Comparing Two “Portraits”: Enslaver and Enslaved, 1772 & 1794

Post by Mark Auslander:

I am fascinated by two “portraits,” one visual, the other encoded in language, of two men of late 18th century Annapolis, Maryland, intertwined with one another through the institution of chattel slavery. The first is a formal oil painting of the wealthy slaveowner and patriot, William Paca, created in 1772 by one of the leading American artists of the era, Charles Willson Peale. The second is a runaway slave advertisement penned twenty two years later by Paca himself, seeking to recover an escaped man referred to only as “Dick.”

William Paca, by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), 1772 Oil on canvas

Let us begin with the painted portrait. At the time he commissioned the painting in 1772, William Paca was one of Maryland’s most distinguished white citizens. Great grandson of English emigrant Robert Paca, William had studied law in Great Britain and amassed a considerable fortune and major land holdings, in part through inheritance and a judicious marriage into the wealthy Chew family. A dedicated Patriot, he served on the Committee of Correspondence and the Committee of Safety, and was recognized as a leading critic of Parliamentary excesses and defender of the rights of the colonists. Four years later he would serve in the Continental Congress and become one of Maryland’s four signatories of the Declaration of Independence. He would serve as Maryland’s third Governor and then as the first Federal Judge for the District of Maryland.

1790 census, Queen Anne’s County. William Pace, 92 slaves

Tax and census records indicate he owned many enslaved people over the course of his life. The 1790 census records he owned 92 slaves in Queen Anne’s county on the eastern shore of Maryland. At the time of his death in 1799, he is estimated to have owned about 100 slaves. His elegant house on Prince George Street in Annapolis contained about ten enslaved people during this period; the rest of his human property was presumably confined to his agricultural holdings in the area, including Wye Island, in Queen Anne's County, on Maryland’s eastern shore, where he died and was buried. The year after his death, the 1800 census records his son John Philemon Paca as owning 118 slaves on Wye Island., Queen Anne’s County.

The Urban Pleasure Garden

William Paca appears to have regarded his greatest accomplishment as the formal Georgian terraced garden in his Annapolis home, incorporating French and English design principles and surrounded by an expensive tall brick wall. As several scholars have suggested, the garden was itself Paca’s most enduring self portrait, evoking a carefully constituted autobiography of self cultivation and classically-oriented refinement, serving as a “mirror" of his well-heeled bourgeois subjectivity for the admiration of his fellow members of the emergent Chesapeake gentility (Leone 1984; Backhaus 2003).

These themes are carefully orchestrated within Peale’s portrait of Paca. A rather corpulent standing Paca rests his right hand on a classical bust of the Roman orator Cicero, and is turned as if to gaze upon his pride and joy, his two acre pleasure garden. The extravagant foliage of a tree immediately behind him is pulled back like the curtain of a theatrical stage, to reveal his beloved terraced, microcosmic landscape. (The configuration seems to anticipate Peale’s most famous image half a century later, his 1822 “The Artist in his Museum,” a self portrait in which the artist lifts up a curtain to reveal his cabinet of wonders: https://americanart.si.edu/blog/eye-level/2011/13/791/charles-willson-peale-man-front-curtain)

In the middle foreground of the Paca portrait a solitary tree echoes Paca’s own upright stance, and perhaps recalls the Tree of Knowledge in the center of the first garden, the Garden of Eden. This tree frames in the middle distance the classical pavilion in the garden’s lower terrace, towards which the main pathway proceeds and the eye is inevitably drawn, juxtaposed with the enclosing brick wall in the distance. Atop the pavillion, Peale has placed a statue of Mercury, the classical messenger of the gods. Paca, it would seem. completes the transition from classical antiquity, emphasizing patrician self-sacrifice,and Old World sophistication, as glimpsed in the Cicero bust that gazes upon him, as he in turn gazes upon the geometrical refinement he has brought to the New World in the form of the garden. As suggested by the elevated statue of Mercury at the heart of the garden, the modern-day Patrician has infused the spirit of the Classical Age into Annapolis.

No other human figures are visible, other than the classical male bust and Paca himself. There are emphatically no laborers or enslaved people present, yet signs of wealth and labor are ubiquitous in the image, which emphasizes the protagonist’s mastery over interior and exterior domains, and implicitly over all those who, in Jefferson’s terms, “labor for his happiness.”

(The gardens, long covered over by a hotel building, have been reconstructed in recent years, based on archaeological excavations and the Peale’s rendition of them in the portrait. They are now open to public tours.)

