Images of Enslavement

Currier's prints were inexpensive--most cost between fifteen cents and three dollars each--allowing average Americans to be art collectors. The images were mass produced by artists working for Currier, and the company produced an average of three new titles per week over a sixty year period. In 1852 a savvy businessman named James Merritt Ives joined the company and introduced several marketing innovations, including catalogue showrooms and door-to-door sales. In 1857 Ives became a partner, and after that the images bore the company name Currier & Ives.

The most popular prints produced by the company were images that showed an idealized version of antebellum America:  small, middle-class, prosperous families in a rural/agricultural environment. Currier's prints appeared at about the same time that Americans were adding a fashionable new room to their homes--the parlor--which required tasteful furnishings and decor. Other prints were produced for specific audiences, depicting such subjects as temperance, moral lessons, religious themes, comic scenes, and politics.

The subject of the print Branding Slaves was rare in that it portrayed an atrocity. Abolition, in 1845, was still a controversial topic in America. This print, however, was popular because it side-stepped the moral issues and showed the system at its most brutal, and was therefore condemnable by all. Horrors of the slave trade were clearly depicted by details in the print:  the fear and horror on the face of the African prisoner, contrasted with the bored expressions of the slavers; the bullwhip lying on the ground behind the slaver to the right; the pistol stuck into the sash of the man with the branding iron; the smoke from the branding iron as it sears the African man's flesh; groups of slaves in coffles, in the left background; and near that a slave being torn from the grasp of a friend or family member. These are all images designed to arouse disgust and revulsion against the most violent aspects of slavery. Not addressed, however, are the moral issues which were central to the actual debates over the institution at the time.