Northern Visions of the Freedmen at War's End

Northern Visions of the Freedmen at War's End

This page will be available by January 1, 2007. Until then, please take advantage of the other pages on the NORTHERN VISIONS website. The articles below are intended as a sample of the types of resources you will soon be able to find in this section.

The four pictures immediately above appeared on two facing pages in the April 25, 1865 edition of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. To the left is an excerpt from the text which accompanied the graphics.

While the full-page picture seems to celebrate the black soldiers who are depicted marching triumphantly into Richmond and the African-Americans seen cheering their arrival, the images on the second page offer views which draw upon racial stereotypes.

The two images in the left hand column might well have been regarded as comic when they were first published because of their "droll" representation of the facial characteristics, gait, dress, and accoutrements of the African-Americans.

While the refugees in the picture upper left may quite rightly evoke a sympathetic response from the viewer, the image of a motley procession being reviewed by a pipe-smoking freedwoman may also have struck nineteenth century readers as "grotesque."

Even more clear is the case of the picture of the freedmen marching in their tattered clothes with rakes and shovels over their shoulders: a clear parody of a real army. The title of the illustration dubs the group the "Sanitation Commission," investing the graphic with yet another layer of parody as the reader contrasts this rag-tag group setting off to clean the streets with the dignified body of philanthropists who had organized medical operations during the war.