Dave the potter’s august pots, sexual imagery, and dred scott

This chapter gives a historical account of three inscriptions written by Dave the Potter in 1857, tying them contextually to significant incidents of that year in Edgefield, South Carolina: the eventful funeral proceedings of Preston Brooks, a violent South Carolinian politician, and the Dred Scott decision of March 1857. Foreman’s reading of the inscription “A pretty little Girl” moves beyond previously noted allusions to Mount Vesuvius’s eruption. The essay considers the inscription in relation to Frederick Douglass’s “Slumbering Volcanoes” speech of 1849, while developing an argument for reading the inscriptions, where appropriate, as being part of a series or triptych.