Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century

Author(s): Jo-Ann Morgan

Source: American Art , Spring, 1995, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 86-109
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American
Art Museum

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3109197

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Jo-Ann Morgan
Cover of the promotional
pamphlet "Life of Aunt Jemima,"
ca. 1895. Published by R. T. Davis
Mill, St. Joseph, Missouri. Private
collection, Los Angeles
Mammy the Huckster
Selling the Old South for the New Century
Of all the stereotypes in American American lifestyles with the latest health
popular culture, the smiling, full-figured, and beauty aids, the choicest food stuffs,
apron-clad African-American servant and the most up-to-date household
woman is among the best known. gadgets. Although African-American
Whether called "Mammy," "Aunt women had long been represented in the
Jemima" (fig. 1), or "Dinah," this loyal fine arts and in literature, it was in the
slave character from the fabled Old South growing field of commercial printing that
took on a fame of mythic proportions the stereotype known today as the
throughout postbellum America. This was mammy was indelibly etched into the
especially true in the advertising imagery public consciousness. A glut of mass-
produced during the 1880s and 1890s. produced images supplied potential
The years between the Centennial consumers with information on develop-
Exposition in Philadelphia (1876) and the ing products. Promotional materials were
World's Columbian Exposition in circulated among audiences at the fairs
Chicago (1893) were a time of national and by traveling salesmen drumming up
self-congratulation. Marking not only the business, while the goods themselves
culmination of the country's first 100 sported pictures as trademarks. Mammies
years, 1876 also closed a difficult first became fixtures on trade cards, product
decade of recovery from the cataclysm of a labels, and song sheet covers-almost
divisive Civil War. By 1893 the coast-to- anywhere advertisers could exploit the
coast railroad system that had helped former slaves' well-honed domestic skills
complete western expansion was connect- to attract buyers.
ing manufacturers with distributors and Why such stereotyping of African-
retailers with customers in an ever- American women was so prevalent in
evolving web of commerce. The corporate mass-produced imagery and how it was
structure of American industry had been influential during the 1880s and 1890s,
forged by robber barons, who now eyed when pictures became dominant features
more markets and conquests to be gotten in advertising, are compelling questions.
internationally. The expositions show- Mammy was drafted by the burgeoning
cased American manufacturing progress commercial print industry ostensibly to
and indigenous bounty in all their glory.' sell consumer goods. Yet a closer look at
Advertisers in this era of entrepreneur- how the mammy stereotype was manipu-
ial vigor produced imagery glorifying lated reveals that she was both a huckster
87 American Art
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 Aunt Jemima puzzle card, after
1895. Private collection, Los Angeles
A puzzle card was an advertise-
ment card with a knotted-string
dangler, which presented
consumers, or, more likely, their
children, with the challenge of
trying to untie.
2 Aunt Jemima advertisement card,
1910
and messenger.
Because she was a
survivor from the Old
South, her continued service to a white
mistress, now her northern employer, was
a reunifying gesture toward North-South
reconciliation. At the same time Mammy
became a defender of class privilege and
the status quo.2 By remaining in the
kitchen or the nursery, she offered a ready
solution not only to the problem of how
to assimilate former slaves into contempo-
rary society, but also to the challenge of
how to keep the middle-class Euro-
American woman in her "ladylike" role of
home administrator.
Aunt Jemima and the Stereotype Craze
Aunt Jemima of pancake-mix fame is
perhaps the most famous domestic servant
in American popular culture.3 Advertising
legend traces her personification to a
St. Joseph, Missouri, vaudeville house
88 Spring 1995
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HONEY I
00pY
Jeminma
S Pancake Flour\
No Increase in the Cost
o I4 Itl.
1" I~ r~ N ra
ro _ __
in 1889, where Chris L. Rutt saw
black-faced comedians Baker and Farrell
performing a cakewalk, or stage dance.
Rutt was looking for an image to advertise
his newly developed self-rising pancake
mix, and Baker's characterization of Aunt
Jemima, a plantation cook in an apron
and red bandanna, seemed to fill the bill.
For him, Aunt Jemima personified
southern hospitality.
To promote Rutt's culinary innovation
at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago,
his employer R. T. Davis hired Nancy
Green, an actual African-American maid
of a local doctor, to play Aunt Jemima at
the company exhibit along the Midway
Plaisance. In a display erected as a large
barrel, former slave Green, dressed as
Aunt Jemima in full skirts and bright
colors, cooked pancakes and entertained
fairgoers with tales of her life in the
South. She was such a crowd-pleaser that
according to the company, over fifty
thousand orders for pancake flour were
taken.4
3 Slave woman stock-cut engraving, In her earliest printed incarnation,
ca. 1840s
Aunt Jemima appeared on a souvenir
lapel button that was distributed at the
Chicago fair. An advertisement card from
1910 shows a similar image of a black
woman, her head wrapped in the bandana
style of the plantation worker and electri-
fied by a toothy, Cheshire Cat-like grin.
The caption reads, "I'se in town, honey"
(fig. 2).5
Southern house slaves were called

either "Mammy" or "Aunt." Women who

nursed children were known as

"Mammy." "Aunt" was a term of endear-

ment, usually given to slave women who
had been with the family for a long period
of time. In popular art the two are almost
indistinguishable from each other. Aunt
Jemima, for instance, looks like a
mammy, or nursemaid. But because
pancake promotions depended on her
culinary skills, the appellation "Mammy
Jemima" would have been misleading.
In the 1880s, blatant stereotypes with
their inherent racism were nothing
exceptional. Stereotypes, as early printers
called them, were readily understood
stock-cut images that could be used over
and over again with print text. Advertisers
traditionaly organized their sales promo-
tions around this method of visual
shorthand a form of pictograph. An
import merchant in the postcolonial era,
for example, might have selected a stock
cut of a Chinese man holding a tea
branch to illustrate his printed handbill.
Stock cuts of slave women were used to
advertise auctions or rewards for runaways
(fig. 3).6
By the 1880s modern technology far
outpaced the conceptual development of
advertisers, who continued to rely on the
stock-cut picture methods of their artisan
predecessors. Commercial lithography was
so advanced by this time that almost
anything an artist could create, the printer
could mass-produce in glorious color.7 Yet
advertising artists persisted in making
.a
.i . .' . . ... .'
drawings that recalled the old stereo-
types-the cigar store Indian chief, the fat
German beer drinker, and the Chinese
laundry man. Advertisers further used
stereotypes to tap into national and ethnic
associations. For example, if affordability
of the product was being stressed, a
Yankee or a Scotsman, types known for
their putative frugality, would be drafted
as the image. To conjure up the Old
South and its so-called hospitality, the
face of a cheery ex-slave cook dressed in
full skirts and a colorful headscarf was
stamped onto the label.
These stereotypes worked for several
reasons. The decades between the two
fairs witnessed increasing immigration to
northern cities by foreigners from all parts
of Europe and the Orient, poor country
folk from rural areas in this country, as well
as former slaves from the South. New York
City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago
were also the centers of printing and
publishing. There, in the rapidly develop-
ing mass-media of journalism, commer-
cial lithography, and advertising, recent
immigrants and other new residents were

