Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade

MAURIE D. MCINNIS is professor in the McIntire Department of Art and associate dean for the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2011 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2011

Printed in the United States of America

20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11      1  2  3  4  5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55933-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-55933-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55932-2 (e-book)

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McInnis, Maurie Dee, author.

Slaves waiting for sale : abolitionist art and the American slave trade / Maurie D. McInnis.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn-13: 978-0-226-55933-9 (cloth : alkaline paper)

isbn-10: 0-226-55933-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Slave trade in art—History—19th century. 2. Art—England—History—19th century. 3. Art—United States—History—19th century. 4. Crowe, Eyre, 1824–1910. 5. Crowe, Eyre, 1824–1910—Travel—United States. 6. Antislavery movements—England—History—19th century. 7. Antislavery movements—United States—History—19th century. 8. Slave trade—Southern States—History—19th century. 9. Slave trade—Virginia—Richmond—History—19th century.  I. Title.

N8243.S576M35 2011

704.9′493063620973—dc22

2011004412

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

SLAVES

WAITING FOR

SALE

ABOLITIONIST ART AND

THE AMERICAN SLAVE TRADE

Maurie D. McInnis

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION Waiting

Color Plates

1 With Thackeray in America

2 Representing the Slave Trade

3 Mapping Richmond’s Slave Trade in 1853

4 The Red Flag

5 Dressed for Sale

6 Going South

7 Exhibiting the Slave Trade in England

EPILOGUE Remembering the Slave Trade

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

IN THE COURSE OF WRITING this book I have incurred many debts. My first thanks go to the University of Virginia, which granted Sesquicentennial Research leave and thus provided me with time I needed to complete the project. I have been supported monetarily from the Dean’s Office in the College of Arts and Sciences with research support and additional support from the small-grants committee. I would also like to thank my chairs in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia, Lawrence Goedde and Howard Singerman, and the Carl H. and Martha S. Lindner Center for Art History, for their support.

My research began when I was the Thomas Jefferson Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge University. I am thankful for the time to conduct my research as well as for the Downing College Fellowship. The book was concluded at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, where I was a residential fellow in 2009–10. I am deeply appreciative to the VFH for providing an excellent place to work and to all of the staff there for their support. The fellows at the VFH offered invaluable encouragement and advice; special thanks are due to Hanadi Al-Samman, Theodore DeLaney, Martien Halvorson-Taylor, Corinne Field, and William Freehling, who made my year at the VFH such an enjoyable one.

Along the way I have received help from excellent research assistants: Katelyn Crawford, Heather McMahon, Christopher Oliver, and Spike Sweeting. Other persons, including many at archives and museums, have been generous with their time and knowledge: Calvin Schermerhorn; Kathleen Staples; Gregg Kimball and Barbara Batson, Library of Virginia; Meghan Holder, Valentine Museum; George Warren, Rockbridge County Historical Society; Noel Harrison, National Park Service; Nicholas Butler, Charleston County Public Library; Jane Aldrich, South Carolina Historical Society; Grahame Long and Jan Heister, Charleston Museum; Ayanna Burrus and Louise Lippincott, Carnegie Museum of Art; Robert Hicklin, Charleston Renaissance Gallery; Sarah Gulick, Freedom House Museum, Alexandria, Virginia; Frank DeCurtis and Debbie Vaughan, Chicago History Museum; Diane Bundy, Kentucky Historical Society; Jason Flahardy, University of Kentucky Archives; Kara Brockman, New Orleans Notarial Archives; and Daniel Hammer, Mary Lou Eichhorn, and John Lawrence, Historic New Orleans Collection.

Numerous colleagues have been extraordinarily generous in reading part or all of the manuscript, sometimes more than once, and talking with me at length about it. These include Edward L. Ayers, Corinne Field, Douglas Fordham, William Freehling, Christopher Johns, Dean Johnson, David Lubin, and Louis Nelson. I also benefited immensely from the comments of the anonymous readers for the press. The project is much improved because of their interventions; whatever shortcomings remain are entirely my own.

