Civil War Propaganda Analysis

Historians have something of a long-standing love affair with the any scrap of historical evidence tangentially relevant to the American Civil War. For many academics and military enthusiasts, the Civil War is fascinating because it was the first major conflict fought between two industrialized factions. While the drastic overhauls made to military ordinance and tactics are obvious to all, one notable change in the war effort brought about by industrialization goes somewhat unnoticed: the adoption of mass-produced propaganda images. While historians can point to earlier efforts to stir up partisan passions and demonize perceived opponents, as with Thomas Paine’s wildly popular revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, propaganda as we know only

came into being after the widespread adoption of the printing press and the invention of photography. By the time tensions over the intractable issue of slavery broke out into open bloodshed in 1861, both pro-slavery and abolitionist factions had a wealth of experience in using politicized cartoons and photographs to rally their respective bases around their cause. Whether it be artwork and photographs depicting the horrors of the slave system or sensationalistic depictions of miscegenation and industrialized decadence commissioned in response, the production of these images was ever-present and continually popular. As tensions turned to war, propaganda went from civilian curiosity to military imperative, a powerful tool used for recruitment.
Who Benefits?

The Creators and Distributors of 19th Century Political Art

To begin analyzing propaganda, a firm understanding of what the term means must be established. Simply put, propaganda is information that is distributed to influence a target audience and advance an agenda, whatever it may be. Additionally, the term brings along with it a certain lack of objectivity, implying that the information contained is at best exaggerated for emotional affect and at worst outright lies packaged as the truth. Even propaganda that relies solely on factual information placed within its proper context still largely relies on emotional and rhetorical shortcuts to get its message

across.
Before analyzing the images themselves, it is important to make clear who was producing propaganda in 19th century America and how they managed to disseminate it to a wide audience.

Unlike the modern top-down state disinformation model pioneered by the likes of Joseph Goebbels and Mao Zedong, the propaganda of the Civil War was rarely the work of the United States or Confederate governments. For the most part, propaganda existed on the local or regional level, commissioned by private organizations or clients. Pre-war, most messaging on the issue of slavery was produced by explicitly abolitionist or pro-slavery organizations, as neither the federal government nor the nation’s newspapers sought to lose the support and respect of a wide swath of their own countrymen. During the war itself, recruitment efforts were largely delegated to local commanders and organizers, and private magazines and printers took the role of public agitators. Given that most of the country’s industrial capabilities lay in the North, the majority of surviving images from the war period itself are unambiguously pro-United States, as the Confederacy lacked both the great factories required to mass-produce photographs and artwork and the kind of broadly available newspapers and magazines available in the

