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Exposing humanity: slavery, antislavery, and early photography in America, 1839-1865

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Exposing humanity: slavery, antislavery, and early photography in America, 1839-1865

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EXPOSING HUMANITY:
SLAVERY, ANTISLAVERY, AND EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY IN AMERICA,
1839-1865

by

Matthew Amato

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Matthew Amato
ii

Acknowledgments

It is a true pleasure to thank the many people and institutions that have supported
my work. I accomplished a great deal of the archival research for this project while on a
Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources from the Council on
Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and completed the writing with the help of a
Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. I also benefited from the generous
support of a Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, a
research award from the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the
University of Alabama, a Mellon research fellowship from the Virginia Historical
Society, and a research award from the Clements Center-DeGolyer Library at Southern
Methodist University. The Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship from the
Social Science Research Council helped me to explore topics during the early stages of
the dissertation process. USC College supported my work throughout my graduate
career, as did the USC Visual Studies Graduate Committee, which awarded me a summer
research fellowship as well as the Anne Friedberg Memorial Grant.
Many people helped me to transform this project from an idea to a product on
paper. I must first thank my dissertation committee at USC. Karen Halttunen
consistently offered insightful comments, and I am still grappling with some of the
questions she posed. Throughout my graduate career, Vanessa Schwartz promoted my
own intellectual curiosity as she brought a seemingly limitless enthusiasm to every
conversation. Leo Braudy made helpful suggestions, particularly as I was
conceptualizing this project. I owe my greatest appreciation to Richard Fox, who advised
iii

this dissertation. Richard pushed me to become a better writer and thinker, and
encouraged me throughout the research process. I am thankful for his guidance and
thoughtfulness.
Archivists and photograph collectors have proven crucial to my research. In
particular, I would like to thank Anne Peterson at the Degolyer Library at Southern
Methodist University; Randall K. Burkett and Kathy Shoemaker at Emory’s Manuscript,
Archives, & Rare Book Library; Mary Jo Fairchild at the South Carolina Historical
Society; Gigi Barnhill, Paul Erickson, Lauren Hewes, Jackie Penny, and Elizabeth Pope
at the American Antiquarian Society; Jennifer Scheetz at the Charleston Museum; Sara
C. Arnold at the Gibbes Museum; Lynette Stoudt at the Georgia Historical Society; Beth
Bilderback at the South Caroliniana Library; Matthew Turi at the Wilson Library;
Heather Beattie, Frances Pollard, and Katherine Wilkins at the Virginia Historical
Society; Autumn Reinhardt Simpson at the Valentine Richmond History Center; Clayton
Lewis at the William L. Clements Library; Pamela Powell at the Chester County
Historical Society; Lish Thompson at the Charleston County Public Library; Bob Zeller,
president of the Center for Civil War Photography; and Robin Stanford.
I am very thankful to the friends and family members who have encouraged me,
made me think, and made me laugh, including Mark, Max, David, Jim, Cathy, Jer,
Lauren, Amy, Glenn, and Matilda. My parents and brother supported me throughout this
process. I am grateful to Dan for his encouragement over the years. My dad helped
instill in me a love for history, amongst many other great things, and has offered
immeasurable support. It has been bittersweet to complete this project after my mom
iv

passed, but her words have continued to guide me and give me strength. My greatest
thanks goes to Kate, my best friend, who has been a loving partner every step of the way.
I so look forward to our future together.
v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

List of Figures vi

Abstract xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Mobilizing Intimacy, 1839-1861 18

Chapter 2: Trading Photographs, 1839-1861 67

Chapter 3: Documenting Abolition, 1839-1861 100

Chapter 4: Slavery’s Victims, Freedom’s Servants, 1861-1865 157

Epilogue 207

Bibliography 213
vi

List of Figures

Figure 1.1: Moses, carte de visite, 1857 18

Figure 1.2: Minor Family Nurse, daguerreotype, c. 1850 18

Figure 1.3: George Smith Cook, Charlotte Helen Middleton and her enslaved nurse,
Lydia, ambrotype, c. 1857 18

Figure 1.4: Justus Englehardt Kühn, Henry Darnall III, 1702-c.1787 22

Figure 1.5: Edward Savage, The Washington Family, 1789-1796 23

Figure 1.6: John Trumbull, George Washington, 1780 23

Figure 1.7: Rose Hill, c. 1820 24

Figure 1.8: Perry Hall, Slave Quarters with Field Hands at Work, c. 1805 25

Figure 1.9: Cogbill and grandmother, ambrotype, c. 1859 33

Figure 1.10: Cogbill and unknown woman, ambrotype, c. 1859 33

Figure 1.11: Rose Hill, c. 1820 34

Figure 1.12: Martha Ann “Patty” Atavis, daguerreotype, c. 1848 34

Figure 1.13: Hector, ambrotype, 1861 36

Figure 1.14: Isaac Jefferson, daguerreotype, c. 1847 37

Figure 1.15: Atavis and Anna Whitridge, tintype 38

Figure 1.16: Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, late 1480s 38

Figure 1.17: Rachel & Sadai Burge, c. 1858 40

Figure 1.18: Mary Louise May Pearson with baby Mary Frances Pearson,
daguerreotype 41

Figure 1.19: Buena Vista, daguerreotype, c. 1850 42

Figure 1.20: The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838 43

vii

Figure 1.21: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852 45

Figure 1.22: George Smith Cook, Charlotte Helen Middleton and her enslaved nurse,
Lydia, ambrotype c. 1857 46

Figure 1.23: “Amy, a slave of the Blacklock family,” daguerreotype, c. 1850 49

Figure 1.24: Eliza Washburn, daguerreotype 49

Figure 1.25: Rosetta, ambrotype, c. 1850s 50

Figure 1.26: Mauma Mollie, daguerreotype, c. 1850 50

Figure 1.27: Minor Family Nurse, daguerreotype, c. 1850 51

Figure 1.28: “Judy Telfair Jackson, Telfair cook with her granddaughter, Lavinia, Mary
Telfair’s maid,” daguerreotype, c. 1849 53

Figure 1.29: Dolly, Fugitive slave advertisement, 1863 60

Figure 1.30: Moses, carte de visite, 1857 63

Figure 1.31: Slave girls of the Pindar Family, tintype, c. 1860 64

Figure 1.32: Back of Pindar tintype 64

Figure 2.1: Osborn and Durbec, Rockville, S.C., half-stereograph, 1860 75

Figure 3.1: Abby Kelley Foster, daguerreotype, 1846 100

Figure 3.2: Abby Kelly Foster, Lithograph, 1846 100

Figure 3.3: Isaac Cruikshank, “The Abolition of the Slave Trade,” Print, 1792 106

Figure 3.4: Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1838 106

Figure 3.5: “Am I Not A Man A Brother?” woodcut, 1837 108

Figure 3.6: “Am I Not a Woman a Sister?” token, 1838 108

Figure 3.7: Theodore Dwight Weld, letter, 1837 108

Figure 3.8: Southworth & Hawes, “The Branded Hand of Captain Jonathan Walker,”
daguerreotype, 1845 114
viii

Figure 3.9: Southworth & Hawes, “The Branded Hand of Captain Jonathan Walker,”
daguerreotype, 1845 115

Figure 3.10: “The Branded Hand,” pamphlet, c. 1845 115

Figure 3.11: Matthew Brady, “Gordon,” albumen silver print, 1863 117

Figure 3.12: Frederick Douglass, daguerreotype, c. 1848 121

Figure 3.13: Frederick Douglass, daguerreotype, c. 1850 121

Figure 3.14: John W. Jones, photograph, c. 1850 122

Figure 3.15: John Brown, frontispiece, 1854 122

Figure 3.16: Phillips, Garrison, Thompson, daguerreotype, 1850 124

Figure 3.17: Phillips, Garrison, Thompson, daguerreotype, 1850 125

Figure 3.18: Ezra Greenleaf Weld, Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Convention, Cazenovia,
daguerreotype, August 22, 1850 130

Figure 3.19: Passmore Williamson, daguerreotype, 1855 134

Figure 3.20: “The Oberlin Rescuers at Cuyahoga County Jail,” April, 1859 135

Figure 3.21: Dr. John Doy and rescuers, ambrotype, 1859 136

Figure 3.22: Dr. John Doy and rescuers, ambrotype, 1859 137

Figure 3.23: J.B. Heywood, John Brown, May 1859 141

Figure 3.24: James Presley Ball, “Jesse Berch, quartermaster sergeant, 25, Wisconsin
Regiment of Racine, Wis. [and] Frank M. Rockwell, postmaster 22 Wisconsin of
Geneva, Wis,” photographic print on carte de visite mount, 1862 148

Figure 4.1: Alma A. Pelot, Ft. Sumter, April 1861 160

Figure 4.2: J.M. Osborn, Ft. Sumter, April 1861 161

Figure 4.3: Alma A. Pelot, Ft. Sumter, April 1861 161

Figure 4.4: J.M. Osborn, Ft. Sumter, April 1861 162
ix

Figure 4.5: Burrell (slave) and John Wallace Comer 164

Figure 4.6: Rockville, S.C., half-stereograph, 1860 168

Figure 4.7: Matthew Brady, “Gordon,” albumen silver print, 1863 171

Figure 4.8: “As We Found Them,” carte de visite, c. 1864 177

Figure 4.9: “As They Are Now,” carte de visite, c. 1864 177

Figure 4.10: M. H. Kimball, “Rebecca, an Emancipated Slave, from New Orleans,”
carte de visite, c. 1863 177