In 1794, twenty two years over he posed for Peale’s portrait, Paca created an implicit portrait of his own, describing an enslaved runaway man, Dick, reprinted in multiple Maryland newspapers that spring and summer:

Fifteen Pounds Reward

My waiting man, negro DICK, ran away from me last Saturday; he crossed the bay from Annapolis to Kent Island on Sunday about nine o’clock and stole and took with him my gray mare. He wore a green cloth coatee and jacket, leather breeches, and boots, a round hat, and blue surtout, but took with him a variety of other clothes. He is a very likely lad, well made, wears a queue, some little plaits his wool, and dresses very fashionably; he is about twenty-five years of age, well fixed, black color, reads a little, and is a complete waiting man; he took the Philadelphia road.

I will give the above reward to any person who will apprehend and secure the said negro lad and mare, or TEN POUNDS for Dick, and FIVE POUNDS for the mare, and pay all reasonable charges.

WILLIAM PACA

Baltimore, April 9, 1794

The Advertisement as Portrait

What can we tease out from thid linguistic image created by Paca of the escaped man Dick?

The phrase “complete waiting man” appears in other 18th century runaway ads and seems to suggest professional accomplishment, probably as a valet, dresser, and server in the dining room. Given the intimacy implied in Georgian-era great households between master and man, we may wonder about the extent to which Paca rhetorically has created Dick as a kind of mirror of himself. Note that in contrast to many contemporary runaway ads, Paca inserts no condemnatory language about the fugitive, not even including the familiar phrase “absconded with no provocation whatsoever.” The description of Dick's physical presentation of self is entirely positive: “likely”, “well made,” "well fixed”. It seems likely that whatever reading ability Dick possessed came from Paca’s own instruction. Paca offers no speculation about Dick’s destination, other than to indicate that he was seen on the road leading from Kent Island towards Philadelphia.

What, in turn, might we infer from this admittedly distorted portrait about Dick himself, on his own terms, rather than as imagined by his Master? Like many enslaved people in urban contexts, Dick seems to have been actively engaged in sartorial self-fashioning, perhaps no less than his erstwhile owner William Paca, who allows (or boasts) that Dick “dresses very fashionably.” The enslaved man seems to have taken particular care with his hair, wearing “little plaits in his wool” and sporting a queue. These features may have harkened back to West and Central Africa hair styles, or perhaps have been been a transformation of the wigs worn by the Chesapeake white elite. One senses Dick was mindful to compose and match his attire carefully, the green coat paired with a blue “surtout” (overcoat or waist coat), going out with his round hat and boots, and taking other clothes with him.

Even in these brief lines, we get a sense of Dick’s logic and forethought. Rather than risking passage through densely populated Baltimore, he heads out by water to Kent Island, a voyage of about ten miles. He travels on a Sunday, the least trafficked day, and is careful to secure a horse for the long journey ahead. Moving north along the eastern shore would have given him access to dunes, coastal marshes, and swamps much less frequented by slave patrols than the metropolitan Maryland highways. Dick was clearly willing to take an enormous gamble in his dash for freedom but he also seems to have done everything possible to shift the odds in his favor.

Dick’s Fate?

What, then, became of Dick? As noted, no will or probate records from the William Paca appear to have survived, so we cannot tell if twenty five year old Dick, born around 1767, was recaptured and continued to labor in Paca’s service. However, it should be noted that the runaway ad continued to run in Maryland newspapers from April to August 1794, suggesting that Dick avoided capture for at least four months, perhaps long enough for him to secure relative safety in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or points further north.

We know that many self-liberated fugitives in the late 18th century found their way to Philadelphia, already emerging as a site of Black cosmopolitan culture. In 1794, the very year that Dick escaped, another Richard, Richard Allen, who had been manumitted in Delaware, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a house of worship which became known as Mother Bethel. Perhaps Dick found refuge in Philadelphia, and attended Allen’s church or another house of worship.

I know of only one other free man of color named Richard in the 1800 Philadelphia census, Richard Holeman, who resided in the city’s Cedar Ward and headed a household of eleven other free persons of color. We might imagine that Dick became someone like this man, heading his own independent household in a relatively free state. Perhaps he was in fact able to pursue the ongoing labor of creative self-fashioning under circumstances, while not entirely of own choosing, were at long last outside of the brutal bonds of chattel slavery.

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For Further Reading

Gary Backhaus. 2003. “The Looking-Glass Self: Self-Objectivation through the Garden.” Pp. 181-217 in the book, Gardens and the Passion for the Infinite, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

Mark Leone 1984. Interpreting Ideology in Historical Archaeology: Using the Rules ofPerspective in the William Paca Garden in Annapolis, Maryland,” in Ideology, Power, and Prehistory, ed. Daniel Miller and Christopher Tiller (Cambridge University Press,)

Joseph Manca. 2003. Cicero in America: Civic Duty and Private Happiness in Charles Willson Peale's Portrait of "William Paca". American Art 17 (1)