The project has an additional online element, a 3–D map of Richmond’s slave-trading district. I have greatly enjoyed working on this project with the Digital Scholars’ Lab at the University of Richmond; Rob Nelson, Scott Nesbit, and Nate Ayers have done excellent work in translating my research into an active model and have integrated it with other research on Civil War Richmond. See Hidden Patterns of the Civil War at http://dsl.richmond.edu/civilwar/.

I was fortunate to have the support and editorial expertise of my University of Chicago Press editor, Robert Devens, from the outset of the project. This is a better book as a result of his enthusiasm for the project and his careful reading of the text at multiple stages. I am also very thankful to Anne Summers Goldberg, who has patiently dealt with my numerous questions, and to everyone else at the University of Chicago Press who was involved with the project.

My greatest debts, however, are to my family, whose unwavering support allows me to pursue my passion for teaching and research. To Ian and Fiona, thank you for bringing joy to my every day; and last, but really first, to my husband, Dean Johnson, thank you for making it all possible.

Introduction

WAITING

ON 6 MAY 1861, a crowd of British royalty, nobility, politicians, and others inaugurated the ninety-third annual London exhibition of the Royal Academy of the Arts. Arriving at the National Gallery’s newly renovated exhibition rooms at two in the afternoon, they toured the gems of British art before sitting down to a sumptuous entertainment with the members of the Royal Academy. They formed, according to the Times, the largest and most distinguished company yet assembled at this annual event. A long series of toasts and speeches followed the dinner, carrying on until eleven o’clock. After toasting Queen Victoria, the royal consort Prince Albert, and other members of the royal family, those gathered toasted the military heroes in attendance, who had recently distinguished themselves in the Second Anglo-Chinese War (1856–60). With a rhetorical flourish characteristic of the Victorian age, they cheered the assembly of great military men and artists, who together honored the arts of war and the arts of peace. In addition to the obligatory royalty and heroes of the day, they extolled the fine arts in general and the preeminence of the British school of painting in particular.¹

One of the visitors that opening day was the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, author of such celebrated works as Vanity Fair and Pendennis. Only Charles Dickens eclipsed Thackeray’s popularity. As Thackeray walked around the exhibition that spring day, hobnobbing with other notables, he must have noticed one painting in particular: Eyre Crowe’s Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia (fig. I.1 and plate 1), which was described by the critic for the Art Journal as one of the most important pictures of the exhibition. Its somber subject matter contrasted with the opulence of the evening.² Nearly a decade earlier, Thackeray had spent six months in America, delivering lectures in the Atlantic seaboard cities, including Richmond. He was accompanied on this trip by Crowe, a close family friend and a young struggling painter, who had gladly accepted employment as the author’s secretary. We do not know whether Thackeray pointed out the work to his fellow distinguished attendees or whether, in line with his own public evasion of the slavery question, he left it for others to discover.

FIG.I.1   Eyre Crowe, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, 1861. Oil on canvas, 29 × 39 in. Collection of Teresa Heinz.

The annual exhibition was the premier venue for aspiring artists and one of the major highlights of the social season. Artists who were either associates or full academicians of the Royal Academy were guaranteed a place for at least one work in the exhibition. Others had to submit works for consideration. Typically, only half of the more than two thousand paintings submitted won acceptance.

Slaves Waiting for Sale, only about three feet wide, was one of the smaller pictures on display. It hung alongside larger pictures covering a wide array of subject matters and genres: from medieval English history to Scottish peasant scenes, from historical biblical narratives to detailed landscape studies. The cornucopia of artistic riches hung frame to frame, floor to ceiling, jockeying with one another for attention (fig. I.2). Near Crowe’s painting were works by such well-known associates of the Royal Academy as Thomas Faed and Henry O’Neil and by artists who were later to become famous, such as James McNeill Whistler and Frederic Leighton. Many of the artists, including Crowe, hoped that this year they would finally be noticed by the critics, the public, and the Academy.³

Before his journey to America almost ten years earlier, Crowe had had only a few pictures accepted for the annual Royal Academy exhibition. Until he was elected an associate of the Academy (an honor he did not receive until 1876), his record of acceptances was spotty, with works shown in 1846, 1848, 1849, and 1854. From 1857 onward, at least one of his works was exhibited each of the next fifty-two years.