Figure 4.11: “Wilson Chinn, a Branded Slave from Louisiana,”
carte de visite, 1863 177

Figure 4.12: . “Gen’l. John W. Geary and staff – taken at Harper’s Ferry,” albumen print
on carte de visite mount, c. 1860s 181

Figure 4.13: Mathew Brady, “Officers of Co. G. R.I.V.,” albumen print on carte de visite
mount, c.1862-1865 181

Figure 4.14: “Portrait of Brig. Gen. Napoleon B. McLaughlin, officer of the federal
Army, and staff, vicinity of Washington, D.C.,” negative, August 1865 191

Figure 4.15: “Am I Not A Man A Brother?” woodcut, 1837 191

Figure 4.16: “The Peninsula, VA. Lt. George A. Custer with dog,”
negative, 1862 191

Figure 4.17: Timothy H. O’Sullivan, “Brandy Station, Va. Dinner party outside Tent,
Army of the Potomac headquarters,” negative, April 1864 193

Figure 4.18: George Barnard, “Group portrait of soldiers in front of a tent, possible at
Camp Cameron, Washington, D.C.,” albumen print on carte de visite mount, c.
1861-1865 193

Figure 4.19: Timothy H. O’Sullivan, “Beaufort, South Carolina, ‘Our Mess,’” negative,
April 1862 194

Figure 4.20: William Morris Smith, “Maj. H.H. Humphrey and others,” photographic
print, June 1865 194

x

Figure 4.21: Moses, carte de visite, February 1857 195

Figure 4.22: M.E.D. Brown, “Washington Family,” lithograph, c. 1833 195

Figure 4.24: Alexander Gardner, “What do I want? John Henry!”
Sketch Book, 1866 197

Figure 4.24: Alexander Gardner, “Aquia Creek Landing, Va. Clerks of the Commissary
Depot by railroad car and packing cases,” negative, February 1863 199

Figure 4.25: David B. Woodbury, “Arrival of Negro Family in Lines,” negative, Jan. 1,
1863 201

Figure 4.26: A. R. Waud, “Contrabands Coming Into Camp in Consequence of the
Proclamation,” Harper’s Weekly, January 31, 1863 202

Figure 4.27: Burrell (slave) and John Wallace Comer 205

Figure 4.28: Mathew Brady, “Officers of Co. G. R.I.V.,” albumen print on carte de visite
mount, c.1862-1865 205

Figure 5.1: Alexander Gardner, “View on Canal, near Crenshaw’s Mill, Richmond,
Virginia,” April 1865, illus. in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil
War (1866) 207

Figure 5.2: Alexander Gardner, “Richmond, Virginia. Group of Negroes (‘Freedmen’)
by canal,” Richmond, VA, negative, April 1865 208

Figure 5.3: Alexander Gardner, Scene in Pleasant Valley, Maryland, October 1862, illus.
in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866) 210
xi

Abstract

My dissertation illuminates the earliest major episode in the continuing use of
photography in struggles over social justice. While studies of early photography in the
United States have amply shown that the new medium developed into a wildly popular
visual practice that broadened the market for portraits, pictured the urban landscape, and
visualized war, I show how it actually played a far more important role as a historical
force: it reshaped how slavery and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested.
More specifically, I assess how photography helped southerners to defend slavery, slaves
to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen their movement, and soldiers to
imagine and pictorially enact an interracial society during the Civil War. Central to my
analysis are dozens of little-studied and unpublished photographs of slaves, ex-slaves,
and abolitionists – which I use in concert with written materials ranging from slave
narratives, newspapers, and photographic journals to the personal papers of slaveholders,
abolitionists, soldiers, and photographers. Ultimately, I argue that slave owners, enslaved
people, abolitionists, and soldiers transformed photography from a scientific curiosity (in
the early 1840s) into a political tool (by the 1860s). I further argue that photography
served as a crucial yet largely unrecognized catalyst of sectional antagonism. While this
project sheds new light on conflicts over late slavery, it also reveals a key moment in the
much broader historical relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms
of power and resistance.

1

Introduction

On August 24, 1839, the Great Western set sail from Bristol, England, carrying
copies of the London Globe that described the much-anticipated technical details of the
daguerreotype process, a French invention that many said would demolish old ways of
picturing and seeing the world. One commentator typified the enthusiasm when he
exclaimed, “What would you say to looking in a mirror and having the image
fastened!!”
1
By the end of September, the London Globe had reached all corners of the
United States, from Boston to New Orleans, and Americans had read about Louis Jacques
Mandé Daguerre’s image-making technique.
2
The invention that seemed to break so
forcefully from the past gave rise to many visions of its future. Concerned artists such as
Thomas Cole saw nothing less than the violent death of their livelihoods. “If you believe
everything the newspapers say,” Cole noted, “you would be led to suppose that the poor
craft of painting was knocked in the head by this new machinery for making Nature take
her own likeness.”
3
Many others were far more optimistic, though. Some saw a boon to
science: “The naturalist is to have a new kingdom to explore,” inventor Samuel Morse
advocated after viewing a magnified image of a spider.
4
In this still-crude process, one
man even viewed the makings of surveillance cameras: “What will become of the poor
thieves, when they shall see handed in as evidence against them their own portraits, taken

1
Quoted in Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American
Society (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), 44.
2
Floyd Rinhart and Marion Rinhart, The American Daguerreotype (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1981), 24-25.
3
Quoted in Rudisill, Mirror Image, 55.
4
Quoted in Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839-1889
(New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1938), 12.
2

by the room in which they stole, and in the very act of stealing!”
5
In 1839, however, no
one foresaw that the daguerreotype would alter the institution of American slavery.
But new technologies spark unintended consequences. By the mid-1840s,
American slaveholders had already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their
slaves, and ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists (such as Frederick Douglass) had come to see
how sitting for a portrait could help them project dignity amidst northern racism. In the
first decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype
saloons of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with visual treasures they
could keep in their pockets. In these ways and others, photography reshaped the worlds
of slavery, antislavery, and emancipation. In turn, the people most deeply enmeshed in
those worlds – slave owners, enslaved people, abolitionists, and Civil War soldiers –
reshaped photography into a political tool. From 1839 to 1865, photography powerfully
influenced the ways in which bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and
contested.
This project examines the place of photographic images and image-practices in
the cultures of American slavery, antislavery, and emancipation. While the history of
antebellum bondage has attracted enormous attention from scholars over the past half
century, its intertwined development with photography has gone largely unstudied.
6
We

5
Quoted in Rudisill, Mirror Image, 44.
6
Good starting points on the historiography of slavery include Peter Kolchin, American Slavery,
1619-1877, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003); and Mark M. Smith, Debating Slavery:
Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998). I have found two more recent works to be helpful: Stephanie M. H. Camp and
Edward E. Baptist, “Introduction: A History of the History of Slavery in the Americas,” in New
Studies in the History of American Slavery, eds. Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp
(Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006); and Calvin Schermerhorn’s essay on secondary
literature in his Money over Mastery, Family Over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper
South (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). James Brewer Stewart offers an
3

might trace this oversight to the longstanding preference for written over visual sources
in the discipline of history, or the scattered nature of the photographic archive. This
project analyzes how slaveholders used photography to defend slavery, and how slaves
used it to endure exploitation. It examines how abolitionists used photographs to build
their movement, and how soldiers used them to convey racial hierarchy during the Civil
War. It offers the first history of how photography bolstered, undermined, and shaped
American slavery.
The influence of photography in other aspects of antebellum American life,
however, has long been clearer to scholars. The widespread (though hardly universal)
perception of the objectivity of the photographic process, the notion that the photograph
captured far more visual detail than other image types, and the general artistic quest for
new subject matter helped launch a slue of new visual practices in the 1840s and 1850s.
From Albert Southworth and Josiah Hawes’s images of Boston streets to many artists’
bird’s-eye daguerreotypes of 1850s San Francisco, photographers took particular interest
in how the camera froze the rapid urbanization of the mid-nineteenth century. Various
artists took pictures that constituted “news,” launching the history of photojournalism
through, for instance, George N. Barnard’s daguerreotypes (1853) of a fire that torched
the small town of Oswego, New York. If the mid-nineteenth century witnessed the rise
of new social views, it also saw the use of portraiture to bolster state power and celebrity
culture alike. New York artist Matthew Brady, for instance, helped initiate the use of

entry point for historiography of the antislavery movement. See James Brewer Stewart, Holy
Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).
On black abolition in particular, see Manisha Sinha, “Coming of Age: The Historiography of
Black Abolitionism,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American
Abolitionism, eds. Timothy McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: The New Press, 2006). For
American slavery in an international framework, see David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The
Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
4

photography to scrutinize criminality (and to bolster state control more broadly) through
his 1846 pictures of prisoners at Blackwells Island Penitentiary. Meanwhile, many
photographers found that the faces of celebrities and politicians – from European opera
star Jenny Lind to former president Andrew Jackson – could reap profits if sold as
photographs or translated into lithographs and engravings.
7
The process of cultural
experimentation and application invested an array of new subjects with heightened
importance as evidence in an expanded visual record.
Most dramatically, the first generation of photographers ushered in a new form of
self-representation and self-definition. “Tis certain that the Daguerreotype is the true
Republican style of painting,” Ralph Waldo Emerson noted. “The artist stands aside and
lets you paint yourself.”
8
Emerson obviously exaggerated the power of the sitter, yet by
linking the act of image-consumption to a theory of self-government he pointed to what
had changed: photography had broadened the market for portraiture, opening up an elite