89 American Art

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4 Francis William Edmonds, The
Bashful Cousin, ca. 1842. Oil on
canvas, 63.5 x 76.2 cm (25 x 30 in.).
National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C., Gift of Frederick Sturges Jr.
identified and isolated like alien germ
strains. Assimilation was not always an
easy task, and much of the tension and
animosity generated by the process were
played out in popular imagery.8
Long before promoter Rutt first spotted
a white man performing as Aunt Jemima
in 1889, the black-face minstrel stage had
played a part in establishing the mammy
stereotype. As early as 1844, George
Christy of Christy's Minstrels was re-
nowned for his impersonations of Afri-
can-American women. Prior to the 1880s,
when all-black minstrel troupes were also
touring, every role, even prima donna or
wench roles, was played exclusively by a
burned-cork-blackened white man.9 The
evolution of Mammy, however, developed
interdependently among all the popular
arts. In art and literature, representations
of African-American women were, as with
the minstrel shows, almost entirely by
Euro-American male artists and writers.
90 Spring 1995
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The Evolution of Mammy
Images of both African female servants
and nursemaids can be found in American
art from the early nineteenth century.
African servant women are pictured
serving Euro-Americans in several
Jacksonian-era genre paintings that
purport to document the diurnal activities
of rural Americans. Note, for example, the
wide, dark form standing in the shadows
of a rear doorway in Francis William
Edmonds's circa-1842 painting The
Bashful Cousin (fig. 4). Sporting her
bandanna and apron, she hovers in the
background, incidental to the antics of
the rustic northern folks and the main
subject of the picture, a country court-
ship. She is a cook emerging from a back
room into the parlor, and her status as a
servant in antebellum society is indicated
by her marginal placement in the pic-
ture.'o Her tray of biscuits anticipates the
incessant bounties of sustenance future
mammies would offer up in popular
imagery. In advertisements of the 1880s
and 1890s, the servile act itself-whether
serving food or attending to children-
would become the dominant theme of
imagery.
In the wake of war, Reconstruc-
tion, and a period of unprec-
edented government and corpo-
rate corruption... northerners
cherished the mythology of a
loyal servant named Mammy
proudly upholding family values
by serving as a surrogate parent.
Throughout the era of the early
American Republic, artists consistently
used the same compositional tactics,
relegating blacks to the background
regardless of the job they performed. In
an 1828 painting by an unknown artist,
York, Pennsylvania, Family, the nursemaid
in the far-left rear serves as little more
than an apparatus to support the tiniest
member of the family (fig. 5).
The personality traits later attributed
to mammies and aunts were impressed
upon the general public in fiction written
during the 1830s. Edmonds, for example,
took the scene for his painting from James
Kirke Paulding's popular novel The
Dutchman's Fireside (1831). Paulding
spent four full pages identifying the cook
as Aunt Nauntje, whose role was de-
scribed thus:
There reigned in the kitchen ofMr.
Vancour an African queen, whose authority,
by virtue of long and vigorous assertion, was
paramount to that of the mistress of the
91 American Art
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establishment.... It was gratifying in those
days to see the interest which these old and
faithful retainers took in the affairs of their
master.... Aunt Nauntje was despotic in
[the kitchen].
Although Aunt Nauntje is not present
when the "bashful cousin" incident takes
place in the novel, painter Edmonds chose
to composite her into his redramatization,
evidently valuing her contribution as an
anecdotal detail."1
As Edmonds's painting and Paulding's
novel corroborate, the personage of the
female African servant developed concur-
rently in the visual arts and literature. In
fact, the nursemaid or servant cook is
known today as Mammy or Aunt partly
because of nineteenth-century fiction and
its accompanying illustrations that
identify her by name.
The best-selling novel of the nine-
teenth century was Harriet Beecher
Stowe's sentimental melodrama Uncle
Tom's Cabin. Published in 1852 after
creating a sensation as a serial in the
National Era in 1851, the book features
both a cook dubbed Aunt Chloe and a
nursemaid called Mammy. Aunt Chloe,
whose "whole plump countenance
beams with satisfaction and contentment
from under her well-starched checked
turban," is a take-charge caretaker who
assumes an authoritative tone with her
mistress.
Now, Missis, do jist look at dem beautiful
white hands o'yourn, with longfingers, and
all a sparkling with rings, like my white
lilies when de dew's on 'em; and look at my
great black stumpin hands. Now, don't ye
think dat de Lord must have meant me to
make de pie-crust, and you to stay in de
parlor? 12
Chloe is only one in a long line of
African-American house servants instruct-
ing helpless, ineffectual Euro-American
women in what became a predictable plot