FIG.I.2   George Sharf, The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1828. Watercolor. © Museum of London. This painting shows the Royal Academy’s earlier exhibition rooms at Somerset House (none inside the National Gallery building have been located) and shows how paintings were traditionally hung for Royal Academy exhibitions. Notice that works are placed frame to frame and that there is a line at about eight feet that separates smaller works, hung just below it, from monumental works, hung just above it; other works are skyed, hung so high they are almost out of sight.

Crowe’s American sojourn was a thematic watershed for his art. A major topic in his paintings in the second half of the 1850s was one that Thackeray had lectured on during their journey—the English novelists and humorists of the previous two centuries, such as Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele. Inspired by the popularity of Thackeray’s lectures in the United States and Britain, Crowe employed these characters in numerous historical narrative paintings devoted to literary history, which brought him notice if only modest praise from the critics. For example, when his Dean Swift at St. James’s Coffee House, 1710 and Sir Richard Steele Writing to His Wife (fig. I.3) were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860, the reviewer for Athenaeum thought Crowe’s painting showed that he had made an advance in the mere qualities of execution but marked no other gain.⁴ His other pictures of a literary character received similarly muted responses.

Crowe’s second major subject in those years was American slavery. As he planned the works he would submit for the 1861 exhibition, it was with knowledge of the volatile political situation in the United States, which had heightened public interest in American topics. English newspapers and periodicals were filled with coverage of the American political crisis following the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 and the secession of Southern states. Although Crowe had earlier published numerous American scenes in the Illustrated London News and had exhibited several paintings in lesser exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Society for British Artists, and the British Institution, he now hoped one would be accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy. Crowe was one of the few English artists who had firsthand knowledge of America and was thus in an ideal position to comment on the issue most central to the current turmoil. He submitted a work designed to address the heart of the American political conflict—slavery.

FIG.I.3   Eyre Crowe, Sir Richard Steele Writing to His Wife. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860. Engraving published in British Artists: Their Style and Character. With Engraved Illustrations. No. LXXIII. Eyre Crowe, Art Journal 26 (1864). University of Virginia Library.

At the time of his American visit, Crowe was still a young man, less than thirty years old. He had not yet met with great success. As he traveled in America, he made dozens of sketches that he hoped to use one day as source material for his journalistic and artistic work. He was moved during his trip by reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published in book form the year of his arrival. This antislavery work, the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, became a sensation in Britain as well as the United States and ignited the artist’s interest in American slavery.

An artist at midcentury necessarily struggled with the charged topic of slavery. As Crowe considered what to represent, he drew upon seventy years of visual precedent. Antislavery images first entered the British visual lexicon with the famous Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship (fig. I.4).⁵ That image played an important role in generating public opposition to the international slave trade. Britain ended its participation in 1807, and the United States followed in 1808. Thus, when Crowe traveled to America, the international trade had been illegal for more than forty years, but the American domestic slave trade had become the focus of abolitionist scrutiny. Uncle Tom’s Cabin opens with the sale of two slaves and tells the story of slavery’s impact on enslaved families. Crowe’s interest in the domestic American slave trade, stimulated by reading the novel, led him to visit slave auctions in Richmond to witness such an event himself.

FIG.I.4   James Phillips, Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship. London, 1789. Engraving and letterpress. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Back in Great Britain and pondering how best to depict slavery and the slave trade, he was constrained by the Royal Academy’s standards and the expectations for what subjects were suitable for fine art. Despite his own horror at the scenes he witnessed, he could not realistically depict their emotional and sensory gruesomeness. He would have to find a way to portray the American slave trade in an image palatable to the selection committee and Royal Academy audiences.⁶ Slavery had only occasionally been represented on the walls of the Royal Academy. As one Victorian art critic commented, painting was an art based on luxury, optimism, and aristocracy. . . . Everything must be kept within the bounds of what is charming, temperate and prosperous, without in any degree suggesting the struggle for existence. To bring the sale of humans to viewers, Crowe would first have to get that picture accepted, and acceptance required being temperate and avoiding anything viewers would consider brutal or anything revealing the struggle for existence.⁷