7
Peter B. Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of
Photojournalism in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992);
Barbara McCandless, “The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity: Promoting the Art,” in Photography
in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum,
1991); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady
to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 57. On photography and criminality, see
also Allen Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of
Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989); and Shawn Michelle
Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999). Helpful introductions to nineteenth-century American photography
include Sandweiss’s volume, Trachtenberg’s seminal text, and Keith Davis, The Origins of
American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1865 (Kansas City: Hall
Family Foundation and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007). The field of the history of
American photography is indebted to two broad overviews first published in the 1930s:
Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present, rev. ed. (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1982); and Taft, Photography and the American Scene.
8
Quoted in Newhall, The History of Photography, 83.
5

practice to the middle class.
9
Portrait-taking quickly became an everyday pastime in
cities and towns, and the community of artists grew hand-in-hand with this impulse to
purchase likenesses – surging from 938 artists in 1850 to 3154 in 1860 (as counted in the
census).
10
An emergent discourse characterized the photograph as a document of the self.
As Philadelphia artist Marcus Root declared, a portrait was “worse than worthless if the
pictured face does not show the soul of the original, – that individuality or selfhood,
which differences him from all beings, past, present, or future.”
11
Photographers and
photographic commentators fashioned the portrait as a vehicle for capturing the inner
essence of the sitter in external form. They made a particular mode of visibility
commonplace as a means of shaping and understanding identity.
This study shows the most important role that photography played in its first three
decades: it made visual representation a central terrain of contestation over late slavery.
Slave owners, enslaved people, abolitionists, and Civil War soldiers – the four groups
that forge the backbone of this study – had particular stakes in photographic self-
representation. Slaveholders, for instance, saw in photography a novel way to craft self-
images through daguerreotypes of their slaves – seemingly transparent portraits of
benevolence that, in part, contested abolitionist claims of southern barbarism. Slaves,
too, wanted photographs of themselves, for such hand-held surrogates of the body gave

9
I am indebted to Robin Kelsey for my thinking about self-representation. Robin Kelsey,
“Photography’s Promise of Self-Representation” (paper presented at Photography’s Past Futures
conference, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, May 8, 2013). The New York Daily
Tribune estimated that photographers made around 3,000,000 photographs per year during the
1850s. It is impossible to know if this number was accurate, since so few antebellum
photographers’ logbooks survive. At the very least, the report indicates how immensely popular
portrait taking had become. See Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America, 13.
10
On census figures, see Taft, Photography and the American Scene, 61.
11
Marcus A. Root, The Camera and the Pencil (Philadelphia: M.A. Root, J.B. Lippincott & Co.,
and D. Appleton & Co., 1864), 143.
6

them a powerful means of remembering loved ones sold away in the busy domestic slave
trade. Many antebellum Americans quickly saw how photographs served as a privileged
means for picturing skin color; northern soldiers relied upon this association as they
responded to the flight of fugitives during wartime, and the uncertainty of an interracial
nation without slavery, with images of white superiority and black servility. Ironically,
photography brought opposing forces into the same cultural sphere precisely because it
helped solve the problems of selfhood that late antebellum bondage generated.
Understanding photographic self-representation as a historical force asks that we
move beyond approaches that focus solely or even largely on the photographers. It
means treating image-making as a serious human activity for non-artists – one with
important social, cultural, and political effects. This study casts slaveholders, slaves,
abolitionists, and soldiers not only as visual subjects but also as “photographic
practitioners.” While visual-culture scholars Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle
Smith have coined this term to describe African American practitioners in particular, this
project applies the concept more broadly, for it usefully describes how historical actors,
even though they did not operate the cameras, used personal and mass-produced
photographs towards various ends.
12
Fusing the methods of history and visual-culture
studies means, in this case, illuminating photography as an important aspect of lived
experience.
The focus of this study on both North and South deviates from much of the
scholarship on proslavery and antislavery culture, which has tended to treat these as

12
Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early
Photography and The Making of African American Identity (Durham: Duke University Press,
2012). Wallace and Smith built upon the work of Deborah Willis. See Deborah Willis,
Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2000).
7

parallel, rather than intertwined, histories.
13
Yet the particular benefit of a cross-sectional
analysis lies in avoiding a celebratory narrative about new visual media and social
change. It will not surprise scholars that antislavery activists sought out photography as a
political tool, for they had long drawn upon the media technologies at hand – from
broadsides to illustrated magazines – to sway northern sentiment. But too often we have
treated the slave South as only a place represented from afar, by artists in Boston and by
northern and British travelers. Such a view has aided the notion – long promulgated in
popular culture – that the Old South stood outside the historical transformations of the
nineteenth century.
14
Even as abolitionists harnessed photography to build political
solidarity and convey sympathy by, for instance, making and exchanging images of
fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, slaveholders fortified their defense of
bondage through images of enslaved women holding white children. Photography forged
a cultural common-ground between antislavery and proslavery forces in the late
antebellum era.
Casting photography as a common-ground between North and South subjects the
relation between photography and social change to scrutiny (rather than assuming the
medium only aided reform); it also reveals modern visual culture as a catalyst in the
“coming of the Civil War.” Historians of the causes of disunion have long taken interest
in the question of “modernization,” though with an emphasis on economic
transformations. Over the past two decades, many scholars have rightly rejected the view

13
For a notable exception, see Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise
of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Biographical accounts
also prove useful in understanding connections between slavery and the antislavery movement.
See, for instance, William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1991).
14
L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers, eds., The Old South’s Modern Worlds:
Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6.
8

of the sectional crisis as a battle between a modernizing North and an anti-modern South.
They have shown, instead, how antebellum slavery set itself on an uneven path towards
modernization – one that included the construction of railroads in the upper South, the
use of steamboats along the Mississippi River, and the hybridization of cotton in many
slave states.
15
Slavery was undeniably central to the eruption of war, and scholars no
longer explain disunion by stressing how the slave states lagged behind or turned their
backs to modernity. But, as Elizabeth R. Varon states, “while scholars can agree that
slavery, more than any other issue, divided North and South, there is still much to be said
about why slavery proved so divisive and why sectional compromise ultimately proved
elusive.”
16

This dissertation situates conflicts over slavery in relation to the rise of modern
visual culture, which increasingly transcended the sectional divide in the antebellum era.
This broad transformation included the rise of photography as well as that of illustrated
mass-presses such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly.
Though these magazines undoubtedly affected political sentiment through coverage of

15
For a helpful recent overview of Civil War causation that charts the shift from arguments about
uneven modernization to the work that has moved beyond a stark northern modernization versus
southern anti-modernization dichotomy, see Frank Towers, “Partisans, New History, and
Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War’s Causes, 1861-2011,” The Journal of the
Civil War Era 1, no. 2 (2011). On the recent push to understand modernization in the Old South,
the best starting point is Barnes, Schoen, and Towers, eds., The Old South’s Modern Worlds. On
the steamboat, see Robert H. Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011). For hybridization, see Walter Johnson, River of
Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2013), 151-2. On railroads, see Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery.
Recent historians have also noted that the sentimental culture once seen as uniquely northern – as
a response to industrialization – seeped into southern culture as well. See Phillip D. Troutman,
“Slave Trade and Sentiment in Antebellum Virginia” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2000);
and Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South
Carolina, 1670-1837 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
16
Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 4.
9

such events as John Brown’s trial, they were only produced in the North, and did not
arrive on the scene until the mid-1850s. Photography proves a particularly compelling
site to understand the ties between sectional politics and visual media precisely because it
entered America more than a decade earlier and because it turned both North and South
into producers of visual culture. Slaveholders initiated the use of photography as a tool
for maintaining a racialized social order in America, using images of well-dressed house
slaves to project a benevolent form of white rule even as they simultaneously used such
images to catch runaway bondspeople.
17
Across the Mason-Dixon line, abolitionists
initiated the use of photography for reform, though in surprising ways. Rather than
embarking upon a campaign of photographic moral suasion, abolitionists used the
medium to build solidarity, by making and exchanging images of activists and fugitive
slaves. In short, photography injected the cultures of proslavery and antislavery with a
stronger sense of legitimacy and urgency that heightened the sectional crisis.
While this project sheds new light on the Civil War era, it also contributes to the
history of modern visual culture. As many scholars have shown, political and social
conflicts have played a crucial role in the development of photography as a central
currency of modern communication. From Roger Fenton’s pictures of the Crimean War
(1855) to Joe Rosenthal’s iconic Old Glory Goes Up on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima
(1945) to present images of America’s war in Afghanistan, artists and viewing audiences