5 Artist unknown, York, Pennsylva-
nia Family with Negro Servant,
ca. 1828. Oil on wood panel, 40 x
29.8 cm (15 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.). The
Saint Louis Museum of Art, Bequest
of Edgar William and Bernice
Chrysler Garbisch
resonating throughout nineteenth-century
popular culture. Later it would be Aunt
Jemima, a kind of fairy godmother to the
rescue with directions for young house-
wives on serving pancakes.
Illustrations support Stowe's text. As
shown in the first edition's gold-embossed
front cover and in the engraving of the
title page, the plump and turbaned Aunt
Chloe herself stirs griddle-cake dough in
92 Spring 1995
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the doorway of the titular "cabin"
(fig. 6). She wears a loose-fitting dress
with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, a
fashion that would be maintained in
subsequent illustrations of aunts and
mammies.
Although no picture of Mammy
appears in the book, the writing reveals
her to be the ultimate loyal retainer,
sleeping on the floor near her mistress.
Like her predecessors in the doorways of
genre paintings and her successors in
advertising promotions, this fictional
servant is ever available lest her mistress
might need some service.
Noteworthy changes in the visual
representation of African women during
the abolition era include a shift of locale
from the rural North to the South and the
addition of black children. No longer
portrayed solely as nurturers of whites,
black women now appeared with their
own children in images that addressed
topical issues. Partly as a result of repre-
sentations of slavery such as Stowe's
rendition in Uncle Tom's Cabin, by the
late 1850s and early 1860s northern
artists were showing a sensitivity to the
public's interest in the plight of the
southern slave.13 African women servants
and nursemaids were no longer casually
added to northern rural settings as in
Edmonds's 1842 picture. When African
women appeared in paintings, audiences,
attuned to the increasingly divisive
national issue of slavery, were inclined to
fix the setting in the South. In paintings
addressing the slavery issue directly, slave
women embrace their own children as
they flee bondage or cringe upon the
auction block.14
Portrayals of imperiled slave mothers
and their children, in effect, became the
emblem around which the antislavery
debate was waged. In a painting of 1852-
53, Slave Market in Richmond, Virginia,
Eyra Crowe's tableau of slaves awaiting
auction includes women dressed in clean
white bibs and aprons, their children on
6 Title page illustration, Uncle
Tom's Cabin; or Life among the UNCLE TON'S CABIN;
Lowly (Boston: John P. Jewett &
Company, 1852)
O.
LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY.
HARRIET BEECIER STTWE
VOL, IIf
J I ,IN .ETwTATT & IAN Y
1890s (fig. 9).16
their laps (fig. 7). Crowe deliberately built
An Appleton's
the scene around what he called 1870s,
the captioned "The Old Nurse-A
"touching form" of a slave mother
Scene inand
the Park," foreshadows the way
her child."5
One printed exception to the typical
abolition-era imagery is an engraving on a
Civil War-era envelope showing a slave
woman, with pensive expression, suckling
a southern baby. The caption, "The
probable source of the aspirations after
Kingly State and Royal Splendor arising
among the 'C.S.A.'-Cotton States
Aristocracy," none too subtly alludes to
the nursemaid figure to suggest that the
South owed its very sustenance to its
African slaves (fig. 8).
Not until the Civil War was over and
emancipation achieved were mammy-type
figures again seen regularly in imagery.
The nurturing black servant reemerged in
the many travel accounts and stories
about the southern states that were
published in national periodicals.
Scribner's Monthly lead the way with
several illustrated stories on the southern
states during the 1870s, including the
93 American Art
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enormously successful series "The Great
South" by Edward King. The series had
a considerable influence on cultural
production at the time, inspiring others
Seeing the former slave woman
visually transformed into a
contented servant absolved every-
one ofpast transgressions and
future responsibility toward the
freedpeople.
to publish plantation and southern theme
pictures and stories into the 1880s and
Journal drawing from the
mammy types would be portrayed in
advertising (fig. 10). A full-figured black
nurse fills the picture. She has three
children to contend with, one propped
upon her wide hip, the others tugging at
her apron. The blond children are dressed
in finery and have delicate feet; the old
nurse, by contrast, has loose, simple
clothing, a broad waist, and big feet. In
the background a Euro-American woman
parades by, her corseted waist, ruffled
clothing and top-hatted companion
leaving little doubt about the lower social
station of the fleshy nurse. The African-
American woman may have become more
central within the picture space, but her
place in society remained subservient.
Further, while the Euro-American woman
might be pictured with a mate, rare
indeed was the African-American servant
ever shown any other way but at work,
removed from her own husband and
family.
7 Eyra Crowe, Slave Market in
Richmond, Virginia, 1852-53.
Oil on canvas, 52.7 x 80 cm (20 3 x
31 1/2 in.). Collection of Mrs. H. J.
Heinz III
8 Illustration on a Civil War-era
envelope. Private collection, Los
Angeles
Civil War envelopes had images
stamped on them in the upper
left corner. As political state-
ments, they were printed in both
the North and South during the
war.
Reconciliation
Reconciliation between the North and
South became almost a national pastime
by the late 1870s. While the interests of
the two former opponents were not always
the same, in most cases they served to further
commerce.17 It was of primary concern to
northern governmental and financial
interests that the profitability of the cotton
trade be restored. To facilitate this rebirth,
according to Richard Slotkin, the planta-
tion structure had to be maintained by "a
continuous supply of cheap and relatively
docile labor.""8 In effect, it was essential
that former slaves remain on the southern
plantation. Gestures of reconciliation
served the business interests of both regions,
even if the alliances that were forged proved
contradictory to the spirit of emancipa-
tion. The North needed southern agricul-
ture; the South needed manufactured
goods from the North. Both depended on
an integrated system of transportation and
a steady, reliable work force.
By focusing on stories about the South
and its inhabitants throughout the 1870s
and 1880s, Scribner's (renamed, after
1881, Century) and other periodicals
contributed to what Paul S. Buck has
94 Spring 1995
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termed "a consistent policy of reconcilia-
tion." From the mid-1880s into the
1890s, the popular northern periodical
Harper's Weekly, as well as Atlantic,
Cosmopolitan, Munsey's, McClure's,
Lippincott's and others with fewer sub-
scribers, brought "reconciliation motives
and conventional Southern themes" to
ever-wider audiences. This deluge of
southern stories invariably featured
illustrations, often immortalizing an old
aunt or mammy.19
With reunification uppermost in
people's minds, it is no coincidence
that an anachronistic figure from the
South became one of the most widely
circulated images exemplifying North-
South reconciliation. Scenes of happy
mammies continuing to work in kitchens
placated northerners concerned about
preserving the southern labor force. And
if Mammy voluntarily remained with
"Missus" and "Massa" even though now
freed, perhaps the slave-holding planter
had not been so villainous after all.
Seeing the former slave woman visually
transformed into a contented servant
absolved everyone of past transgressions
and future responsibility toward the freed
people.
9 J. Wells Champney, Mammy and
Baby. Published in Edward King,
"The Great South," Scribner's 7
(December 1873)
10 The Old Nurse-A Scene in the
Park. Published in "Varieties,"
Appleton's Journal 6 (7 October 1871)
Joining forces with writers, artists
offered romanticized pictures for the
outpouring of novels and memoirs
recalling the pre-Civil War South as a
place of harmony and contentment for
all. An illustration by G. Cowles (fig. 11),
for example, gives visual form to Thomas
Nelson Page's heart-warming compilation
of essays called Social Life in Old Virginia
Before the War (1897). In the picture, an
older African-American woman, her large
hands supporting a curly-headed blond
child at rest across her lap, sits within an
entryway surrounded by delicate rose
vines, an appropriate framing device for
the author's sentimental recollection. The
woman's serious expression, intent on the
face of her little white charge, exemplifies
the southerner's mythic mammy, who
though old, continues to serve. "The
Mammy was the zealous, faithful, and
efficient assistant of the mistress," wrote
Page,
in all thatpertained to the care and training
of the children. Her authority was recog-
nized in all that related to them directly or
indirectly, second only to that of the Mistress
and Master. She tended them, regulated
95 American Art
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them, disciplined them: having authority
indeed in cases to administer correction; for
her affection was undoubted. Her regime
extended frequently through two genera-
tions, occasionally through three. From
infancy she was the careful and faithful
nurse, the affection between her and the
children she nursed being often more
marked than between her and her own
offipring. She may have been harsh to the
latter; she was never anything but tender
with the others.20
Spreading Mammy's fame and touting
her healing capacity was a collaborative
effort between writers, publishers, and
artists from both the North and South.
While the written tributes glorifying the
"faithful nurse" were almost always by
southerners, the publishers who rushed
this effluvia into print and the artists who
augmented it with reverent pictures were
primarily based in the North. Mammy's
tenacious presence as a cherished vestige
of a romanticized past symbolized forgive-
ness and redemption of the former
Confederates.
Using both pictures and words,
advertisers also created fictional legends
11 G. Cowles, She Was Never
Anything But Tender with the
Others. Published in Thomas Nelson
Page, Social Life in Old Virginia
Before the War (1892; reprint, New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897)
around their mammies and aunts. The
R. T. Davis Company not only created a
visual image of a beaming cook, but also
concocted a biography for her that they
distributed in a little picture storybook
pamphlet called "Life History of Aunt
Jemima" (see frontispiece). The pamphlet
appeared about 1895, some six years after
Rutt gave the name "Aunt Jemima" to his
. pancake mix. Aunt Jemima, so the story
goes, had been a slave on the plantation of
Colonel Higbee of Kentucky. Like so
many of her kind, she had no education,
but "her skill was a natural gift." In other
words, this African-American woman was
born to serve pancakes. R. T. Davis
capitalized on this reputed "natural gift"
in ad campaigns: "Who is there who
would not admire this uneducated negro
woman, who knew nothing of artificial
flavoring extracts, or chemical solutions
calculated to tempt the palate, yet could
prepare the most tempting dishes from
the most simple and healthful materials?"
96 Spring 1995
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Aunt Jemima served pancakes to the
"gallant men" of the Confederacy during
the war. Years later, as the steamer Robert
E. Lee was passing by her cabin, a small
party of southerners and northerners alike
sat discussing the best dinners they had
ever eaten. A Confederate ex-general
recalled a wartime repast he had enjoyed
from Aunt Jemima. As they just happened
to be in the neighborhood, together the
party disembarked to call on the renowned
cook. Conveniently, a representative of
the R. T. Davis Mill was in the group
when Aunt Jemima's "famous pancake
recipe" was revitalized, and, as they say,
the rest is "history." Thus did the
Missouri-based company effectively
insinuate itself in the public mind with
this comforting tale of North-South
reunification. Former enemies now
reunited to enjoy each other's company
and celebrate the rediscovery of Aunt
Jemima and her marvelous pancakes.21
With North-South reunification an
ongoing process, Mammy became not
only an agent of reconciliation, but also,
as previously noted, a symbol of redemp-
tion. Southerners had lost not only the
war, but a way of life. For them, the
notion that Mammy continued to be
devoted to her old master validated their
purpose. The war may have been lost, but
the old plantation way of life now capti-
vated even the imaginations of the victors.
Mammy became a figure around which
nostalgia for a bygone, idyllic time could
emanate. "Distinguished men of the old-
time South never visited their old homes
without tenderly greeting the old slave
whom they had known only as a mammy,
early in childhood," wrote T. W. Caskey
of Mississippi in 1890. Having been
nurtured by an "old black Mammy"
became a requisite fantasy for any
southerner seeking to establish his or her
pedigree.22
Popular song sheet covers, like the
illustrations in numerous stories and
memoirs, also used poignant imagery to
fabricate an antebellum South where and asked him to sign her souvenir book,
mammies cradled babies and crooned he wrote, "For Aunty Sojourner Truth,
"plantation slumber songs" to the rhythm October 29, 1864. A. Lincoln."24 This
of rocking chairs on log cabin porches. presumably honorary title, ostensibly
The namesake of "Mammy's Li'l' Boy- intended as a term of endearment,
A Rocking Song" (1899) is a young nevertheless denied the African-American

