Leutze’s painting allows us to see that the ideologically motivated inclusion of Black figures in representations of American history is far from a contemporary phenomenon, despite the Trump administration’s insistence that such gestures are a woke invention. The administration’s recent attempts to purge references to the enslaved people whom Washington owned from his former Philadelphia residence is, like Leutze’s painting, an attempt to recast the revolutionary commander in chief and first president to meet contemporary political needs. Although the subject of Leutze’s Crossing was indeed a slaveholder, all evidence indicates that the artist himself was an abolitionist. During the Civil War, he designed the banners for two Black regiments, the New York 20th and the 26th. At the time of his death in 1868, Leutze was at work on a painting of Abraham Lincoln delivering the Emancipation Proclamation. All that survives, however, is a written description of a preliminary sketch. Had Leutze fulfilled his vision, we would have another work for the American national canon and a Lincoln to stand alongside his Washington.
Both Leutze and Lawrence’s Crossings, in their own ways, celebrate the democratic origins of the American republic. Robert Colescott’s reworking in the collection of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art casts a more skeptical eye on the nation’s foundations. Created in 1975 in the lead-up to the US Bicentennial, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook features a bevy of caricatured Black figures—a cigar-smoking banjo player, a chef, a mammy, a shoeshine boy, and others—who tumble over one another in a boat steered by Carver, the agricultural scientist.
Sometimes read as a statement about the exclusion of Black figures from the Western canon, the painting seems to me more of a commentary on the inclusion of racist tropes in the popular American imagination. If George Washington is one of the stock characters in our national drama, Colescott seems to say, well, then here are some others. His painting recalls the prints that circulated alongside reproductions of Leutze’s Crossing during the 19th century. A few years after that painting made its New York debut, Currier & Ives, a local printmaking firm, released a lithographic version (which, notably, omits the Black rower from the scene). In the following decades, the company would enjoy a brisk trade in prints from its extensive “Darktown” series, which relied on racist gags about the failings of an imaginary Black community. In his reworking of the Crossing, Colescott merges these images into a single composition. To Leutze, American history is a grand theatrical tableau. In Colescott’s recasting, it is a minstrel show.