Frances Flora Bond Palmer and James Merritt Ives, artists. “High Water” in the Mississippi. Hand-colored lithograph. New York: Currier & Ives, 1868. Approx. 32 x 25 in., adhered to  35 x 28 in. cardstock frame. 

A striking, hand-colored lithograph by Currier & Ives depicting the aftermath of flooding along the Mississippi River. In the foreground, a Black family stands precariously on the roof of a submerged cabin, attempting to salvage furniture from the rising waters, while nearby chickens roost on a floating coop. In the background, a white family is shown atop the balcony of a two-story home, cheerfully waving to the approaching steamboat Stonewall Jackson (named for the Confederate general killed in 1863), while safely removed from the immediate devastation.

The composition, produced in the years after the Civil War, has been widely interpreted as an allegory of Reconstruction-era social realities. The juxtaposition of the Black family’s desperate struggle with the white family’s relative security literalizes the racial and economic inequalities that persisted after emancipation. The imagery represents the perilous condition of freedpeople, who faced displacement, poverty, and systemic disadvantage, even as white Southerners retained both symbolic and material "higher ground".

This print is attributed to Francis Flora Bond Palmer (1812 - 1876), one of Currier & Ives’s most prolific and accomplished artists. Palmer produced more than 200 of the firm’s most admired landscapes and genre scenes between 1849 and 1868, often blending technical precision with layered social commentary. Nathaniel Currier, who began publishing lithographs in New York in 1835, partnered with James Merritt Ives in 1857, forming the legendary firm that became synonymous with nineteenth-century American visual culture. Currier & Ives continued operations until 1907, leaving a vast body of work that not only illustrated but also shaped popular understandings of American life.

A copy of this lithograph is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see object no.: 63.550.43). 

[Civil War, Union, Confederate] [African American, African American History, Black History, Slavery, Enslavement, Abolition, Emancipation] [Art, Folk Art, Military Art, Etching, Engraving, Lithographs, Prints, Ephemera]