17
Scholars have done important work in revealing the role that lynching photography played in
bolstering white power from the late nineteenth century onwards. These works include Dora
Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007); and Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and
Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). The place to start for photography
and imperialism is Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S.
Imperialism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). My work offers an
earlier moment in which photography was used to support a racialized social order in the slave
South.
10

have engaged in a reciprocal exchange that has privileged the capacity of the photograph
as eyewitness evidence of distant strife. Though Fenton represents the first wartime
photographer, scholars all point to the Civil War as the first systematically documented
conflict. An estimated 3,000 photographers produced tens of thousands of different
photographs, including gruesome scenes of battle aftermaths at Antietam and Gettysburg
as well as portraits of generals and views of military fortifications.
18
They turned the
Civil War into the first “living room war,” connecting the home front to the battlefront by
selling mass-produced photographs and by turning photographs into engravings
published in magazines.
19
But during the 1840s and 1850s, well before the first battle at
Ft. Sumter, photography walked hand-in-hand with the brutalities of slavery as it helped
bolster and define the movement that fought against slavery. Photography played a
crucial and largely unrecognized role in catalyzing the political tensions that produced the
first war it is famous for documenting.
By re-casting the first twenty-five years of American photography as a story of
social and political conflict over bondage, this project reveals the earliest major episode
in a continuing history of the use of mechanically reproducible images in social justice
struggles. Past scholars have shown how artists of the progressive and New Deal eras –
including Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans – highlighted urban and rural
poverty for distant audiences as they promoted the notion of the photographer as the

18
On the estimate of the number of photographers, see Davis, The Origins of American
Photography, 173.
19
Starting points on war photography include Anne Wilkes Tucker, Will Michels, and Natalie
Zelt, eds., War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2012); and Mary Panzer, Things As They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since
1965 (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2005).
11

intrepid social documentarian in search of truthful views.
20
More recently, Sharon
Sliwinski has shown how the Congo Reform Association of Britain harnessed
photography to protest the monstrous violence that the regime of King Leopold II of
Belgium committed in the Congo Free State.
21
Likewise, Leigh Raiford has illuminated
the role of photography in twentieth-century black social movements, charting the
political power of self-representation for organizations such as the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee.
22
Yet antebellum abolitionists actually established the use of
photography as a key instrument of reform. They displayed photographs of slaves on the
lecture podium, thereby anticipating the lantern slide shows of the late nineteenth
century. They initiated the subgenre of “atrocity” photographs with representations such
as the “Branded Hand” and the “Scourged Back.” Photographic icons of suffering, these
images demonstrated the capacity of photography to publicize violations of the body.
23
It
was not inevitable that the twentieth century would witness the widespread use of
photography as a way of documenting social conditions and of visualizing abstract claims
about justice and exploitation. The origins of this distinctly modern disposition lie in
heated battles over late American slavery.

20
For the 1930s, see William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1973); and John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural
History of Thirties Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
21
Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
22
Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American
Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Lisa Tickner
does not focus specifically on photography but does offer an illuminating study of how the British
women’s suffrage campaign used political images. See Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women:
Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-14 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
23
Though photo-historians have long noted photographs of death on the Civil War battlefield,
studies of “atrocity photographs” have largely focused on the twentieth century. Whereas an
older narrative positioned photographs of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s as the first mass-
circulated atrocity images, scholars have recently pushed the chronology back to the turn-of-the
twentieth century, illuminating, for instance, photographs of the dead at the Battle of Wounded
Knee (1890). See Jay Prosser, Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, and Nancy K. Miller, eds.,
Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2012).
12

Through the crucible of bondage, photography became a privileged mode for
conveying humanity and humaneness. Assessing this transformation deepens the
chronology of the history of human rights photography as it broadens the conventional
conceptual framework. Spurred by Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1973) and
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), recent scholarship has focused intently on how
images of suffering influenced political engagement in the twentieth century. Sontag and
others have wanted to know whether photographs of pain have spurred empathy that
leads to political activism, or whether they have simply created a new disposition in
which viewing constitutes a form of politics in its own right.
24
Such a line of inquiry has
proven a double-edged sword. On the one hand, studies have highlighted the possibilities
and limitations of empathy as form of moral encounter between viewer and photographed
subject, as well as how media organizations have capitalized upon the public appetite for
images of death and famine to improve ratings and sales figures. On the other hand, the
emphasis on spectatorship has narrowed our view, obscuring a more complicated history
in the nineteenth century – prior to the age of the globetrotting photojournalist, the
magazine photo-essay, and the digital blog. Antebellum slaves, for instance, kept
photographic portraits to memorialize family. When they escaped bondage, fugitive
slaves made portraits in the North that stood as important symbols of subversion and
visual markers of the transition to freedom. These and other practices demonstrate the

24
On spectatorship, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1973); Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003); Sliwinski,
Human Rights in Camera; John Berger, About Looking (New York: Vintage International, 1991);
Susan Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death
(New York: Routledge, 1999); and Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and
Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
13

centrality of self-representation and self-expression to the history of human rights
photography.
This project joins the community of scholars who, over the past three decades,
have put visual culture at the center of historical transformations.
25
It takes images as
historical evidence in their own right – as building blocks of identity, culture, and
ideology rather than as illustrations of predetermined arguments rooted in the analysis of
written texts. Amidst the landscape of visual sources – from illustrated books to
monuments to Hollywood films – photographs have proven especially tempting as
avenues of unmediated access into the past. As with diaries and letters, newspaper
articles and speeches, however, photographs are textual constructions. They stand as a
record of choices made by people – about technical matters such as lighting and spatial
composition as well as about what to picture and what not to picture.
26

This study treats photographs as discursive and material objects. Drawing upon
the approaches of art history, it examines the production of images alongside the form
and visual content within the images. In doing so, it pays particular attention to how the

25
For introductions to the use of visual culture within history, see Michael L. Wilson, “Visual
Culture: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture
Reader, eds. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004);
and Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001). For ways of integrating American history with the history of
photography, see Joshua Brown, “Historians and Photography,” American Art 21, no. 3 (2007).
Model monographs that focus on photography include Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend:
Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and Jennifer
Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Wexler, Tender Violence. More broadly, important works
regarding visual culture in nineteenth-century America include David Morgan, Protestants &
Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of Mass Production (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999); Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life,
and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and David
Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998).
26
On this point, see Wexler, Tender Violence, 133.
14

subjects and conventions of the photographs drew upon and broke from past and
contemporaneous images. But it also moves beyond the often-artificial conceptual divide
between “visual culture” and “material culture” by foregrounding the physical properties
of images. Despite the ways in which photographs have severed viewers from the
physicality of their subjects, such images each contain a history of mobility and
tangibility: over the past two centuries, photographs have been shared and smashed, torn
and worn; they have been placed in attics, books, and lockets. As photo-historians
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart write, “it is not merely the image qua image that is
the site of meaning, but that its material and presentational forms and the uses to which
they are put are central to the function of a photograph as a socially salient object.”
27
It is
precisely in this realm that historians stand to contribute to visual-culture studies, for the
deep archival research that grounds the discipline of history is ideally situated to
illuminate conditions of reception, circulation, display, and preservation. Combining an
attention to visual discourse and social practice, this study moves beyond an exploration
of depictions of the system of slavery to illuminate how images forged a very part of that
world.
The promise of the interdisciplinary study of visual culture, then, is twofold: first,
it allows us to address old questions (such as the role that culture played in shaping
sectional commonality and animosity) in new ways; second, it gives us wider contexts
within which to pose new questions about the past. In this vein, this project is the first to
seriously ask and explore what it meant for slaves to purchase and use photographs in the
South. Historians of photography have shown how antebellum artists and racial scientists

27
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, “Introduction: Photographs as objects,” in Photographs
Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, eds. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart
(London: Routledge, 2004), 2.
15

used photography to demonstrate supposed biological distinctions between blacks and
whites. In the process, though, we have come to see enslaved people as passive victims
of photographic representations.
28
Yet the scholarship on the “internal economy” of
antebellum bondspeople, produced over the past two decades by historians including
Roderick A. McDonald and Dylan Penningroth, makes it conceivable to explore slaves’
active engagement with photographs. These historians have shown how some enslaved
people secured small amounts of cash and took part in the consumer marketplace across
the slave states. Building upon their insights, this study assesses what it meant for
commodified people to obtain and exchange visual commodities that testified to their
personhood.
29

The first section of the project (chapters 1 and 2) investigates how photography
helped slaveholders to defend slavery and slaves to endure it. While photography spurred
the widespread practice of self-representation, slaveholders turned this practice towards
distinctive political ends. Drawing upon an original archive that includes dozens of
unstudied and unpublished slave photographs, Chapter 1 explores how slaveholders
translated the people they owned into images they could view, hold, and show. Whites
increasingly built their identities as owners – and their justification of bondage – through
gallery pictures and outdoor scenes of the plantation household. Chapter 2 reveals how
slaves integrated photographs into their practices of expression and their strategies of