To solve this dilemma, Crowe reworked an image he had sketched years earlier under a similar title, Slaves Waiting to Be Sold (fig. I.5). The revised painting, his culminating statement on American slavery and his final painting on the topic, garnered much-wanted attention from the critics. The captivated writer for the Times, for instance, was drawn to the timeliness of the subject matter, identifying Crowe’s picture as one of fewer than fifty outstanding works in the exhibit, which included more than a thousand. In a second review, the critic commented on the importance of the subject matter, a scene of Southern slave life, bearing internal evidence of local truth.⁸ A reviewer in the Art Journal saw this painting as Crowe’s breakout work, asserting that Crowe, hitherto comparatively unknown, had "produced one of the most important pictures in the exhibition, and certainly the most promising work of the season, from . . . the apparently coming men of English Art."⁹

The painting arrived at a timely moment. The American Civil War had begun with the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on 12 April 1861, less than a month before the exhibition’s opening on 6 May. On 17 April, Virginia had seceded from the Union, and Richmond was soon made the capital of the Confederacy. Crowe’s subject matter as well as the timing captured the public’s attention. But the manner in which the subject was presented was also striking. In contrast to most Victorian narrative painting, there is not much action in the image. Nine slaves sit on benches in a low-ceilinged nondescript room. They are merely waiting, as the title informs us. It is what they are waiting for that forms the true subject of the painting. They wait to be sold. The only acting in the picture comes from the left, where three potential buyers enter the room. Crowe successfully creates narrative tension through this contrast between acting and waiting, between buying and being sold.

FIG.I.5   Eyre Crowe, Slaves Waiting to Be Sold, in Eyre Crowe, With Thackeray in America (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1893). Collection of the author. The sketch was made in an auction room on Wall Street, Richmond, VA, on 3 March 1853.

Most artists who represented the American slave trade focused on the climactic moment of the auction itself, creating a theatrical setting and focusing on the spectacle of the action. Those images generally relied upon sentimental conventions and stock characters, most commonly showing an individual slave standing on an auction block next to an auctioneer with his arm raised, with a crowd of potential buyers gathered around them. Crowe himself had experimented with this moment in a wood engraving for the Illustrated London News (fig. I.6). As writers described such scenes, they emphasized the market drama, the suspense of bidding, and the theater of the going, going, gone of the final sale. Its frequent repetition as a visual and textual formula made the image of the slave auction expected and almost familiar, which paradoxically diminished both its horror and its impact.

FIG.I.6   Eyre Crowe, Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia, in Illustrated London News, 27 September 1856. Collection of the author.

Crowe sought to convey the depth and complexity of the horrors of slavery by presenting an entirely different scene: not the moment of the auction, by now so well rehearsed in the minds of viewers, but the moments before. This decision might seem a relatively minor choice, but it had dramatic implications. The shift in timing alone forced viewers to consider the topic anew. Instead of drawing attention to the auctioneer and the buyers, Crowe focused primarily on the enslaved. Significantly, he moved away from the characteristically crowded auction scene to the pre-auction inactivity, in which only a small number of participants were present. He moved from representing the figures as stock types to creating images of individuals who possessed a depth of feeling and emotion rarely encountered in representations of persons of African descent in the nineteenth century. In Crowe’s painting, the viewer is forced to consider the slave trade not just in the abstract but instead to recognize that it happened to individual mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons.

Crowe distilled his understanding of slavery and the American war into this single moment. Just as the viewing public could not know the outcome of the war unfolding before them, the slaves in Crowe’s painting could not know what fate held in store for them. While this painting represented nine individuals, it also represented all slaves, each of whom had a price on his or her head and could be sold at any moment.¹⁰ This sense of uncertainty and foreboding made Crowe’s image apt for the moment. The picture of a small group of enslaved men, women, and children asked the British public to consider the horrors of American slavery in the modern world. It also asked them to consider the cause of the U.S. Civil War and, by extension, Britain’s proper response to it.