woman any marriage or kinship alliance

such as would be recognized by "Mrs." or
a surname. The title "Aunt" also conve-
niently subverted questions of familial
Slave women often were aunt,
relationships at a time when actual
cousin, or half-sister to the Euro- genealogical connections between planters
American children whose care and the offspring of their female slaves
were not uncommon. Indeed, slave
they supervised. women often were aunt, cousin, or half-
sister to the Euro-American children

whose care they supervised.

Euro-American boy (fig. 12). The lyrics,
in dialect to suggest that Mammy herself
sings them, are rhapsodic recollections of
an "old-time South":
Who's all time dodgin in de cotton en de corn? and servant persisted.
Mammy's lil' boy. Mammy's lil' boy.
Who's all de time a stealing ole Massa's
dinner horn?
Mammy's lil'baby boy.23
After emancipation the appellation
"Aunt" continued to function as a way to
bind the former slave to the southern
locale. In tribute to her longevity of
service, the title implied that a mutually
affectionate relationship between master
For many reasons, continuity with the
old ways, such as calling former slave
women "Aunt," was embraced by most
Americans in the second half of the

nineteenth century. The decades between

Absent in such charming evocations of
the Old South was the ironic reality that
even as she was caring for "ole Massa's"
child, the slave woman could be separated their way of life move from a simple,
from her own babies. Instead, the horror
of family estrangement during slavery was based economy to an urban industrial
recomposed into warm pictorial icons in
the tradition of Madonna and child
imagery (fig. 13).
Remembering the Glory Days
Like "Mammy," the name "Aunt" was
also used to put a benevolent face on
domestic relations between planter and
slave. The "Aunt" designation for African-
American women was so widespread it
is reputed that when writer-activist
Sojourner Truth met President Lincoln
the two major American fairs were a time
of extraordinary change. Within their
own lifetimes many Americans had seen
family-centered farm- and merchant-
economy. Nina Silber recently noted that
with this dramatic change came a fear
held by many in the North, where
industrial growth was greatest, that their
society had lost its "moral center and
sense of purpose." Northerners were
apprehensive that profit and power
motives had replaced human values. Not
only was "the culture of conciliation" an
opportunity to reunite the divided
sections of the country, but the romantic
memories it fostered were a welcome
balm to soothe this sense of moral
dislocation. According to William R.

