the emphasis on racist stereotypes about Jewish phyisognomy can be seen in the painting.

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Stieglitz, The Steerage

Key points

• Often misinterpreted as a scene of American immigration, the people in Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage were leaving the United States, either because they had been rejected at Ellis Island, were migrant workers on temporary visas, or, like Stieglitz, were simply travelers. It speaks to the explosive growth in transatlantic crossings in the early 20th century.
• Stieglitz celebrated The Steerage as an example of modern photography as fine art, emphasizing its geometric shape and dynamic line, elements that replaced his earlier pictorialism, which had used blurred edges and atmospheric toning to look painterly. This style embraces the mechanical camera as a tool to capture the energy of modern life.

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