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Picturing A Nation Divided: Art, American Identity And The Crisis Over Slavery, Louise Michelle Hancox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

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 …