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12 "Mammy's Li'l' Boy" song sheet, Taylor, plantation fiction, with its
1899. Private collection, Los Angeles
reverent iconography, privileged "country
life over city life, agriculture over com-
merce and business, impracticality over
prudence and providence and primacy of
home and family over all else." In the
wake of war, Reconstruction, and a period
of unprecedented government and
corporate corruption that ran rife under
President Grant's administration, 'A

northerners cherished the mythology of a

loyal servant named Mammy proudly
upholding family values by serving as a T.1I
surrogate parent. In a time of significant
labor upheavals-the railroad strikes of
1877 were unprecedented in violence and
nationwide involvement-the enduring
mammy stood as a reminder to disen-
chanted modern citizens that values lost

were worth recovering.25

Artists could harvest a motherlode of
nostalgia merely by conjuring up the
antebellum mammy, inserting her into a
contemporary scene and letting her
reminisce about the past. Reverie for the
old plantation was such a welcome theme
in 1875 that the northern-based Harper's
Weekly used it for its front page (fig. 14).
horizon show off Dixieland's agricultural
prowess, while the mist-enshrouded
foliage points her rocker in the direction
of memory lane.
During this heyday of emerging
consumerism, manufacturers capitalized
on the old plantation mythology that
associated African-American women with

In this full-page illustration, titled Song of
the Kettle, a stoop-shouldered African-
American woman holds a pipe and gazes
into the steam coming from a kettle on her
stove. The text describes the picture as "a
characteristic sketch of Southern negro life.
'Auntie' sits in her own little room at evening
time dreamily puffing the smoke from her
pipe, and thinking of by-gone days."26
Old mammies were remembering the
glory days well after they actually experi-
enced them. One gray-haired mammy, for
example, is shown on a song sheet cover
(fig. 15) telling the Euro-American child
on her lap that "they made it twice as nice
as paradise and they called it Dixieland."
If this Auntie were seventy in 1916, when
the song was published, she would have
been but a youth herself when the guns
went off at Fort Sumter. Behind her, the
rows of crops neatly disappearing into the
housekeeping and child care to huckster
the fruits of mass production. Advertise-
ments pictured contemporary middle-
class home settings, which seemed to be
in the North, where the bulk of the
market was. Yet the African-American
servant in these modern kitchens still
looked like an old slave, as in the case of
Aunt Jemima. By providing the same
loyal service to the northern "lady of
leisure" as she once did for her southern
mistress, Mammy helped consumers tap
into the reverie of a romantic Old South,
even as she confirmed her role as per-
petual servant.
"Mighty Frame and Stature"
The advertising print mammy was often
full-figured, a presence both nurturing

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 equipped for work, while her small tiny-
waisted, light-skinned employer appears
to belong in the parlor on the other side
of the doorway.27
In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Aunt Chloe
observes anatomical differences between
her own "great black stumpin hands" and

Joining forces with writers,

JAW

"ac
artists offered romanticized
06?
wil:

pictures for the outpouring of

..... ..... .....
novels and memoirs recalling the
pre-Civil War South as a place of
harmony and contentment for all
Aa .6,6

?,, hi

d-P-;k?

the "beautiful white hands.., with long

21 lit
W?l
..... . all i
kM
r
13 "When You Sang Hush-a-Bye and well-nourished. An 1880s promo-
Baby to Me" song sheet, 1918. tional calendar card for Fleischmann's
Collection of Jo-Ann Morgan
Yeast features a large figure called "Cook"
(fig. 16). This mammy no longer peers in
from the back room as she once had in
preabolition genre paintings, but instead
dominates the scene both thematically
and compositionally. Massive arm on hip,
she casts a capable glance over her shoul-
der at the diminutive mistress, there to
inquire about the cook's choice in yeast.
The physical traits of the two women are
used to define their separate roles. The
heft of the African-American cook
graphically emphasizes that she is
fingers" of her "Missis." "De Lord must
have meant me to make de pie-crust," she
concludes.28 So it seems, according to
Aunt Chloe, that it was the Lord's own
intention that the black woman should be
a kitchen servant. This was a viewpoint
1880s advertisers were only too ready to
promote. The Fleischmann's cook
graphically reiterates the hierarchy among
Stowe's characters. Her great black hands
and arms stir the heavy pots on an iron
stove, while her mistress's hand drapes
limply against the ornamental sash of her
fancy dress.
The African-American woman's role
was further defined by clothing. In the
Fleischmann's advertisement, as in scores
of other printed examples, female servants
wear billowing skirts and aprons, blouses
with sleeves rolled high, and bandannas
binding their hair. This costume, suitable
for housework, was the female house-
slave's dress, harkening back to estab-
lished genre-painting iconography.29 The
fair-skinned mistress, by contrast, is

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14 The Song of the Kettle. Cover of Furthermore, this scenario allayed
a nlm

A H .....
Harper's Weekly 19 (25 September
northern fears that freed Africans wanted
1875)
industry jobs. With each image of a
"devoted servant," misconceptions about
the African-American's "place in society"
were confirmed.30
The mammy stereotype is so familiar
to viewers that the equally stereotypical
, " portrayal of the Euro-American women as
the genteel lady of the house may seem
less so. Whereas the African-American
woman of late-nineteenth-century
advertising is large, able, and dressed for
work, the Euro-American woman is a
tiny, helpless ornament, a display of
Gilded Age conspicuous consumption.
Yet, while the delicate mistress in her
modern home was meant to serve as an
incentive to covetous consumers, she too
was a visual anachronism, who looked less
like the robust, voluptuous beauties then
favored by the public and more like the
frail, sentimental heroines of antebellum
fiction.31

typically fitted into a trim, high-collared, Contrary to the way it may have
long-sleeved dress, with decorative lace, looked, advertisers were not out of touch
when they chose the traditional appear-
buttons, and ruffles to proclaim her status
as member of the leisure class. Given the ance of the once-exalted exponent of "true
appearance on one trade card of the stoutwomanhood" as the ideal female for their
African-American woman with squalling advertisements. According to Taylor's
white baby slung across her hip (fig. 17),analysis, it was no coincidence that the
there is little question who will wash thefirst wave of plantation fiction, with its
loyal mammies and demure white
advertiser's fine linen (hanging across the
fence) rather than dine on it. women, coincided with the first stirrings
of abolition and the women's rights
In the Annual Report ofthe Superinten-
movement in the North during the
dent ofNegro Affairs in North Carolina of
1830s. Women were restless. They could
1865, Reverend Horace James advocated
giving "the colored man equality," not vote, own property (if married), or get
convinced that African Americans would a divorce. Higher education and the
"always make the most pliable, obedient, professions were outside the reach of
devoted servants that can enter our most. Even freed African-American men

dwellings." Twenty years later the adver-would get the vote before Euro-American
tising world presented a visual microcosmwomen.32
of a world in which black women serve Having apprenticed in the antislavery
movement of the pre-Civil War decades,
and white women repose. Scenes of happy
mammies, converted from former slavessome activist women went on to direct
into contented servants continuing to their political acumen toward temperance
work in kitchens, gave psychological work, suffrage battles, and other women's
comfort to Euro-American viewers. rights issues. Any incremental advance of

