J.P. Ball’s Splendid, Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States: The World’s Only African American, Abolitionist Panorama (1855)

• In Event: The Ohio River: Free People of Color, J.P. Ball's Anti-Slavery Panorama, and Zones of Fugitivity

Description for Program

In 1855, daguerrean James Presley Ball, commissioned a team of Black artists (including famed landscapist Robert Duncanson) to create a stunning 2,400 square yard painting of the slave trade, “Ball’s Splendid, Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States…” It was the world’s largest and only African American abolitionist panorama, and a relentless critique of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Fifty-three scenes, many based on photographs that Ball took, documented slavery from Nigeria to Charleston and New Orleans, then north along the Mississippi, Ohio, and Susquehanna Rivers and Niagara Falls to liberty in Queenston, Canada. The entrpreneur declared, "The sketches, (except the African views) were taken by the artist, upon the spots which they represent...Each picture is a gem...Labor and expense have been disregarded to make the picture complete." Quaker Achilles Pugh published a 56-page description of the panorama, which Ball claimed was “but a plain attempt to record plain facts for plain people.” Ball exhibited the enormous canvas to thousands of spectators, black and white, in Cincinnati, Boston, and Rhode Island.
Based on dozens of newspaper articles that describe the work’s promotion and circulation, this paper analyzes the painting in relation to Mississippi River panoramas by John Banvard, John Rowson, and Henry Lewis (1840s) and the Cincinnati Panorama (cityscape along the Ohio River) by daguerreotypists Charles Fontayne and William Porter. It also contextualizes Ball’s connections to abolitionists, as well as political and social leaders locally and nationally. The presentation features scores of Ball’s portraits (daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and cartes-des-visite), advertisements, and reproductions of his images as prints. Although Ball's panorama no longer exists, it stands as a powerful symbol of resistance to the brutality of the "peculiar institution."

Author

• Theresa Leininger-Miller, University of Cincinnati