(upbeat jazzy music)
- [Narrator] We're in the storage room
of the Terra Foundation for American Art
looking at a large painting by an American painter
named Samuel Colman.
This dates to just after the Civil War.
We think it was painted in 1868.
- [Announcer] It was painted that year, we think,
because the ship, the Glad Tidings,
was being handed over from the father to the son
so the transition I think is the reason
the painting may have been created.
Our research has told us a lot about the Glad Tidings
which transported cotton
throughout the Civil War period and after.
It traveled between New Orleans, New York and London.
- [Narrator] I think it's easy for us in the 21st century
to lose sight of how important ships were
in a port city like New York.
New York's life was on the water.
Its wealth, its prosperity
was the result of commerce up and down the coast
but also to Europe.
- [Announcer] The large sail ships
that we see in the foreground
were the vessels that made the transAtlantic voyage.
Off to the left we see a steamboat
and so bringing the sail ships
and the steam vessels together,
these two technologies that were still working
in tandem during this period.
- [Narrator] This is a painting that is about
those kinds of contrasts of the past
and the future and I think that it's no mistake
that the artist is painting that just a few years after
the close of the Civil War
when things really are shifting
and the artist brings those shifts out,
not just in the contrast between sail
and steam power but also in what's being transported.
- [Announcer] At right we see multiple bales of cotton,
likely from New Orleans,
possibly being transferred to another vessel
for shipment to London.
We don't quite know but the presence
of this cotton alludes to that great wealth coming out
of the cotton kingdom.
- [Narrator] The American South produced cotton
that was used around the world.
Especially in the mills of England
and it was incredibly valuable material.
It was the great cash crop for the South
but it was labor intensive
and it used enslaved labor
and so it's a crop that is bound up with the Civil War.
- [Announcer] I think the strength of cotton
on the world market in the days leading up
to the Civil War is the factor
that gave the Confederacy the confidence
that England and France would come in
and intervene on their behalf
and I think without that kind of economic power,
the Confederacy would not have been as bold
to secede from the union.
- [Narrator] And in fact, in this year, there's a story
in the London Illustrated News celebrating American ships
now in the post-war era that are able
to bring American cotton to the mills in northern England.
- [Announcer] There was great jubilation when those ships,
including the Glad Tidings, entered the harbor.
Many people think that the trade in cotton ceased entirely
during the Civil War.
What happened is much more complicated
and much richer I think.
It's during the early to mid Civil War period
that a cotton manufacturer by the name of Edward Atkinson
speaks with Abraham Lincoln to begin to utilize
the Union Army in seizing cotton plantations
in areas of the southern United States
where the Union had advanced to during the conflict
and so Union troops would go
into a large cotton growing plantation,
seize it, seize its labor force
and they would rename these now freed slaves
as contrabands of war.
This discussion about contrabands raised many issues,
because now these formerly held slaves
were making their steps toward the emancipation.
The term was free labor cotton
and these contrabands produced this free labor cotton
as they called it because these contrabands,
they were paid minimal wages
and they were given certain rights
that exceeded that under slavery
and so this free labor cotton became very significant
to abolitionist minded countries like England
where the distaste for taking U.S. cotton
throughout this period was a result
of their anti-slavery political positions.
- [Narrator] But this painting is even more fascinating
because to the left of the bales of cotton,
we see barrels.
- [Narrator] In the years after the Civil War,
the Southern cotton economy
would never really recover.
By that time, England and other cotton using,
manufacturing countries were looking elsewhere
for their cotton crops.
To Africa, to India and so forth
and so the South never fully recovered its control
on that market.
If you look closely at the end of the barrels,
you read the words New York Petroleum Company
and below that you'll notice a dark spot
and in fact, it's raw, crude petroleum spilling out
of those barrels.
- [Announcer] This is long before the adoption
of the combustion engine for the automobile.
Petroleum was still quite a novel thing.
It was being marketed to replace whale oil
which was very expensive
and oil was just becoming plentiful
thanks to the discovery
of the important oil field in western Pennsylvania.
I'm not sure that Colman understood
just how far seeing his choice was
in including both cotton on the right.
This important commodity of the 19th century,
and the commodity that would so shape the 20th.
- [Narrator] Both of which responsible for great amounts
of armed conflict.
- [Announcer] Let's turn for just a moment
to the composition and to the light
because this painting is so beautifully,
so carefully rendered.
First of all, you get this sense that this is an artist
that understood the rigging of these ships.
But I'm struck by the way
that the masts tower over us.
This is the skyline of New York
before the skyscraper.
- [Narrator] Also interesting is the way that the smoke
that's coming off of the tar pits
is infiltrating some of the riggings
of the ships so it's clear on one hand
then also atmospheric in other areas.
- [Announcer] The artist has kept all of the figures
in this painting
at a distance but we're still close enough
to make out that at least one figure is African American.
- [Narrator] We notice that he is bare footed.
He's rolled his pants up to his knees
and he is facing away from us,
tending to the cotton.
This was a common trope during the Civil War period
for rending African American figures.
- [Announcer] And because New York is a northern state,
we don't associate it with slavery
but New York had slaves well into the 19th century.
- [Narrator] New York was intricately intertwined
with the plight of the South, economically speaking,
and I think the African American figure in the foreground
both looks back, of course to the plight of slavery
but here in this post-war moment, 1868,
the height of reconstruction, this African American figure
also gestures forward in time,
thinking about all of the challenges
that African Americans would have to overcome
over the following years through the Reconstruction Period
into the Jim Crow Era and then finally
into the moment of Civil Rights in the 1950s and 60s.
- [Announcer] It's extraordinary how a single canvas,
one that at first is seemingly
just a lovely image of ships reaches out
into some of the most complex
and troubling issues in American history.
(upbeat jazzy piano music)