A Cotton Plantation on the Mississippi

William Aiken Walker (1838–1921), who spent much of his life in Charleston, South Carolina, or traveling around the American South after the Civil War (1861–1865), was known primarily for his paintings of plantation life and New Orleans scenes. During the 1880s, when he made frequent trips up and down the Mississippi River, he made numerous paintings featuring Black sharecroppers picking cotton and laboring to ready cotton crops for market. Although no longer enslaved, the sharecroppers lived in poverty, as Walker's scenes made evident, since they were mired in an agrarian system that was slow to change, even as the rest of the nation became increasingly industrialized. Walker's pictures were popular souvenirs for those who were nostalgic for a past when the South prevailed as a leader in cotton producition for European and American textile mills.

The New York-based firm of Currier & Ives decided to make this lithograph after one of Walker's paintings to appeal to prospective Southern customers, especially those still engaged in the cotton business. In this rural scene, a wagon, hitched to a three-mule team and loaded with cotton bales, stands on a dirt road in the left foreground. While a Black man sits atop the cotton bales, another Black man stands beside the wagon, and a third Black man (mounted on one of the mules) converses with a Black woman standing on the road. In the central foreground, a white couple stands on the road: the bearded man has raised his right arm to point at the wagon as the woman (shown in profile) gazes in that direction. Behind them is a cotton field filled with Black workers picking cotton; beyond, there is a cluster of farm buildings and rustic dwellings. In the central left background, a steamboat makes its way on the river.

Nathanial Currier, who established his successful lithography firm in 1835, produced thousands of hand-colored prints in various sizes that together create a vivid panorama of mid-to-late nineteenth century American life and its history. People eagerly acquired such lithographs featuring picturesque scenery, rural and city views, ships, railroads, portraits, hunting and fishing scenes, domestic life and numerous other subjects, as an inexpensive way to decorate their homes or business establishments. As the New York City firm expanded, Nathaniel included his younger brother Charles in the business. In 1857, James Merritt Ives (the firm's accountant since 1852 and Charles's brother-in-law) was made a business partner; subsequently renamed Currier & Ives, the firm, which became known as "the printmakers to the American people," continued until 1907.