Slaves Waiting for Sale was the artist’s culminating statement, but it did not stand alone. It was part of a cycle of images that made allusions to a wide web of associations. Crowe’s first painting about American slavery, Going South: A Sketch from Life in America (plate 2), directly addressed one of the central stories of nineteenth-century American history—the forced relocation of African Americans through the domestic slave trade. In the decades between the end of America’s participation in the international slave trade in 1808 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, historians estimate that nearly two-thirds of a million enslaved persons were sold from the upper South, where tobacco cultivation declined, to the lower South, where cotton and sugar production boomed. Most commonly this relocation separated African American families. What planters wanted in the fields were able-bodied young men and women, not their entire families. Sons and daughters were sold away from mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers, and husbands and wives were sold away from their children and each other.¹¹

Crowe’s images of the American slave trade stand at the center of this book, but the book is not a traditional art history book. Nor is it a traditional history book, although it is about the American slave trade. Rather, the paintings serve as the hub of a wheel, much like the one in the center of Going South. With Crowe’s images at the center, the radiating spokes spread outward to discuss the evolution of slave trade imagery; Crowe’s slavery pictures; slave markets, jails and auction rooms; the visual world of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and the place of American slavery in the Victorian art world.

Although Crowe provided a fresh window onto the material experience inside the slave market, he was only a brief observer of this moment. Crowe used his keen reportorial talent and artistic sensibilities to offer new insights and raise new questions about the persons bound up in this inhuman commerce. As a white English artist with limited exposure to slavery, he did not understand the full implications of all that he had seen, nor did anyone else. As former slave William Wells Brown wrote at the time, Slavery has never been represented, slavery never can be represented.¹² But authors and artists felt they had to try.

In the chapters that follow, I retrace Crowe’s footsteps, reconstructing what he saw and filling in gaps with what he missed. By doing so, I want to capture the context needed for us to understand Crowe’s images today. In exploring the images created by Crowe and other artists, the chapters that follow explain how those works helped viewers to see the American slave trade and to understand slavery in new ways. Images were a vital weapon for abolitionists working to end slavery, who often found it difficult to get the public to read their pamphlets or listen to their speeches. Images could quickly and immediately communicate their position. As Angelina Grimké, a Southern-born slaveholder turned abolitionist, explained: Until the pictures of the slave’s sufferings were drawn and held up to public gaze, no Northerner had any idea of the cruelty of the system, it never entered their minds that such abominations could exist.¹³

What follows is an archaeology of sorts. It is not a new history of the American slave trade but a study that looks at that slave trade from a new vantage point, from the images created by artists as they tried to represent it, as they tried to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. By examining the trade from inside the auction room, I mean to recover some of the texture of nineteenth-century life. To that end, I draw from a wide range of sources not commonly brought together in one study. Visual evidence is taken from photographs, newspaper and book illustrations, and fine art paintings, and textual evidence comes from the account books and letters of slave traders and the published accounts of travelers and former slaves.¹⁴ The purpose is to recreate the network of relationships among people and places; among images and texts; and among those attacking the slave trade, those damaged by it, and those profiting from it. The many different issues raised by Crowe’s images connect seemingly unrelated worlds. The tobacco fields of the Virginia countryside may seem a world away from the exhibition rooms of the Royal Academy. Yet, the two were linked by the auction rooms of Richmond’s slave traders and Crowe’s visit there on 3 March 1853.

Exploring those linked stories illuminates both the American slave trade and nineteenth-century art’s political power. By studying these images we can more easily understand how images fundamentally shifted the way people grasped slavery. Viewers were given access to a world that was unfamiliar to them. Images distilled the multiplicity of conflicting information about slavery and the slave trade into comprehensible messages. These images proved to be a vitally important way to get a much wider audience to see slavery in new ways and, for many, for the first time. It perfectly captured the current historical moment. Just as the slaves were waiting, their fates undetermined, the world was waiting to learn the fate of the United States, and thus American slavery as an institution. Within the wider world of antislavery imagery, Crowe’s Slaves Waiting for Sale was exceptional. Ripe with ambiguity, its intimate view of an event usually depicted with great theatricality called upon viewers to consider the slave trade anew. Its inactivity invited viewers to pause. It encouraged them to become absorbed, to reflect upon the interiority of those represented and consider their own subjective responses. Even after the passage of 150 years, the painting’s unique vision of American slavery invites similar reflection today.