28
Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis
Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (1995); Trachtenberg, Reading
American Photographs, 53-56.
29
Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on
the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1993); Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community
in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
16

endurance during the 1840s and 1850s. This chapter uses written materials such as slave
narratives, newspapers, and photographers’ records to uncover an enslaved culture of
visual communication and memory. Whereas free antebellum American used
photographs to record their families, images proved especially important to slaves as an
avenue to maintain social ties amidst the persistent disruptions of the domestic slave
trade.
In Chapter 3, the project moves to the antebellum North. Since the late eighteenth
century, American and British antislavery proponents had used images to persuade a
mass audience of the immorality of bondage. But the technical limitations of
photography made the medium a poor tool for abolitionists to picture southern plantations
and slave markets, as they did in lithographs and illustrated almanacs. Instead, as this
chapter shows, northern radicals used photography as a way to personalize bonds within
their movement. Lastly, Chapter 4 addresses how photography helped Americans to
imagine and pictorially enact an interracial society during the Civil War. The question of
interracial relations became particularly acute because of the unanticipated confluence of
three parties in Union army camps: hundreds of northern photographers, thousands of
fugitive slaves, and thousands of Union soldiers (who had come South with varying ideas
about the meanings of the war). Northern white soldiers and photographers created
scenes of racial hierarchy as slavery fell, often posing African Americans sitting on the
ground or serving Union personnel. Through a fleeting moment of interracialism, they
tethered black freedom to racial subordination in the private and popular imagination.
The central argument of this dissertation is that photography unsettled and
energized conflicts over American slavery as it ultimately resettled a vision of racial
17

hierarchy in a post-slavery nation. On one hand, the medium contributed to the political
clash that abolished slavery and produced new conditions of autonomy for former slaves.
On the other hand, it gave whites a new way to maintain the racial order as bondage fell
during the Civil War. We cannot understand the last decades of slavery and the first
moments of freedom without photography.
Ironically, even as this new visual medium eventually pushed enslaved and free
apart, it also tied them together. Abolitionists, slaveholders, slaves, and soldiers built up
a set of common cultural practices – and a landscape of images – that linked them. Many
entered the new world of emancipation with images of each other from the old world of
slavery. This story begins in the late antebellum South.
18

Chapter 1
Mobilizing Intimacy, 1839-1861

During the 1840s and 1850s, the rise of photography unleashed a radically new
way for American slaveholders to depict, possess, exchange, and preserve knowledge
about the world of southern bondage. As itinerant and urban-studio photographers spread
throughout the South, masters and mistresses did not simply seek to represent
themselves: from the older slave states of Virginia and South Carolina to the newer states
of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, slave owners began photographing their slaves.
These photographs have lived on to the present, passing through various pathways of
public and private memory. Some images currently sit in the same archival boxes as
slaveholders’ written materials – the letters, diaries, and plantation logbooks upon which
our knowledge of slavery is primarily based. They also reside in private hands, held by
descendants of slaveholders as well as by early photograph collectors.

Fig. 1.1. Moses, carte de visite, 1857
1

Fig. 1.2. Minor Family Nurse, daguerreotype, c. 1850
2

Fig. 1.3. George Smith Cook, Charlotte Helen Middleton and her enslaved nurse, Lydia, ambrotype, c.
1857
3

1
Louis Manigault Family Record Book, Vol. III, Louis Manigault Papers, 177.01.01.02, South
Carolina Historical Society.
2
Minor Family Papers, 1838-1944, Accession #6055, 6055-a, University of Virginia Library,
Charlottesville, VA.
19

Slaveholders in cities and on farms and plantations made slave photographs – in the
cosmopolitan centers of Richmond, Savannah, and Charleston as well as in rural areas
such as northern Florida, central Virginia, and northwest Mississippi. The images
themselves reveal individual slaves such as Moses and the Minor family nurse (Figures
1.1-1.2) as well as slaves posing with whites, as in the case of Lydia and Charlotte Helen
Middleton (Figure 1.3). Though female house slaves are pictured most often, the archive
also includes enslaved men and children. The selection of female portraits, moreover,
can hardly be reduced to the stereotype of the “mammy” (nor the other African-American
stereotypes prevalent in nineteenth-century popular culture, including the “jezebel”).
4

The photographs show slaves who never fled their plantations, slaves who ran away
before they were pictured, slaves who ran away after they were pictured, and slaves who
would demand wages for their labor amidst the disruptions of the Civil War. Despite the
temptation to treat these images as unmediated access into the past, our most pressing
task should be to explain how they operated in their world rather than ours. Diverse in
geography, gender, age, and visual composition, these images offer a largely untapped
source base for the study of late antebellum slavery.
Slave photographs did not operate as historical agents on their own, however.
They stood at the center of a proslavery photographic culture that entailed a set of

3
“Charlotte Helen Middleton and her enslaved nurse, Lydia, 1852,” by George Smith Cook
(American, 1819-1902), ambrotype,  Image courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art
Association, 1937.005.0010. Middleton family records show that Charlotte Helen Middleton was
born on August 23, 1854. Thus, I have approximated the production date of the image as 1857.
See “Record of Nathaniel Russell Middleton, Jr.,” Middleton Family Papers, Folder 11/298/3,
South Carolina Historical Society.
4
On stereotyping, see John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the
Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), Ch. 6; Deborah Gray
White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 1985).
20

practices of production, display, exchange, and preservation. Studying the making and
social lives of these images revises how we understand the justification of antebellum
slavery. Past scholars have shown how the speeches of politicians and the abstract
descriptions of benevolent bondage in the pamphlets of theorists heightened the southern
sense of moral and political legitimacy that pushed the nation towards Civil War.
5
But
the defense of bondage – and the continuous construction of a masterly self-image – also
emerged from the daguerreotype gallery. Increasingly, slaveholding men, women, and
children mobilized interracial intimacy within and through images. They pictured
enslaved nurses and white children, bodies and hands touching tenderly, in a genre I term
the “chattel Madonna.” They showed slaves holding the tools of their forced labor.
Slaveholders exchanged and displayed these images: they increasingly engaged
bondspeople through portraits rather than social interactions – portraits that seemed to
offer consent and little resistance. In these ways, they turned human commodification
into a form of intimate personalization. After 1839, as this chapter shows, the proslavery
impulse manifested itself in a miniaturized depiction of a well-dressed slave, placed on
the desk of the man who owned him.

5
For scholarship regarding the defense of slavery, see Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of
Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1981); Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in
America, 1701-1840 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987); George M. Frederickson,
The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-
1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma:
Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860 (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1992); Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the
Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery,
Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011);
Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina,
1670-1837 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Willie Lee Rose, “The
Domestication of Slavery,” in Slavery and Freedom, ed. William W. Freehling (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982).
21

The emergence of the daguerreotype – the first photographic process –
dramatically altered the ways in which masters depicted their slaves. Since the
beginnings of bondage in colonial America, as art historians and cultural historians such
as Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and John Michael Vlach have shown, few artists or masters
had made common slaves the central subjects of visual representation.
6
Justus
Englehardt Kühn’s Henry Darnall III (1702-c.1787) marks the first known painting of an
African American in colonial America (Figure 1.4).

6
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth
Century (Andover: Addison Gallery of American Art, 2006); John Michael Vlach, “Perpetuating
the Past: Plantation Landscape Paintings Then and Now,” in Landscape of Slavery: The
Plantation in American Art, eds. Angela D. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 2008); and John Michael Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and
Slavery in Plantation Paintings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Other
important scholarship regarding visual depictions of slavery and African Americans includes
Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual
Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Kirk Savage, Standing
Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997); Peter H. Wood, Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil
War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual
Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000);
Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of
Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); and Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf, “The
Perfect Shadow of His Master: Proslavery Ideology in American Visual Culture, 1700-1920”
(PhD diss., Indiana University, 2005). On the visual culture of slavery in the Atlantic world, see
Kay Dian Kriz and Geoff Quilley, eds., An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic
World, 1660-1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
22

Fig. 1.4. Justus Englehardt Kühn, Henry Darnall III, 1702-c.1787
7

Kühn’s employment of the collar to symbolize the enslaved boy reflected the more
patriarchical disposition of mastery in the colonial era. Yet his use of a marginal black
figure as the foundation of white mastery, freedom, and wealth would prove a remarkably
persistent strategy in eighteenth and nineteenth-century portraits and domestic scenes.
Numerous artists painted George Washington, for instance, with a slave on the margins
of the canvas (Figures 1.5-1.6).

7
Museum Department, Maryland Historical Society.
23

Fig. 1.5. Edward Savage, The Washington Family, 1789-1796
8
Fig. 1.6. John Trumbull, George
Washington, 1780
9

Rather than visual subjects in their own right, slaves largely existed in painted portraits as
racial props to signify the standing of their masters.
In a similar vein, nineteenth-century landscape paintings conveyed the beauty of
southern plantations – their rich fields and lavish mansions – while marginalizing or
erasing the slave labor that made such vistas imaginable.
10
Rose Hill (c. 1820) was
typical (Figure 1.7).