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15 "They Made It Twice As Nice As
Paradise and They Called It
Dixieland" song sheet, 1917.
Private collection, Los Angeles
feminism was viewed as a threat that
could destroy home and family. Stories
lauding the old plantation ideal became a
It was no coincidence that the
first wave ofplantation fiction,
with its loyal mammies and
demure white women, coincided
with the first stirrings of aboli-
tion and the women's rights
movement in the North during
the 1830s.
way to remind women of their traditional
sphere of influence. Not so coincidentally,
pictures glorifying the woman who
cultivated her homemaking capabilities
also abounded by the 1880s. Certainly,
someone had to purchase and use the new
goods.
Many of these postbellum advertise-
ments feature women who resemble an
antebellum-era figure whom Caroline
Ticknor called the "Steel-Engraving
Lady." The type once reigned in the
fashion plates of Godey's Ladies'Magazine.
Lois Banner's description of the "Steel-
Engraving Lady" could just as well apply
to the mistress of the Fleischmann's Yeast
trade card:
Her face is oval or heart-shaped. Her eyes
gaze into the distance or are downcast. Her
chin is soft and retreating. Her mouth is
tiny, resembling a "beestung cupid bow" or a
"rosebud," as contemporaries described it.
Her body is short and slight, rounded and
curved. Her shoulders slope; her arms are
rounded; a small waist lies between a
rounded bosom and a bell-shaped lower
torso, covered by voluminous clothing. Her
hands are small, her fingers tapering. Her
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....
feet, when they protrude, are tiny
delicate. When her pictorial repres
colored, her complexion is white, w
blush ofpink in her cheeks.
In the 1880s, however, the women
whom the public viewed as beau
trendsetters flaunted commandin
physiques. Stage stars such as Lilli
Russell, influential members of t
class, including, most notably, Fir
Lucy Hayes and Britain's Queen
were full-figured women.33 Thom
Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Will
Merritt Chase, and other eminent
American painters interpreted po
subjects as tall and statuesque. Yet
spite of this, advertisers relied on
delicate creature with an ever-pre
expression of the "right sentimen
carry their message. By imaging
American woman in this traditional
manner, advertisers helped reinvigorate
beliefs about a woman's proper place.
Through pictorially juxtaposing
African-American servants and Euro-
American housewives, late-nineteenth-
century arbiters of popular taste engen-
dered belief in the inherent "difference"
16 Fleischmann's Yeast trade card,
1880s. Private collection, Los
Angeles

17 Trade card, 1880s. Collection of

Jo-Ann Morgan

Printers offered stock cards such

as this to potential advertisers,
who would have them custom-
ized with their business name and
address printed on the blank area.

between races just as stridently as composition further established a tiered

pseudoscientists had developed earlier relationship. On a trade card for Sapolio
theories of polygenesis. Like the phrenolo- soap, for example, an African-American
gists and craniologists of midcentury, woman kneels at the feet of her Euro-

print artists used physical distinctions to American employer in the manner of a

establish a hierarchy. Along with contrast- religious supplicant (fig. 18). Slack-jawed
ing physiognomies, clothing, and ges- with awe, the maid looks up from under
tures, the figures' placement within the her bandanna at her mistress, who

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 employers
grammati
answer de
prose. On
trade card
Olt
angry-fac
Dinah! Six
look at th
wails Dina
servant's o
her arms
wringing
clothes. 'S
The card,
transform
Wringer
Mistress,
marvels,
so soon! W
new wring
now does
collared, l
replication
grammar
benefit b
Golly! Mi
Dis chile
done got d
clothes neider."
Mark Twain described a faithful
servant character in a short story of 1874:

'Aunt Rachel" was sitting respecqfully below

our level on the steps-for she was our
servant, and colored. She was of mighty
frame and stature;... She was a cheerful,
hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for
her to laugh than it is for a bird to sing.34

Although the "mighty frame and stature"

of Twain's Aunt Rachel would become

the prevailing mammy physique, nurtur-

ing servants of the late nineteenth century
daintily came
holdsin other ages and sizes. upYounger t
of her skirt
domestics such as Dinahso as
in the Universal n
Should
the consum
Wringer advertisement were not unusual,
differences denote
and they were often shown to be just as
dress, marked dist
devoted to an employer's children as
added toaunts oradvertise
mammies. In an advertisement

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18 Sapolio soap trade card, 1880s.
Private collection, Los Angeles

19 Universal Clothes Wringer trade

card, 1880s. Private collection, Los
Angeles

20 Universal Clothes Wringer trade

card (open)

-U

Atl

mr ah W- ...N C
As on. @$e e

for canned meat (fig. 21), "Dinah keeps

the children quiet" by providing them
with servings of corned beef. Dinah,
though younger and thinner than many
of her class, wears the loose-fitting
clothing typical of Mammy, with sleeves
rolled high and a bright, red bandanna
tying back her hair. Like their affluent
parents, the little children wear fine
garments with stylish high-buttoned shoes
on their wee feet.

Mammy's Rule

Whether through age, size, or command

of language, the superior-inferior relation-
ship between the Euro-American mistress
and African-American servant was

continuously being reiterated. On the

Universal Clothes Wringer card, clock-wa
Mistress's mode of dress is obviously Dinah's
better since young Dinah mimics it after however
her transformation. Also, Mistress is the clothes a

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21 Libby, McNeil and Libby's
Cooked Corned Beef trade card,
1880s. Private collection, Los
Angeles
a privileged ranking, black women were
not shy about reminding them. Aunts put
white women in their place-albeit a
superior one-by giving no-nonsense
orders to do things they themselves could
not do on their own. "Don't buy your

IfMammy was such a wonder,

why then did Mistress not simply
let her run the kitchen so she IT-

could enter a profession, get an

education, or, at the very least,
win the right to vote?

kitchen stove honey, till you have seen the

Redwood," an older aunt type counsels
her employer, brandishing a huge loaf of
baked bread as testimonial (fig. 22). The
"lady" receives this sage wisdom wearing
full-length gloves and waving a fluffy
feather fan, indicating she would never be
the one to actually use the proffered
portable range.
Aunt Jemima also gave advice. From
the moment she first appeared at the
1893 Chicago fair announcing "I'se in
town honey" in the servant dialect now
familiar in popular culture, she reassured
niently triggered the little homemaker's
fears of inadequacy, only to assuage them
by suggesting that the way to becoming a
home manager par excellence was by
using the new product. In this way, Aunt
Jemima, like the other African-American
stereotypes, became a supporting player in
affirming the stereotype of the Euro-
American woman. If the wheels of

poor bewildered housewives. "Don' yo'
fret none honey.... Jus' follow dese
directions for de world's mos' delicious
pancakes."35 Quaker Oats, the company
that later owned the product, mounted
commerce turned by the labor of a loyal
mammy, they were no less dependent on
the purchasing power of the lady of the
house.
African-American feminist writer bell

many advertising campaigns casting Aunt
Jemima in the role of advisor to the fretful
Euro-American woman who needed help
fulfilling her wifely duties. Ironically, as
often as not, the black woman's knowl-
edge and assurances-"easy as 1-2-3," she
would boast-only increased the white
woman's insecurity. Advertising conve-
hooks has noted the contradictions within
such depictions of women. Hooks has
questioned how nineteenth-century slave
women could be perceived as hard
working and able to perform such "male
jobs" as field work while Euro-American
women were presumed unfit for any kind
of labor. "[Black women's] ability to cope

