Picturing a Nation Divided: Art, American Identity and the Crisis over Slavery

<p>In 1859, Arkansas artist Edward Payson Washbourne produced a lithograph entitled the Arkansas Traveler. Based upon a popular folktale originating twenty years earlier, Washbourne used the image to convey his understanding of the crisis over slavery in the western territories. Artists in north and south responded to the slavery debate with differing visions of the western landscape; one characterized by free labor, the other slave. Westward expansion also highlighted debate about Indians, long relegated to the role of the savage other by the myth of the frontier. Yet, on the southern frontier, the conversation was different, as slaveholding Cherokees claimed to be more civilized than the barbaric white settlers. In the Arkansas Traveler, Washbourne, influenced by his missionary father and his Cherokee contemporaries, presented slaveholders as civilized and those whites who opposed the expansion of slavery as barbaric. For Washbourne, as for the progressive Cherokees, the solution to the problem of slavery was to educate these anti-slavery barbarians in the ways of the civilized south. Thus, the Arkansas Traveler reveals the role of art in communicating the complexity of ideology on the southern frontier on the eve of Civil War. </p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Year dc:date.available

2018

Author dc:creator

• Hancox, Louise Michelle

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Schweiger, Beth

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mazow, Leo G.
• West, Elliott

• Arkansas
• Art
• Cherokees
• Indians
• Settlers
• Slavery
• Indigenous Studies
• United States History

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/2768

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.uark.edu:etd-4320