Slavery’s Suffering Brought to Light—New Orleans, 1834

This chapter focuses on the abolitionist movement and the rise of physical sensation as a rhetorical theme. It interprets the term “image” in its post-nineteenth-century sense as identifying both the actual (“this really happened”) and the conventional (“this is what it looked like”). Although photography was not in place during all of the moments under investigation in this chapter, the clamor for visual proof is consistently evident. The chapter analyzes the Lalaurie affair of 1834—a scandal in which a white Creole woman named Delphine Lalaurie was found to have experimented on her slaves for her own wanton pleasure—to highlight a view of black humanity, as well as the power accorded to sight at this historical moment as a means to acquire knowledge. The encounters with the suffering bodies of enslaved blacks and the humane insight of these confrontations challenged core principles of slavery and, at moments, exposed the cracks in slavery's logic that would eventually lead to its abolition.