NARRATOR: In this study for a painting, Samuel Jennings presents Lady Liberty in white with broken chains at her feet. The floor is strewn with objects relating to the arts and sciences, indicating a path to freedom paved by a Western education. Before her, Free Black figures bow gratefully, while others celebrate in the landscape. On the left, you can see a globe.

And that’s where things get interesting.

VINCENT BROWN: What I see there is the island of Hispaniola in red and green, blown up way out of proportion to anything that you might expect from the Caribbean on a globe like this.

NARRATOR: That’s Vincent Brown, the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

VINCENT BROWN: Knowing that this painting was finished in 1791 or 1792, during the massive slave uprising that became the Haitian Revolution and resulted in the creation of the second independent postcolonial nation state in the Americas and the first to abolish slavery, that becomes far more significant than almost anything else that I see. While one might assume that this is just Black figures thankful for the gift of wisdom, for the gift of liberty that comes from a white patron, this globe tells another story. It almost suggests that, look, if not liberty, then revolution.

NARRATOR: Jennings gave the final painting to the Library Company of Philadelphia. He had first suggested an image of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, but the committee members actually asked Jennings to make this abolitionist scene of Liberty and freed Black Americans.

VINCENT BROWN: It's an image of emancipation that's very much a gift from white people to black people, but it's also a representation of, frankly, their fundamental belief in white superiority. Something like the Haitian Revolution upset that idea entirely—this was black people making a world for themselves, by themselves. That’s just a place a lot of abolitionists could not get to. Even as we look back and understand that they were probably on the right side of history, they had their limitations too.