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,All
ITV
r ji
xt
ter
UP
-sow,,
fill
22 Redwood Portable Range trade effectively in a sexist-defined 'male' role
card, 1880s. Private collection, Los
threatened patriarchal myths about the
Angeles
nature of women's inherent physiological
23 Granite Floor Paint trade card. difference and inferiority." Fearful that
Private collection, Los Angeles white women might learn self-reliance by
observing their gender counterparts, male
arbiters of culture circulated the image of
black women as what hooks terms
"masculinized sub-human creatures.'"36
Black women were now "different" in
ways that went beyond their skin color.
Part of the masculinizing strategy
of advertisers seems to have been to
make African-American women not
only physically unattractive, but also
106 Spring 1995
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cantankerous or bossy-traits at odds
with the coy, demure behavior expected
of "ladies." Mammy's rule within the
restricted roost of her employer's kitchen
was so prescribed she could order about
Ironically, as often as not, the
black woman's knowledge and
assurances-"easy as 1-2-3, "she
would boast-only increased the
white woman's insecurity.
the man of the house as well as the
woman. A Granite Floor Paint advertising
card (fig. 23) clearly illustrates this
peculiar dynamic. In the card's two
scenes, maids reign over their kitchens
into which their now-marginalized Euro-
American male employer peeks from
background doorways. "G'way chile," one
orders. "Why don't you use de Granite
Paint?" she chides. Meanwhile, in the
scene on the right, the wondrous paint
has been applied, causing that maid to lift
up her skirts, kick up her heels in delight,
and dance a breakdown-an unladylike
gesture if there ever was one.
In this era of the voluptuous beauty,
the potential attractiveness of the buxom
African-American woman was negated by
picturing her uncorseted and wearing
unstylish clothing. Though Mammy, as
a wet nurse, was female in the most
essential life-sustaining sense, advertisers
undermined her very femaleness by
giving her broad shoulders, strong arms,
and firmly planted large feet to support a
wide stance. Euro-American men were
thus able to define the Euro-American
woman as delicate and dependent by
counterposing her against the command-
ing presence of the husky, mannish
African-American woman.
24 Edward Potthast, illustration to
Harry Stillwell Edwards's
"Brother Sims's Mistake," Century
Magazine 58 (July 1899)

!1"WW

I :0.Vc

If Mammy was such a wonder,accompany

why Harry Stillwell Edwards's
"Brother
then did Mistress not simply let her run Sims's Mistake," shows an
the kitchen so she could enter a amused church congregation looking
profes-
sion, get an education, or, at theupvery
at the preacher and Brother Sims
engaging
least, win the right to vote? Because in an animated discussion
maid
service was not what was for sale, but
across the pulpit. All six women in the
labor-saving products, newfangled food wear shawls, aprons, broad
gathering
concoctions, and the mythology grins,
that and identically tied bandannas,
home was still the place for the as
true
if each beaming face were stamped
Victorian woman. Middle-class house- from the same advertiser's stereotype
wives were not necessarily supposed to stock cut.
hire Aunt Jemima, but to serve "Aunt As the century neared an end, the
Jemimas." nation looked forward to an ever-expand-
ing position of world prominence in the
modern age. Yet Americans continued to
embrace the notion of the "old black
Mammy was such a ubiquitous icon by mammy," a relic from a once-discredited
the end of the century that when Edward but now-recouped past. Not only did
Potthast needed to illustrate African- Mammy and scores like her promote
American women for a Century Magazine consumer goods, but more importantly,
short story, it seems she was all he could they sold the public a bill of goods about
think of (fig. 24). His drawing, made to the Old South.