8
Accessed through open access policies of NGA Images. Courtesy National Gallery of Art,
Washington.
9
George Washington, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924
(24.109.88). Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
10
Vlach, “Perpetuating the Past: Plantation Landscape Paintings Then and Now,” 16.
24

Fig. 1.7. Rose Hill, c. 1820
11

A visitor to wealthy planter Nathaniel Heyward’s home would likely have encountered
Rose Hill hanging over the mantel; its size and placement offered a prideful reminder of
the world Heyward governed. What the visitor would not have seen was that, by his
death in 1851, Heyward owned 2,340 slaves – making him the largest slaveholder in
United States history.
12
Yet even when slavery was the subject of the painting, as in artist
Francis Guy’s Perry Hall, Slave Quarters with Field Hands at Work (c. 1805), the
architecture and land, rather than slaves’ bodies, still took precedence (Figure 1.8).

11
Courtesy of The Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina.
12
For more on this painting, see Mack, Landscape of Slavery, 6. For the figures on Nathaniel
Heyward, see William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New
York: Oxford, 1996), 4.
25

Fig. 1.8. Perry Hall, Slave Quarters with Field Hands at Work, c. 1805
13

The arrival of the daguerreotype would alter these visions. Throughout the spring
and summer of 1839, southern newspapers murmured of a new invention by Frenchman
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. For The Daily Picayune of New Orleans, news of the
daguerreotype was “exciting great sensation in the scientific world.”
14
Meanwhile, as
Baltimore’s The Sun declared, the daguerreotype “is expected to prove of as much value
to the fine arts as the power loom and steam engine have to manufacturers.”
15
While
postbellum southern literature mythologized the Old South as an agrarian land opposed to

13
Museum Department, Maryland Historical Society.
14
“Late from Europe,” The Daily Picayune, June 5, 1839, 2. Readex: America’s Historical
Newspapers. Web. 26 June 2013.
15
The Sun, March 18, 1839, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
26

modern industry and its fruits, southern elites and intellectuals actually awaited the
daguerreotype with much enthusiasm.
16

For many southerners, the daguerreotype broke with the past by offering a
striking new way to preserve it. As a poem in the Southern Literary Messenger
exclaimed, “Ye pupils of Daguerre! improve the hour –/Make haste to paint the
fragments which are left us/Of what stern Time and Vandals have bereft us.”
17
While
southern poets lauded the memory-making possibilities of Daguerre’s invention, many
southerners visited traveling exhibitions of Daguerre’s work in 1841. In cities such as
Baltimore and Charleston, large, genteel crowds gazed with “wonder and delight” and
“universal admiration” at daguerreotypes of the city of Venice and the midnight mass at
Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.
18
In dramatic fashion, the daguerreotype memorialized the
monuments of Western civilization as it democratized their visual consumption.
Daguerreotypy soon turned from capturing the face of civilization to the faces of
people. Though exposure times varied (the more natural light the better), they dropped

16
On the history of the daguerreotype in America, see the following:
Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to
Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Merry A. Foresta and John Wood, Secrets of
the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1995); Martha A. Sandweiss, ed., Photography in Nineteenth-Century America
(Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1991); Floyd Rinhart and Marion Rinhart, The American
Daguerreotype (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981); Grant B. Romer and Brian Wallis,
eds., Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (New York: Steidl, George
Eastman House, and the International Center of Photography, 2005); Beaumont Newhall, The
History of Photography from 1839 to the Present (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, rev.
1982); Keith Davis, The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate,
1839-1865 (Kansas City: Hall Family Foundation and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007);
Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971); and Robert Taft, Photography and the
American Scene: A Social History, 1839-1889 (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1938).
17
Quoted in Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in
the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 31.
18
“Daguerre’s Pictures,” The Sun, October 1, 1841, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers;
“Daguerre. – The Fine Arts,” The Charleston Mercury, December 11, 1841, 2. ProQuest Civil
War Era.
27

quickly in the early 1840s, from minutes in the fall of 1839 to as low as thirty seconds by
the spring of 1840. By the end of 1840, one New York chemist noted that exposure times
had dropped as low as 10 seconds.
19
A business for portraits emerged – one which
photographers tethered to antebellum sentimentalism. They linked likenesses to feeling,
attachment, and the sense of loss. As inventor, daguerreotype booster, and commercial
operator Samuel Morse put it in 1840, to hold in “our possession the likeness of some one
who has been loved by us is a delicious, even if sometimes a melancholy, pleasure.”
20

Some daguerreans were not afraid to use fear to make this point. Mobile, Alabama
daguerrean John Armstrong Bennet reminded customers that his images were especially
important in times of widespread disease: “Call immediately,” Bennet exclaimed, “if you
want accurate and beautiful Miniatures of yourselves or friends – for soon the raging
epidemic may hurry many into the grave! and the oh! how you will regret that you had
not obtained a true copy of those loved features, when you find them fading from your
memory.”
21
The uncertainty of the future, Bennet suggested, made photographs of the
past a pressing need for intimate mementos of a loved one.
Imbued with visions of scientific and industrial progress, inspired by notions of
art and truth and beauty, and driven by potential profits, Americans took up
daguerreotypy in droves during the early 1840s. Many commercial daguerreans came
from backgrounds in the visual arts – including engraving, lithography and, especially,

19
Rinhart and Rinhart, The American Daguerreotype, 48-51.
20
Quoted in Rudisill, Mirror Image, 215.
21
Frances Robb, “Shot in Alabama: Daguerreotypy in a Deep South State,” in The Daguerreian
Annual: Official Yearbook of the Daguerreian Society, ed. Mark S. Johnson (Pittsburgh: The
Daguerreian Society, 2004), 204. On the discourses that promoted a sentimental attachment to
commodities, see Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and
Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
28

portrait, landscape, and miniature painting.
22
Others had worked as craftsmen – as
blacksmiths, inventors, and cobblers – and brought to daguerreotypy a familiarity with
electricity, small tools, and metals.
23
As daguerreotypist J.F. Ryder recalled, there was
“but a step from the anvil or the sawmill to the camera.”
24
Taking one more step, these
daguerreans founded commercial galleries in major southern port cities such as
Charleston, New Orleans and St. Louis by 1841, and in inland cities such as Columbia as
well as smaller coastal cities such as Mobile by 1843.
25
Yet many of the first southern
galleries were short-lived. In Charleston, at least fifteen daguerreotype galleries opened
in the 1840s, but most only remained open for a few weeks to a few years.
26
In
Columbia, meanwhile, only two studios opened during the early 1840s. It was not until
1846, when Joseph T. Zealy opened for business, that the city could boast of an
established gallery.
27

Given the small number of established galleries in the early to mid-1840s South,
many masters and slaves may have first encountered photography from northern itinerant
daguerreans. These “humbugs” and “country operators,” as their more urbane gallery

22
In the South, visual artists who transitioned to daguerreotypy included Jules Lion (French),
John Houston Mifflin, George S. Cook, Solomon Numes Carvalho, and Edward Samuel Dodge.
See Rinhart and Rinhart, The American Daguerreotype, 227.
23
Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 21-22.
24
Quoted in Rudisill, Mirror Image, 121-122.
25
Charleston (1840), St. Louis (1841), Tuscaloosa (1841), Columbia (1842), Mobile (1843),
Houston (1843), Galveston (1844). For Charleston and Columbia, see Harvey Teal, Partners
with the Sun: South Carolina Photographers, 1840-1940 (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2001), 13-15, 27-32. For St. Louis, see Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R.
Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continental Divide: A
Biographical Dictionary, 1839 to 1865 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 3. For
Tuscaloosa and Mobile, see Frances Robb, “Shot in Alabama: Daguerreotypy in a Deep South
State,” in The Daguerreian Annual: Official Yearbook of the Daguerreian Society, ed. Mark S.
Johnson (Pittsburgh: The Daguerreian Society, 2004), 202, 204. For Houston and Galveston, see
David Haynes, Catching Shadows: A Directory of Nineteenth-Century Texas Photographers
(Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1993), viii.
26
Teal, Partners With the Sun, 13-26.
27
Teal, Partners With the Sun, 27-28.
29

counterparts disparagingly called them, extended the early-nineteenth-century culture of
Northeastern peddlers into the slave states.
28
Dramatic transformations in
communication and transportation technologies over the previous decades – the rise of
steamboats, turnpikes, and railroads, the expansion of the postal system, and the
invention of the telegraph – made this possible. Daguerreans moved by wagon,
stagecoach, steamboat, and railroad, selling likenesses from their wagons, out of
storefronts, in hotel rooms, and on their vessels.
29
Capitalizing on the infrastructural
developments of the early nineteenth century, itinerant daguerreans flourished nationally
in the mid-nineteenth century.
These artist-entrepreneurs crisscrossed the South. The Atlantic Seaboard
experienced a steady flow of northern itinerants during the 1840s, and South Carolina and
Georgia, due to their wealth and weather, proved particularly popular destinations. Some
itinerants came to Charleston, Savannah, and Columbia for the winter season, while
others stayed for months or even years. New Yorker Samuel Broadbent, for instance,
first traveled to Augusta in 1840 as a miniature painter. After adopting daguerreotypy,