1

With Thackeray in America

IN OCTOBER 1852, the young artist Eyre Crowe boarded the ship Canada in Liverpool bound for Boston. He was accompanying the celebrated author and satirist William Makepeace Thackeray on what was to be a six-month speaking tour of the United States. Thackeray, a family friend whom Crowe had known since he was a young boy, had written the aspiring painter the previous month to cajole him into making the trip. Though I don’t think you’d make the best and the cutest Secretary, Thackeray playfully opened, yet to me you would be valuable as you know from old affection and entire confidence.¹ As the author and the artist traveled from Boston to Savannah with numerous stops in between, both gathered material that eventually shaped the direction their respective art took. In anticipation, Thackeray commented before setting out on the journey, "Let us hope I shall bring back something amusing from America—my book just out [Esmond] is as dreary and dull as if it were true."²

At the time they embarked, Crowe, still in his twenties, had not met with much success. His childhood had been spent in Paris, where his father was a journalist for the London Morning Chronicle. It was there that he first became acquainted with Thackeray, a friend of his father. At age fourteen Crowe enrolled in the atelier of Paul Delaroche; he later accompanied the painter to Rome for additional artistic training. When he moved to London with his parents in 1844, he enrolled in the Royal Academy School of Art to continue his studies and to become known to the London art world.³

He had exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy in 1846, 1848, and 1849, but with little critical notice. The only mention of these early productions, in fact, came from Thackeray himself, who was then employed by Crowe’s father as the art critic for the Morning Chronicle. The energy, good drawing, and character cited by Thackeray in his 1849 column were not enough to launch Crowe’s painting career, and in 1850 and 1851 the artist had no works accepted for exhibition.⁴ Therefore, having previously worked for Thackeray in copying illustrations and text for various publication projects, he gladly accepted the offer to serve as secretary for Thackeray’s speaking tour.

It was the first trip to the United States for both of them. Thackeray had just completed his novel Esmond (1852) and decided to undertake this lecture tour entirely for financial reasons, hoping to put some money away for his wife and children. As he commented in a letter to a friend, It’s only for the money’s sake that I pursue it. But it [speaking] is more profitable than book-writing and serves even to aid that.⁵ The author’s intent was to deliver a series of six lectures in each of the cities he visited: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. Having produced best-selling novels such as Vanity Fair (1848) and Pendennis (1848–50), he was one of the most celebrated authors of the day, second only to Charles Dickens. Thackeray’s fame had been established as a young satirist writing for publications such as Fraser’s Magazine and Punch, where his biting satire often poked at England’s stuffy upper-crust society. After the success of Vanity Fair, however, he found himself a part of that society, and his later works, including Esmond, are now seen as considerably less successful. It was as if he found it difficult to satirize his newly won social class. Nevertheless, when he arrived in America in 1852, he was a literary giant and his visit was eagerly anticipated.⁶

Among the passengers on their thirteen-day crossing were two literary sorts, Arthur Clough, the English poet and James Russell Lowell, the American poet, as their shipmates called them, in addition to a mix of other English and American travelers. By all accounts, it was a rough crossing, with the ship plunging like a porpoise.⁷ Thackeray and Crowe were greatly troubled with seasickness, and even simple correspondence was frustrated by the rocking ship. Because the vessel pitched so violently, Thackeray complained in a letter to his daughter, I can’t write, and my sentences lurch about and grasp hold of anything to support themselves; he added, "Poor Eyre has been very puky [sic], he is the worst secretary and the best creature.⁸ In the close quarters characteristic of a mid-nineteenth-century ship, the passengers got to know one another well and often talked politics. The Englishman Clough reported that one evening the discussion turned to slavery and a man from Hartford, Connecticut, who took not the antislavery view and stated that the North was quite satisfied, talked at length about the recently passed Fugitive Slave Law. The American poet Lowell and his wife, fervent abolitionists," vehemently countered his arguments. Such shipboard conversations served as an introduction to a topic that proved omnipresent during their travels.⁹

Thackeray and Crowe disembarked in Boston and soon headed to New York, where they were quickly thrown into the social whirlwind that characterized their time in America. Thackeray was a highly sought-after guest, and they saw more of people than they did of places. The novelist told his daughters, I go to dinner before the lecture, to parties afterwards, am receiving visitors or writing notes all day, and the pace of London is nothing to the racketing life of New York. The long course of the lectures meant that they remained in each city often for several weeks; in New York they stayed for more than a month.¹⁰

Thackeray’s lectures were biographical sketches of the humorous English writers of the previous century, including Dean Swift, William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Henry Fielding, and others. A subscription for the entire series