The Mississippi River in Antebellum Visual Culture

Between the 1830s and the Civil War, the Mississippi River was embedded in some of the most contested economic, moral, cultural, and political debates of the time. In the same decades, technological advances in printing and transportation enabled images of the river to circulate widely in the form of paintings, maps, illustrated magazines, engravings, and bird's-eye views. By bringing to light the multi-faceted ways that the river was represented visually, this dissertation argues that images played a key role in defining the Mississippi as a physical and cultural entity. While previous art historical studies have argued that national identity cohered around nineteenth-century landscape representation, this project highlights the potential for images of the antebellum landscape to facilitate mobile and shifting meanings. Progressing downriver, each chapter addresses the circulation of key works as well as their form and content. Chapter 2 demonstrates that George Catlin's landscape paintings of the Missouri and Upper Mississippi River Valleys recreated the sense of mobility that the artist himself experienced during his travels, in contrast to more grounded, localized views created by Seth Eastman. Chapter 3 reckons with the iconic imagery that George Caleb Bingham created of the Middle Mississippi Valley, emphasizing the social malleability of his artistic persona, boatmen figures, and patrons. Chapter 4 looks at how the Mississippi figured into debates about the nature of time and the American past by discussing the complex media interactions and contemporary scientific and historical undercurrents underlying Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, a moving panorama concerned with Native American earthworks. Finally, chapter 5 analyzes the way that New-Orleans based publisher Benjamin Norman and artist Marie Adrien Persac harnessed conventions from cartography, the picturesque, and urban viewmaking to create Norman's Chart of the Lower Mississippi, an engraved map of cotton and sugar plantations that promoted a vision of the region as stable, harmonious, and productive as the nation inched towards Civil War. Together, these representations figure the Mississippi River as malleable terrain that was shaped by artists, their viewers, and the mobility of people and objects