Black History Month: Painting told slavery story

As the Civil War was beginning, after the surrender of Fort Sumter but before Virginia officially joined the Confederacy, a painting of Richmond slaves waiting for auction was a surprise sensation at the Royal Academy of Art.

British artist Eyre Crowe had visited Richmond eight years earlier, in 1853, and caused a ruckus when he pulled out his sketch pad at a slave auction. His highly trained hand produced a portrait of people, not caricatures, illuminating a story that Richmond's proposed slavery museum is trying to tell.

The black man in his painting sits sullen and pained, a vein visible in his forehead, arms crossed and fists clenched. He's no Uncle Tom.

A woman whose barefoot baby is nursing at her breast has a look of sad resignation. Another woman smiles lovingly at the pensive toddler sitting on her lap. A young boy lowers his eyes; an older woman kneels at the heating stove. Two other women stare far into the unsettled future.

White men in the shadows, less fully formed, represent the buyers who will determine their fate.

The painting and the history of Richmond's slave trade captivated Maurie McInnis, art professor and associate dean at the University of Virginia, whose recent book is called "Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade."

Jack Trammell also has examined the era in "The Richmond Slave Trade: The Economic Backbone of the Old Dominion," a new paperback for The History Press. Now director of disability support at Randolph-Macon College, Trammell originally researched Richmond's slave market for a 2005 column for The Washington Times.

The slave trade in Richmond amounted to more than $4 million in 1857, according to an editor of the Warrenton Whig. The average selling price was less than $1,000, McInnis said. Prices increased during the Civil War, Trammell added. Individual slaves could sell for $2,000 in 1863, which Trammell estimates is equivalent to about $80,000 today.

The dollar value of slaves was two or three times the national gross domestic product, said Trammell, who has degrees in history and special education. "People in the North were staggered by the absolute value. There's no way the North could have bought out the South.

"There's perhaps no other way the system could have come to a close than the agony of defeat in a terrible war. When you study the dehumanizing aspects of the system, it's hard not to come away with a sense of relief in 1865 when the sun comes back out and we get disconnected from this horrible thing."

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As the largest slave-trading center outside New Orleans, Richmond was a place where surplus slaves from Virginia's fields and industries were sold south to supply the expanding needs of cotton planters on the frontier.

Nearly 50 dealers of enslaved Africans have been identified in the city before the Civil War ended the practice, said Janine Bell, a member of the Slave Trade Commission, at a recent discussion of the proposed slavery museum.

The city's slave trade was largely hidden in plain sight. The nucleus was Wall Street, which was little more than an alley between Main and Franklin streets beneath the current location of Interstate 95.

"Virtually no trace of this neighborhood can be found today," McInnis said. "Not only the buildings but the topography of the landscape in this section of the city was forever dramatically altered."

What's left — in particular Lumpkin's Jail and the slave burial ground — gives Richmond's proposed slavery museum an authenticity that sets it apart from all others, said Joy Bailey, a consultant working with the project.

When the young artist Crowe visited Richmond in 1853, he was serving as secretary for a family friend, "Vanity Fair" author William Thackeray, during a lecture tour of America.

Crowe had bought a copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" on the trip from Boston to New York. In Richmond, his first Southern city, he decided to see the system at work.

While reading a newspaper at breakfast on his first morning at the American Hotel, Crowe saw several ads for slave auctions. He walked a few blocks down Main Street and turned left on Wall, where red flags marked the locations of slave sales. In the first two rooms, he merely observed.

"In the third room," McInnis said, "he was so struck by the sight of a group of slaves seated on benches before the sale that, in what he described as a hardly justifiable fit of enthusiasm, he took out his pencil and paper to make a sketch of the scene."

Bidders stopped to watch. The dealer came over to ask what he was doing and Crowe replied, "I don't feel bound to answer your questions." When bidding continued to lag, the dealer approached again "with what he described as ill-disguised rage," McInnis reported, "and once again demanded to know what he was about. Crowe replied, 'You can look for yourself. I am sketching.'"

A third question persuaded Crowe to leave. He ducked into the second sales room for a minute, and as he walked away he noticed the entire group coming after him. "He walked quickly to Main Street and disappeared into the crowd," McInnis said.

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Crowe was one of the few highly trained artists who ever depicted the slave trade, McInnis said.

Two of his Richmond paintings — "After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond" from the Chicago History Museum and "Slaves Waiting for Sale" from the collection of Teresa Heinz — may return here when McInnis curates an exhibit on Virginia and the American slave trade at the Library of Virginia in 2014.

Lefevre James Cranstone, who was primarily a landscape artist, also depicted a Richmond slave auction. His "Slave Auction, Virginia" is at the Virginia Historical Society.

"The difference in skill level is noticeable," she said. "Crowe spent a lifetime painting people and emotions. Cranstone did not."

Crowe succeeded in showing a series of emotions. "Most striking is the anger of the male slave," McInnis said. "Previously there had been very few people of African descent exhibited. They had conformed to stereotypes. This man does not. That figure was very much commented on" at the Royal Academy show.

The work also drew attention because of the moment Crowe chose to portray. Previous artwork had focused on the auction itself. By moving away from the expected, "he forced viewers to consider the topic anew," she said. By painting individuals instead of stock characters, "we are forced to consider the slave trade not just in the abstract but to recognize that it happened to individual mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons. …

"His images helped his contemporaries then and us today to see the trade and thus slavery with fresh insight."