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Notes
I wish to thank my co-fellows at the
Dartmouth College Humanities Institute,
chaired by Robert McGrath and Donald
Pease and directed by Amy Kaplan, for their
insightful comments on an earlier draft of this
essay. Thanks too to C&cile Whiting for her
help in this project's evolution. I am
especially grateful to Zena Pearlstone for
involving me in this topic in the first place.
1 See Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environ-
ment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age
of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New
York: Atheneum, 1985); and Robert W.
Rydell, All the World's a Fair: American
International Expositions, 1876-1916
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984).
2 See Nina Silber, The Romance ofReunion:
Northerners and the South, 1865-1900
(Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1993), p. 108.
3 For representations of Aunt Jemima and
Mammy in popular culture, literature,
and film, see Karen S. W. Jewell, From
Mammy to Miss America and Beyond:
Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S.
Social Policy (London: Routledge, 1993);
William L. Van Deburg, Slavery and Race
in American Popular Culture (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984);
Trudier Harris, From Mammies to
Militants: Domestics in Black American
Literature (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1982); and Donald
Bogel, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies,
and Bucks: An Interpretative History of
Blacks in American Films (New York:
Viking, 1973).
4 See Arthur F. Marquette, Brands,
Trademarks and Good Will (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1967), pp. 142-45. Green
continued to perform as Aunt Jemima
until 1919 when she was well over 80.
5 The image of Aunt Jemima has under-
gone changes over the years. In the civil
rights era of the 1960s, for example, the
bandanna was reduced to a headband.
The most recent update occurred in 1989,
when the headband was removed and
Aunt Jemima was given a curly hairdo
and pearl earrings. See Cathy Campbell,
"A Battered Woman Rises: Aunt
Jemima's Corporate Makeover," Village
Voice 34 (7 November 1989): 45-46.
108 Spring 1995
93.156.218.154 on Thu, 20 Jul 2023 17:07:47 +00:00
6 For examples see Carl W. Drepperd,
Early American Advertising Art: A
Collection of Wood Cut and Stereotype
Illustrations Used in American Newspaper,
Almanac and Magazine Advertising, 1750
to 1850 (New York: Youth Group of
Magazines, 1943).
7 See Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art:
Chromolithography 1840-1900: Pictures
for a Nineteenth-Century America
(Boston: David R. Godine, 1979).
8 On immigration to the North, see
Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America:
Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-
1915 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991),
pp. 8-12. On stereotypes, see Zena
Pearlstone, Seeds of Prejudice: Racial and
Ethnic Stereotypes in American Popular
Lithography, 1830-1918 (manuscript
to be published); Ethnic Images in
Advertising (Philadelphia: Balch Institute
for Ethnic Studies, 1984); and Jan
Nedeerveen Pieterse, White on Black:
Images ofAfrica and Blacks in Western
Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992).
9 See Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The
Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century
America (London: Oxford Press, 1974),
pp. 139-45; Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett
and the Rise ofEarly Negro Minstrelsy
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1962), p. 148; and Eric Lott, Love and
Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class (New York:
Oxford, 1993).
10 Notable recent scholarship on the
representation of African-Americans in
fine art include Albert Boime, The Art of
Exclusion (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian
Press, 1990); Elizabeth Johns, American
Genre Painting: The Politics ofEveryday
Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1991); Guy C. McElroy, Facing History:
The Black Image in American Art, 1710-
1940 (Washington D.C.: Bedford Arts,
Publishers, in association with the
Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990); and
Ellwood C. Parry III, The Image ofthe
Indian and the Black Man in American
Art, 1590-1900 (New York: G. Braziller,
1974).
11 James Kirke Paulding, The Dutchman's
Fireside, 2 vols. (New York: J & J
This content downloaded from
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Harper, 1831), 1:72-76. See H. Nichols
B. Clark, Francis William Edmonds:
American Master in the Dutch Tradition
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1988), pp. 67-68. See
also Francis Pendleton Gaines, The
Southern Plantation: A Study in the
Development andAccuracy ofa Tradition
(New York: Columbia University Press,
1924); and William R. Taylor, Cavalier
and Yankee: The Old South andAmerican
National Character (New York: George
Braziller, 1961), p. 300. Taylor writes
that most of the literary techniques for
representing "crotchety old mammies"
and "wise old 'aunts'" were developed by
novelists in the 1830s.
12 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's
Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, 2 vols.
(Boston: John P. Jewett & Company,
1852), 1:45, 39.
13 Eastman Johnson, for example, capital-
ized on the public's penchant for slavery
themes with the painting Old Kentucky
Home (Negro Life at the South) (1859,
New-York Historical Society), which
established his reputation and got him
elected associate academician at the
National Academy of Design. See
Patricia Hills, "The Genre Painting of
Eastman Johnson: The Sources and
Development of His Style and Themes"
(Ph.D. diss, New York University,
1977), pp. 56-58.
14 African-American females were fre-
quently pictured as light-skinned
mulattos or mothers during the abolition
and emancipation years. Examples
include Eastman Johnson's The Freedom
Ring (ca. 1860, Hallmark Cards, Kansas
City) and A Ride for Liberty-The
Fugitive Slaves (ca. 1862, Brooklyn
Museum).
15 Eyra Crowe, With Thackeray in America
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1893), pp. 130-36.
16 See Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion,
1865-1900 (Boston: Little, Brown &
Co., 1937), p. 209. Buck observes that
plantation theme literature before
abolition and during the redemption-
minded 1880s used the same stereotypes.
See also Taylor, p. 148, and Gaines, p.
17. Edward King's "Great South" was
 serialized in Scribner's throughout 1873
and 1874, then compiled into a book in
1875.
17 Silber, pp. 95-109, discusses how the
reunion theme became prominent during
this time when northerners were troubled
by strikes, immigration, economic
changes, and political corruption. By
picturing servants committed to their
own social caste, plantation theme
imagery and literature spoke to
northerners' need for "class obligation" in
labor struggles as well as to southerners'
desire to keep freed slaves as dependent
workers.
18 Slotkin, 285-91. Slotkin goes on to
suggest that workers were equated with
either "slaves" or "savages" to serve the
interests of the propertied class. "But for
postwar ideology, the vision of the
proletarian as contented slave or
demented savage became positive
doctrine: it justified both the exploitation
of the 'dependent' worker and the violent
military suppression of the rebellious
worker" (p. 291).
19 Buck, pp. 1-23. Buck has suggested that
Scribner's editorial posture of reconcilia-
tion was intentional. In reference to the
story "Uncle Tom at Home in Ken-
tucky" in Century (October 1887), Buck
writes, "The illustrations were as effective
in reconciliation as the prose." See also
Joyce Appleby, "Reconciliation and the
Northern Novelist, 1865-1880," Civil
War History 10 (June 1964): 117-29.
Appleby has determined it was in fact
northern fiction writers who first
extended the olive branch of reconcilia-
tion themes. But the reemergence of the
plantation mythology that exploited the
faithful mammy character was a product
of predominantly southern writers taking
up the themes again in the 1880s. For
more on the plantation mythology in
109 American Art
93.156.218.154 on Thu, 20 Jul 2023 17:07:47 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
literature see Robert A. Lively, Fiction
Fights the Civil War: An Unfinished
Chapter in the Literary History of the
American People (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1957), pp. 42-
72; and Gaines.
20 Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old
Virginia Before the War (1892; reprint,
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1897), p. 57.
21 Promotional pamphlet, "Life History of
Aunt Jemima," published by R. T. Davis
Mill, St. Joseph, Mo., ca. 1895. See also
Marquette, pp. 143, 146-47.
22 T. W. Caskey, quoted by Marion E.
Harmon, Negro Wit and Humor
(Louisville, Ky.: Harmon Publishing,
1914), p. 115. See also John Dollard,
Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New
York: Doubleday, 1937), p. 82.
23 Words and music by H. S. Edwards,
"Mammy's Li'l' Boy" (Boston: Oliver
Ditson Company, 1899).
24 See Verta Mae, Thursdays and Every
Other Sunday (Garden City: Doubleday,
1972), p. 69.
25 Silber, p. 95; and Taylor, p. 309. See also
Schlereth, p. 23.
26 Harper's Weekly 19 (25 September 1875):
773.
27 Both stereotypes have continued to be
partnered for contrast into the twentieth
century. Perhaps the most famous pair of
contrasting physical types is Hattie
McDaniel's Mammy to Vivien Leigh's
Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind
(1938). In a widely reproduced publicity
still, their physical relationship replays a
theme developed in nineteenth-century
advertising. Recalling the hefty cook of
This content downloaded from
Fleischmann's Yeast, Mammy wears a
loose-fitting, house-slave dress, bandanna
and all, while Scarlett is trussed up for
courtship in a tight-fitting lace corset.
28 Stowe, 1:45.
29 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll:
The World the Slaves Made (1972;
reprint, New York: Vintage Books,
1976), pp. 558-59.
30 Horace James, quoted in George M.
Fredrickson, The Black Image in the
White Mind (New York: Harper & Row,
1971), pp. 180-81.
31 See Martha Banta, ImagingAmerican
Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural
History (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987).
32 Taylor, pp. 165-66. The term true
womanhood is from Barbara Welter, "The
Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,"
American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966).
33 Caroline Ticknor, "The New Woman
and the Steel-Engraving Lady," Atlantic
Monthly 5 (July 1901): 105-10; and Lois
Banner, American Beauty (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 46. See also
Schlereth, p. 166.
34 Mark Twain, "A True Story" (1874), in
The Complete Short Stories ofMark
Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City:
Hanover House, 1957), pp. 94-95.
35 Magazine advertisements circa 1930s,
quoted in Daniel J. Leab, From Sambo to
Super-Spade: The Black Experience in
Motion Pictures (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1975), p. 98.
36 bell hooks, Aint IA Woman: Black
Women and Feminism (Boston: South
End Press, 1981), p. 71.