Eastman Johnson's 'Negro Life at the South' and urban slavery in Washington, D.C

Sawyer's sarcasm, as well as his descent into minstrel argot, is unsuccessful at masking a genuine fear of confronting the growing national crisis surrounding slavery. Indeed, the unusual coarseness of his language reflects a certain degree of desperation at being forced to address the unpleasant topic. Likewise, images such as Negro Life at the South did not permit viewers to "withdraw their eyes" from the realities of district slavery, and it is here, as we will see, that a key to the "objectionable" character of Johnson's painting can be found.

For those who focused their attentions on ending the slave trade in the district, the presence of slave dealers' private jails within sight of Congress had always been particularly galling. Yet slavery's apologists came close to refusing to acknowledge the existence of the slave trade, let alone the slave prisons. The remarks of Senator Joseph Underwood of Kentucky are characteristic:

Now, I have been a member of Congress, first and last, for about fifteen years, and during all that time . . . I never witnessed a bargain here which involved the sale of a slave, nor have I ever seen one put in jail. . . . If this traffic in human beings be so great an outrage to the feelings of members who represent the North, I do not know how it has been their fortune to come more frequently in contact with it than I have. Can it be that gentlemen run about in search of these spectacles which give them so much horror? I have heard, to be sure, that there are some pens, as they are called . . . where slaves are confined, but I have never gone there to see who was in or out of them, or how they were kept. And really, sir, it seems to me that no one of proper feeling would be disposed to look upon such places, unless it was his duty to do it.

Another politician (and future president of the Confederate States), Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, did not feign ignorance but, rather, painted a pleasant picture of life in the jails:

The depot is a comfortable looking house, in which, I understand, a trader keeps his slaves before going to some market. Rather a boarding-house in its aspect than a prison . . . . I finally discovered, by accident, what this slave-pen was, so often spoken of in Congress, by having my attention drawn to a dwelling-house, by the spacious yard and growth of poplar trees around it. That, I was told, was the "slave-pen." It is a house by which all must go in order to reach the building of the Smithsonian Institution, and looking as little like a jail as any residence in the city of Washington.(36)

This, for abolitionists, was the crux of the matter. Slavery's hideous face had been hidden for too long behind the benign facades of Washington's domestic architecture. If Southerners needed directions to the prisons, they would receive them from representatives such as Horace Mann of Massachusetts:

Sir, from the western front of this Capitol, from the piazza that opens out from your congressional library, as you cast your eye along the horizon and over the conspicuous objects of the landscape, - the President's Mansion, the Smithsonian Institution, and the site of the Washington Monument, you cannot fail to see the horrid and black receptacles where human beings are penned like cattle, and kept like cattle, that they may be sold like cattle, - as strictly and literally so as oxen and swine are kept and sold at Smithfield shambles in London, or at the cattle fair in Brighton.