28
This group of entrepreneurs emerged largely in the rural Northeast after the Revolution and
grew steadily during the early nineteenth century. Itinerant painters made up one segment of this
peddler culture: traversing the back roads, these transient painters sold portraits to manufacturers,
innkeepers, and middle-class farmers – helping to spread the taste for the consumption of
individual likenesses. On peddlers, see David Jaffee, “Peddlers of Progress and the
Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-1860,” The Journal of American History 78, no. 2
(1991); David Jaffee, “One of the Primitive Sort: Portrait Makers of the Rural North, 1760-1860,”
in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural
America, eds. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1985); and David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). On the revolution in communication and
transportation technologies, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The
Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
29
Rinhart and Rinhart, The American Daguerreotype, 351. On “humbugging,” see Neil Harris,
Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
30

Broadbent came back to Savannah in the winter of 1843-1844 and 1844-1845, to
Charleston in October of 1845, and finally to Columbia in December of 1845.
30

The antebellum boomtown of New Orleans proved a prime springboard for artists
to popularize the process in the southwestern slave states, and George Smith Cook took
on the principal role in doing so. A Connecticut-born transplant living in New Orleans in
the 1840s, Cook adopted daguerreotypy when it arrived in the city. From 1845 to 1849,
he traversed the Deep South, hawking portraits and tutoring future daguerreans in various
towns of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
31
Cook and others made noteworthy
arrivals in the small towns they entered. “We have a most excellent Daguerreotype artist
in town now, whose name is Cook. I have not seen such pictures as he takes this side of
Philadelphia,” a resident of Athens, Alabama noted in his diary.
32
Such residents took
pleasure in the way that talented itinerants seemed to demolish the cultural distance
between large cities and small towns. Likewise, a slaveholder in South Carolina
described the fun when “the Dauguerian car…arrived at Laurens.”
33
As much as the
daguerreotype itself was a novel form of visuality, the mobility of the photographer
injected a sense of novelty in the largely pre-industrial South.
By the 1850s, urban galleries had grown increasingly numerous and visible in
southern cities. Charleston, Richmond, New Orleans, and St. Louis emerged as the

30
A number of operators for the famous Boston-based photographer John Plumbe – including
Rueben F. Lovering and William A. Perry – also spent winters in Savannah, Columbus, or
Macon, Georgia between 1845 and 1847. See Rinhart and Rinhart, The American
Daguerreotype, 70-71.
31
Jack C. Ramsay, Jr., Photographer – Under Fire: The Story of George S. Cook (1819-1902)
(Green Bay: Historical Resources Press, 1994), 16-33.
32
November 5, 1847, Thomas Hubbard Hobbs Diaries, W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library,
The University of Alabama.
33
Zelotus Lee Holmes to Aunt, July 8, 1852, Zelotus Lee Holmes Papers, South Caroliniana
Library, University of South Carolina.
31

centers of southern photography, and galleries sprang up in concentrated pockets in these
cities. At any given point in the 1850s, one would pass by numerous photograph
galleries walking down King Street and Meeting Street in Charleston, Canal Street in
New Orleans, and Main Street in Richmond.
34
Artists such as George Smith Cook
(Charleston), Joseph T. Zealy (Columbia), William A. Pratt (Richmond), Jesse
Whitehurst (Richmond), and William Fitzgibbons (St. Louis) rose to national
prominence.
35
They sold images that easily undercut the prices of paintings. While a
moderately priced miniature portrait painting of the day cost about $15.00 in the late
1840s, the average price for a sixth-plate daguerreotype in 1845 was $5.00; by 1850, its
price had dropped to $2.50, and, by the mid-1850s, one could find such photographs in
many places for as little as 25 cents.
36
While the North certainly outpaced the South in
the number of studios, photography was available and affordable for many throughout the
South.
The accessibility, affordability, and sentimental associations of photography laid
the groundwork for slaveholders to build up a new visual proslavery world. George
Smith Cook’s logbooks – the only surviving archival records of a southern photographer

34
“The Photographic Galleries of America – No. III., The Richmond Galleries,” The
Photographic and Fine Art Journal, July 1856, 217.
35
The 1850 census counted 938 daguerreans across America. On the dramatic increase in
photographers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and the 1850 census figures, see Rinhart
and Rinhart, The American Daguerreotype, 114, 90-91. For Charleston locations, see Teal,
Partners with the Sun, 43-66. For New Orleans locations, see R.A.C., “New Orleans
Photographic Galleries,” The Photographic and Fine Art Journal, August 1858, 244-245. For
Richmond, see An Amateur, “The Photographic Galleries of America – No. III: The Richmond
Galleries,” The Photographic and Fine Art Journal, July 1856, 217.
36
On average, the sixth-plate, the most common plate size, cost about $5 in the 1840s, but by
1850 its price had dropped to around $2.50. For daguerreotype prices, see Wendy Wick Reaves
and Sally Pierce, “Translations from the Plate: The Marketplace of Public Portraiture,” in Young
America, eds. Romer and Young, 90. For miniature portrait prices, see Barbara McCandless,
“The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity: Promoting the Art,” in Photography in Nineteenth-
Century America, ed. Sandweiss, 52.
32

– occasionally list enslaved sitters (and many black sitters who could have been slaves).
For instance, on April 18, 1848, Cook listed one quarter-plate daguerreotype for $5.50 in
Columbus, Mississippi: “Col Girl of Mr. Moore.”
37
On the following day (April 19), a
“Mr. Moore” purchased a sixth-plate daguerreotype for $3.50 from Cook.
38
If, as is
likely given the timing, this was the same Mr. Moore, then he would not only have
daguerreotyped his slave first, but he also would have bought a larger and more
expensive image of her ($5.50) than of himself ($3.50).
39
Little is known of the female
slave whom Cook daguerreotyped on this day, nor is much known of the slaveholder, Mr.
Moore. We do know, however, that Cook took photographs of other slaves. Only three
days earlier, he made a daguerreotype of the same size and price (quarter-plate, $5.50) of
a different slave woman.
40
The way in which Cook logged these portraits – simply
jotting down the name, size, and price as he did for all his images – suggests that, by
1848, slave photography had become a normal, unremarkable part of his practice.
41

37
Entry for April 18, 1848, Account Book 1845-1861, George Smith Cook Collection,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
38
Entry for April 19, 1848, Account Book 1845-1861, George Smith Cook Collection,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
39
Cook worked in Columbus Mississippi in the spring of 1848 and then moved to Columbus
Georgia by late May. In his entries for April of 1848, labeled only “Pictures at Columbus,” Cook
lists a number of sitters who appear in the 1850 census in Columbus Mississippi. Take, for
instance, James Benoit, resident of Columbus Ward I, Lowndes County, Mississippi. Likewise,
in his list of expenses, he noted “Expenses at Columbus Miss” and listed stock sold on April 12
and money paid to the “Editor of Whig” on May 4. Yet Cook had moved on to Columbus
Georgia by May 31, 1848: he stayed there through the summer, and then returned in the summer
of 1849. See Account Book 1845-1861, George Smith Cook Collection, Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress, Washington D.C; and 1850 United States Federal Census records, Lowndes
County, Mississippi.
40
This entry lists a “Mr” and then a surname, followed by “Col Girl.” The surname looks like
“Nasss,” as in “Mr. Nass’s Col Girl.” In the 1850 Slave Schedule, no man named Nass appears
for Columbus, Mississippi, which suggests that this slaveholder may have come from a different
county to have his slave photographed. See entry for April 1848, Account Books 1845-1861,
George Smith Cook Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
41
Thus, Joseph T. Zealy did not make the first slave daguerreotypes when he produced a set of
nude portraits for Louis Agassiz in 1850. George Cook actually sold photographic supplies to
33

Proslavery photographic production did not fall solely under the domain of
slaveholding men such as Mr. Moore, though. Slaveholding women such as Mary
Pringle, an aristocratic Charlestonian, made photographs of their chattel. Slaveholding
children also took trips with their slaves to take pictures.
42
Owners may have even
commissioned portraits of slaves and white children as one of many portraits on a single
trip to the gallery.

Fig. 1.9. Cogbill and grandmother, ambrotype, c. 1859
43
Fig. 1.10. Cogbill and unknown woman,
ambrotype, c. 1859
44

For instance, in the late 1850s, Courtney Lelia Cogbill of Petersburg, Virginia sat with
her grandmother, Matilda Burwell Byrd, and a black woman who might have been one of

Zealy as early as 1849. On November 23, 1849, for instance, Cook sold Zealy the following
supplies for $9.62: “½ Dry Book Cases ¼ 6.00 ¼ 1/6 Do 9.00 9.62 9.62/ 1 Dry ½ Pressures
1/10.” Zealy, like many southern photographers, continued to buy supplies from Cook into the
1860s. See “Stock sold at Charleston,” November 23, 1849, Account Book 1845-1861, George
Smith Cook Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
42
McInnis, Politics of Taste, 246.
43
Museum Collections, Virginia Historical Society.
44
Museum Collections, Virginia Historical Society.
34

the Cogbills’ slaves (Figures 1.9-1.10).
45
(In 1860, the Cogbill family owned seven
slaves, including a 15-year-old female who was listed as “black” in the census records).
46

Since Courtney’s dress, haircut, age, and position appear identical, as do the brass frames
around the images, it seems likely that Courtney sat back-to-back (in strikingly similar
poses) with her grandmother and her black caretaker. Proslavery photographic
production emerged from every level of white families.
Mainly within the photograph saloon, slaveholders transformed the visual
depiction of their bondspeople. Large paintings showing the world the master governed
gave way to small photographs showing the people his family owned (Figures 1.11-1.12).

