Dred Scott (Courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-5092)
This article addresses the visual image of Dred Scott in the public imagination particularly through the photographic portrait of Scott made in 1857. Limited by the not yet developed technology to print photographs in newspapers, this photograph was not published when the landmark 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford defined African Americans as separate from and unequal to the citizenry that constituted the national body. In response to Dred Scott’s resistance to enslavement Chief Justice Taney’s decision that African Americans “were not intended to be included under the word ‘citizens’ in the constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States” clarified that regardless of status as slave or free, African Americans were marked by their Blackness as property of the nation state. Scott’s image was mediated to the public through an engraving based on the original photograph. In my analysis I return to the photograph and the published engraved portrait, and discuss the roles they played in the interpretation of the Dred Scott case and African American identity in the mid-nineteenth century.
Dred Scott: Picturing a Nineteenth Century Icon
The opportunity to control one’s own image through photography and indeed one’s own story was of particular significance for African Americans in the 1850s. While still in its technological infancy, photography had been used against Black slaves to provide scientific evidence of their own supposed inhumanity. Because of this contemporary abuse of the daguerreotype and Scott’s assertion to the court that he was not property but human and therefore deserving of freedom, the Scott photograph was poised to interrupt this force of photography that sought to frame and capture the Black body. The ability to exercise one’s agency over the photographer, and his apparatus, partially determined the manipulation of the viewer’s reaction to the resulting image. For Scott having agency in the studio could affect the response of the American public to the outcome of his case and ultimately affect the fate of slavery in America. Dissemination of his image aided in the public reception of his case and has dictated the way in which we remember Scott as an African American activist and icon. The image of Dred Scott that exists in the popular consciousness is one of two images: the 1857 engraving of Scott, and the 1888 painting by Louis Schultze.
Painting of Dred Scott by Louis Schultze, 1888 (Courtesy of Missouri History Museum)
Engraving of Dred Scott in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 27, 1857 (Courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-79305)
Both portraits are based on the same photograph of Scott that has not been published and remains available through selected archives. Both the painting and the print differ from the original photograph, but retain enough of a similarity for the original to be evidenced of their source. The engraving was first published alongside the likeness of Scott’s wife, Harriet Scott, and their two children on the front cover of the June 27, 1857 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, a popular American newspaper known for its heavily illustrated pages and quickly published articles about current events, both novel features for nineteenth century readers. Likewise, Dred and Harriet Scott are depicted separately but as companions. Their placement follows an established visual tradition, dating back to the early modern era, of paired husband and wife portraits. Their union reflects a family unit that paralleled other traditional families across racial lines. Importantly for the Leslie newspaper audience, the couple mirrors the family unit esteemed by a White heterosexual norm that revered the patriarch as head of the household and the woman as helpmate and nurturer for their children. The depiction of this family would have appealed to a conservative readership that may have been able to empathize with the plight of the Scott family. The engraver depicts Scott as arguably younger, more composed, and comfortable than he appears in his photographic image, which makes for a more flattering depiction than the photograph.
Photograph of Dred Scott, 1857 (Courtesy of Missouri History Museum)
His look of surprise in the photograph becomes one of confidence in the engraving. His facial expression changes from surprise to calm. In the photograph, Scott’s eyes seem over-wide and the wrinkles on his forehead raised and pronounced as if Scott was startled by something in the studio. These alterations to Scott’s appearance from one media to another may reflect the engraver’s sympathy or admiration for Scott. Perhaps these modifications are standard to the profession of engraving to please the patron. These changes do present Scott as more dignified and self-assured than the original image.
In the Leslie article “Visit to Dred Scott—His Family—Incidents of His Life—Decision of the Supreme Court” that accompanies the engravings, the description of the family counters the attractiveness of the images by depicting the Scotts as silly and superstitious Negroes who do not pose a threat to the preferred racial hierarchy of the nation. The authors discuss the family’s critical ambitions for freedom as merely a curious notion effectively reassuring readers that Dred Scott’s case was not worthy of serious alarm. However, the fact that the authors published an article downplaying the significance of the Scott case indicates that they indeed recognized its potential threat to White privilege. Further, their turn to photography to create a physical representation of Scott, one that could be disseminated and owned as property, perpetuated a false sense of stability of the slave system that would soothe Whites’ racial anxieties. However, the visual exposure of the family through the published engraving had an emancipatory effect by allowing the public to make its own decision about the family’s level of civilization and surmise the threat of the court’s resolution.
It appears that the authors used photography as a way to control the Negro who was acting out of order by having the audacity to challenge the authority of law and sue his way into being. However, the authors took a risk by printing the engravings of the Scott family as a rhetorical strategy. Although they may have sought to make the Scotts’ image available for public surveillance and to reinforce White authority and citizenship, the appeal of the family’s likeness and the potential connections between the family and the Leslie readership certainly could have worked to the Scott’s advantage instead. The visual evidence of the family worked both for the authors’ purposes and for the Scotts’ whose images emerged along with Blacks’ increasing ambitions for a new middle class in the 1850s. On the one hand, the visual likeness of the Scotts supported their social status as objects for possession; on the other, their visual representation placed the Scotts in the public mind as a family portrait seemingly like the White proto-nuclear family that turned to photography eagerly to solidify their status through visual evidence.
Newspaper article about Dred Scott decision (Courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-132561)
In the conclusion of the Leslie article, the authors describe Scott as a celebrity in St. Louis who worked as a porter at the city’s hotels and employed himself by delivering the clothes that Harriet washed. They also write, “Scott states grinningly, that he could make his thousands of dollars, if allowed, by traveling over the country and telling who he is; which is no doubt true, because his name will ever be suggestive of the Missouri Compromise and the Supreme Court of the United States, and for a century to come, will be interminably repeated in the political struggles which will agitate the country.” There certainly was the potential for Scott to travel and tell his story to achieve greater economic success. Particularly with the aid of photography, Scott’s travels may have been highly lucrative. Photography was both a suspect and exciting new media in the 1850s undergoing rapid development as imaging technology. For African Americans, the photographic portrait had the potential to impede or assist their social status. Photography was considered a projection of one’s inner character, through the beauty, countenance, and determination that could be read on the surface of the body, and in turn, on the surface of the photograph. However, one’s own position as subject or object, dictated viewers’ reception of the body’s capability of having subjectivity or humanity at all.
Thinking about Dred Scott in the context of nineteenth century African American photography highlights the need to analyze the power involved in the symbolic realm of possessing photographic likenesses. The narrative surrounding the Scott family photographs and the tension between the photographs and the Leslie text reinscribes the instability of photography as visual evidence. The photograph is not self-evident but only a record that may or may not be cherished, reproduced, shared or kept. African Americans have been framed by photography and in many cases weary of our own images. As Black folk we know that our visual appearance is primary. The layers of Scott’s imagery is just one story of many to be further investigated and reattached to the legacy of the family that we continue to be fascinated by today.
Bridget R. Cooks, PhD
Associate Professor
Program in African American Studies
Department of Art History
University of California, Irvine
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