North.
Abolition, Advertised: Pre-War Anti-Slavery Propaganda
Even before the outbreak of war, the existence of a vast system of chattel slavery in the American South inspired widespread abolitionist campaigns and equally spirited proslavery responses. Abolitionists in both the United States were some of the earliest adopters of visual information campaigns in their anti-slavery efforts. Focusing largely on the unabashed brutality and wanton cruelty inflicted upon enslaved people, abolitionist propaganda and messaging efforts appealed to basic human empathy and compassion. For the most part, abolitionist art chose to highlight the more obviously barbaric aspects of the “peculiar institution,” the particular set of laws and practices that comprised the wholesale chattel slavery of Africans in the American South.
A prototypical example of the vintage of pamphlets and books distributed in the North by abolitionists are the various editions of the American Anti-Slavery Almanac, the primary mouthpiece of the influential American Anti-Slavery Society. Founded in 1833 by radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the American Anti-Slavery Society declared that “the guilt of [this nation’s] oppression is unequalled by any other on the face of the earth” and stood for nothing less than full emancipation. Styling itself as a grim take on widely available farmer’s almanacs, the Almanac was an annual calendar sold by that matched every month to a particular injustice committed within the Southern slave system. Corresponding to the month of January, the first illustration of the 1838 edition features a free African woman being forcibly restrained as a white man tears her identification papers up, preparing to sell her off at the soonest opportunity. (Image 1) This was an all too common story, as self-proclaimed “slavecatchers” often seized the first black person they could find, often destroying evidence of their prior freedom in the process. As James M. McPherson writes in his Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era,
Indeed, professional slave catchers did not always take pains to make sure they had captured the right man nor did every judge go out of his way to ensure that a supposed fugitive matched the description on the affidavit. A good many slave catchers did not bother to take their captured prey before a court but simply spirited it south by the quickest route.
Even those who did not believe in ending the Southern system of slavery outright were shocked by the complete contempt of law shown by so-called “slave catchers,” and their flagrant trampling upon the rights of free men was a common rallying cry in the North.
Representing May in the Almanac is an image (Image Two) depicting slave auctioneers seperating a husband from his wife and children, as his new buyer wishes to disrupt the cohesiveness of the family. The wanton separation of enslaved families was a shockingly common practice throughout the South, and one that enslaved people were all to cognizant of. In a letter written by enslaved seamstress Elizabeth Hobbs to her long-lost mother, Hobbs pleads,
I want to hear of the family at home very much, indeed. I really believe you and all the family have forgotten me, if not I certainly should have heard from some of you since you left Boyton ; if it was only a line; nevertheless I love you all very dearly, and shall, although I may never see you again, nor do I ever expect to.
Hobb’s story was hardly uncommon, and many enslaved people tirelessly searched for the whereabouts of their parents, spouses, and siblings. The 1840 version of the Almanac (Image 3) features an even more heartbreaking variant of this familial separation story for the month of September, with a heartbroken mother being ripped away from her infant child as the slave broker gleefully looks on. While it carries obvious emotional weight, separating husband from wife and parent from child carried particular weight in a devout Christian society.
Furthermore, abolitionists believed that the slave system was a slap in the face to the democratic values of the United States, and played up the insult for all to see in their artistic efforts. Two Anti-Slavery Society engravings featured in the same 1841 dossier get this across well. Dripping with venomous irony, the first uncredited image is titled “How Slavery Honors Our Country’s Flag.” (Image Four) In it, a procession of men in chains marches forth under the whip of their overseer, bearing the American flag aloft, the two men at the front equipped with marching fiddles. Their chains serve to negate the flag’s mere existence as a symbol, and actively dishonor the nation and its principles. For abolitionists, slavery was the gravest insult to God and country the Earth had ever seen.
Its companion piece is the even more direct “A punishment, practised in the United States, for the crime of loving liberty,” (Image Five) which features a bound slave suspended from a tree as a white overseer readies his flogging paddle. Lofty Southern talk of liberty and individual rights gave way to deafening rhetorical silence with each crack of the whip. Like the overwhelming majority of abolitionist propaganda, little in the way of creative license was needed to get across the depravity of what slave owners euphemized as necessary discipline.
A Positive Good: Pre-War Slavery Apologia, In Pictures
Abolitionists were not alone in their use of visual propaganda, although they were certainly not outmatched. Pro-slavery proponents and apologists were quick to jump on the visual bandwagon, offering up every racist canard in the book in increasingly desperate attempts to justify a system under siege. Although the South was certainly the foremost center of pro-slavery rhetoric in the nation, most of the surviving pro-slavery propaganda available to modern historians actually originates in the North. Simply put, the South lacked both the manufacturing base and the transportation system needed to distribute print media.
Born in free Philadelphia, Edward Williams Clay ended up as one of America’s most prominent racist artists. An 1841 print by Clay known as “America” (Image Six) is a classic example of slavery apologia. Clay portrays the ideal American agricultural system as consisting of a well-to-do white family, flanked by their docile and elderly slaves, whose descendants are foolishly dancing in the background. The master laments “these poor creatures” and promises that “while a dollar is left me, nothing shall be spared to increase their comfort and happiness.” Presenting this system as mutually beneficial, Clay makes it clear that the enslaved should know their place and thank their benevolent masters for their kind treatment. The interplay between these twin archetypes — that of the cultured, benevolent master and the helpless, depraved slave — essentially comprises the majority of pro-slavery art.
Another of Clay’s most notable pieces is his 1839 “Amalgamation Waltz,” (Image Six) a cartoonishly sensationalized warning against the evils of miscegenation. In what he clearly meant as a nightmarish scene, Clay depicts a debutante ball where young white women happily dance with grossly caricatured black men, their rightful white suitors watching helplessly from the balcony. Relying on his audience's presumed disgust towards race mixing, Clay’s piece carries with it a tacit threat: if you support abolition, this could be your daughter. Given the widespread fear in 19th century America of sexually virile black men taking advantage of pure white women, one has to imagine that Clay was attempting to play it to the hilt.