VERBATIM
For
several weeks my local art museum displayed a traveling exhibit from
the Johnson Collection of art permanently located in Spartanburg, South
Carolina. The prevailing consensus among historians is that the
antebellum South did not produce much in the way of art, that its
literature was substandard, and that its only contribution to American
history was slavery and militaristic oligarchy. Those who read this
blog understand this position to be blatantly false, but the opinion
still exists.
The important part of this critique, however, is the perception that
anything Southerners produced or anything produced about the South in
antebellum America is somehow substandard unless it is an open critique
of Southern society. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin: good; William Gilmore Simms’s
The Sword and the Distaff: bad; Theodore Weld’s
American Slavery As It Is: good; Nehemiah Adams’s
A Southside View of Slavery: bad.
Several paintings in the Johnson Collection stood out, not the least of which was the original
Lost Cause by
Henry Mosler, but there is one that nicely exemplifies the thinking of
the modern historical profession in regard to Southern art, William
Thompson Russell Smith’s
Shenandoah Valley (pictured above).
Smith was a Northern artist who enjoyed Southern life and often painted sweeping landscapes of the South.
Shenandoah Valley
is a picturesque landscape complete with several slaves harvesting
wheat. The description of the painting includes this gem: “Smith chose
to romanticize Southern rural life rather than depicting its harsh
realities….Thus, he presents African-American figures in the painting as
if they are picturesque peasants working contentedly in an idyllic
field rather than as slaves laboring involuntarily for the owner of the
plantation home at right.”
Smith could not have been painting what he saw. No. He was making
this up so that people would buy his work. This is not an endorsement
of slavery, but merely a point that anything remotely benign or positive
about antebellum Southern life has to be a product of the “Lost Cause”
mentality and needs to be corrected by our wise Northern academy.
Forget that Smith painted this in 1846 and that he was a Northerner.
That doesn’t matter. It is only sufficient to “correct” an “idyllic”
impression of the South and to explain the true harsh realities of
Southern life. This type of narrative only serves to compound racial
animosity. It has been this way since the antebellum period.
The Johnson Collection includes works by Charles Bird King, stunning
portraits Stonewall Jackson and John C. Calhoun, the famous
The Burial of Latane, and others. For more on the collection,
visit its website.
