Charles Howland Hammatt Billings

1818-1874

American (Boston, Massachusetts)

Hammatt Billings was an architect who began his draughtsman career in the early 1840s as chief illustrator of the popular weekly, Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion. In 1850 he designed a masthead (magazine at the head of the front page) for Boston-based abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, including a slave auction on the left, a scene of emancipation on the right, and a central circle in which Christ stands triumphant between a kneeling slave and a fleeing slaveholder. For Uncle Tom's Cabin Billings used existing antislavery iconography and established conventions of fine art paintings.