Fig. 1.11. Rose Hill, c. 1820
47
Fig. 1.12. Martha Ann “Patty” Atavis,
daguerreotype, c. 1848
48

45
Lelia Courtney was born on June 15, 1858. See Bible Records, Cogbill Family, Cogbill Papers,
Manuscripts, Virginia Historical Society.
46
The Cogbills owned 7 slaves in 1860, including a 15-year-old female and a twenty-five-year-
old female, both listed as “black” in the census records. See U.S. Census, 1860, Slave Schedules,
Petersburg, VA, pg 47. Harriet Cogbill might have brought Courtney with both her grandmother
and her enslaved nurse to the photography gallery, in the summer of 1859, to memorialize her in
light of a recent illness, or after that illness. On July 20, 1859, Benjamin Daniel Cogbill
(Courtney’s father) wrote a letter to Harriett Cogbill (Courtney’s mother), noting that he was
“glad to hear that you were getting on so well without me and happy to learn that dear little
Courtney was improving so fast.” Benjamin Daniel Cogbill to Harriett, July 20 1859, Cogbill
Papers, Manuscripts, Virginia Historical Society.
47
Courtesy of The Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina.
48
Cased Photograph Collection, Maryland Historical Society.
35

Proslavery photography promoted a more embodied and central representation of slaves.
It moved their bodies, faces, and emotions to the centers of frames.
Such slave portraits also stood in stark contrast to the set of photographs
historians of photography have studied at length: the fifteen daguerreotypes of South
Carolina slaves which Columbia artist Joseph T. Zealy made for Harvard scientist Louis
Agassiz in 1850. As past scholars have shown, Agassiz sought to use these images to
prove the theory of polygenesis – that described how blacks and whites came from
different biological origins.
49
Zealy forced his enslaved subjects to pose nude, and
captured them in straight, frontal poses that foregrounded anatomy and deviated from the
characteristic asymmetry of contemporaneous bourgeois portraits. The Zealy-Agassiz
daguerreotypes functioned through a process of racial classification: they stripped
enslaved people of the portraiture conventions – the typical postures, props, and clothing
– that signaled individuality.
Slaveholders’ photographs, on the other hand, produced a sentimental-evidentiary
culture, not a scientific culture. To start, slaveholders framed these photographs as acts
of intimate ownership, as illustrated by the case of Louis Manigault and Hector. A
boatman as well as a favored slave at Gowrie plantation outside Savannah, Hector often
traveled to the city to deliver mail and obtain supplies for Manigault.
50
In 1861 Hector
posed in the full-length portrait necessary to capture his oar (Figure 1.13).

49
Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis
Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9 (1995): 38-61; Trachtenberg, Reading
American Photographs, 53-56; and Elinor Reichlin, “Faces of Slavery: A Historical Find,”
American Heritage 28 (1977).
50
James M. Clifton, ed., Life and Labor on Argyle Island: Letters and Documents of a Savannah
River Rice Plantation, 1833-1867 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1978), 134, 169, 183, 230
36

Fig. 1.13. Hector, ambrotype, April 23, 1861
51

Hector’s image was part of the broader genre of “work photography,” one that emerged
as the cheapness of the daguerreotype had severed the portrait from its aristocratic roots.
It permitted all types of workers to pose with their tools, as in the case of Isaac Jefferson,
a free blacksmith and the former slave of Thomas Jefferson, whose apron, hammer, and
bare arms signified his labor (Figure 1.14).

51
Image courtesy of The Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina. My thanks to
archivist Jennifer Scheetz for this image.
37

Fig. 1.14. Isaac Jefferson, daguerreotype, c. 1847
52

In similar fashion to Jefferson’s image, Hector’s portrait linked his identity to his
particular role as a laborer. Hector might have taken a similar pride that Jefferson took in
his image: the oar that dominates the picture suggests the geographic mobility prized by
enslaved boatmen; the newspaper, moreover, suggests how Louis Manigault depended
upon Hector to bring him communications from the outside world. Yet Louis Manigault
made sure to assert his control over Hector. As Manigault would later write, “In this
picture I had him taken with his paddle in one hand, and a newspaper in the other, with

52
Isaac Jefferson, Memoirs and Daguerreotype, 1847, Tracy M. McGregor Library, Accession
#2041, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. My thanks to Edward Gaynor for this
image.
38

the Gowrie plantation mail-bag over his shoulder.”
53
Manigault enveloped Hector’s
possession within his own authority. Hector could claim “his paddle,” but Manigault
claimed ownership over Hector and mastery over the photographic process: he framed
this photograph as an act of possession.
Within the frames, interracial intimacy most commonly manifested itself in
portraits of enslaved nurses with white children. These portraits fused the sentimental
trappings of early American photography with a longstanding Christian iconography: the
Madonna and child (Figures 1.15-1.16).
54

Fig. 1.15. Atavis and Anna Whitridge, tintype
55
Fig. 1.16. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child,
late 1480s
56

53
Attached inscription, Hector, The Charleston Museum.
54
Laura Wexler offers a post-1865 discussion of caretaker images. See Laura Wexler, Tender
Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 2000), Ch. 2. See also Deborah Willis, The Black Female Body: A Photographic
History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
55
Cased Photograph Collection, Maryland Historical Society. This is a tintype copy of a
daguerreotype.
56
Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, late 1480s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers
Fund, 1908 (08.183.1). Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
39

Historian Laura Wexler notes that the Madonna iconography “is a tribute to the highest
achievement that womanhood can attain in Christian culture and a paean to the actual
woman who occupies that mythical role.”
57
Surely many slaveholders would have seen
this Christian relationship in these images, for, as historian Drew Faust notes, the vision
of mastery as an “evangelical stewardship” had become a mainstay of proslavery
arguments.
58
Take the example of Dolly Lunt Burge – mother to Sadai and mistress to
Rachel (Figure 1.17). On the day Lincoln was re-elected, November 8, 1864, she wrote
of her own slave ownership in her diary: “The purest & holiest men have owned them & I
can see nothing in the Scriptures which forbids it. I have never bought nor sold & I have
tried to make life easy & pleasant to those that have been bequeathed me by the dead. I
have never ceased to work, but many a Northern housekeeper has a much easier time than
a Southern matron with her hundred negroes.”
59
In a cruel inversion characteristic of
self-proclaimed paternalists, Burge formulated bondage as a burden to the mistress and a
gift to the slave. She justified this position through the Bible as well as by self-
consciously distancing herself from the slave market, reaffirming the centrality of the
chattel principle to slavery in the process. That she would commission a photograph of
her young daughter with her slave nurse suggests that Burge sought to memorialize a
domesticated, Christian vision of bondage for the years ahead.

57
Wexler, Tender Violence, 61.
58
Faust, The Ideology of Slavery, 13.
59
Christine Jacobson Carter, ed., The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848-1879 (Athens: The
University of Georgia Press, 1997), 156.
40

Fig. 1.17. Rachel & Sadai Burge, c. 1858
60

Still, in the present, chattel Madonna images actually amplified the tensions of
bondage – tensions between enslaved women as racial subordinates and as important
members of white families. On the one hand, chattel mothers were still subject to the
authority of the blood-mothers of the children they held. As historian Thavolia Glymph
has recently shown, relations between mistresses and house slaves were far more violent
than previous scholars have documented. Enslaved women, Glymph reveals, could
receive beatings for events that easily exceeded their control. Harriet Robinson, for

60
Rachel and Sadai Burge, Box 3, Folder 11, Burge Family Papers, Manuscript, Archives, and
Rare Book Library, Emory University. As Sadai was born in December of 1855, the image was
likely taken in late 1857 or 1858. Sadai’s parents, Dolly and Thomas Burge, lived on the Burge
Plantation, nine miles east of Covington, Georgia, where they owned approximately 100 slaves.
See Finding Aid, Burge Family Papers, MARBL, Emory University,
http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/burge266/
41

instance, remembered how she received “a lick ‘cross the head’” for “every word them
chillun missed” in a spelling lesson.
61

Fig. 1.18. Mary Louise May Pearson with baby Mary Frances Pearson, daguerreotype
62

On the other hand, many slaves received the same visual tribute that white women
received within the photographic frames (Figure 1.18). Assuming the role of nurturing
surrogate mother, Martha Ann Patty Atavis held Anna Whitridge closely, with black and
white hands touching, presenting her to the viewer (Figure 1.15). For masters, who better
to picture than enslaved women with white children? Many of these children, because of
their ages, might have seen the black women that held them as extended members of their
families. Anna Whitridge might not have known that her father had bought Atavis in
1839 for $200.
63
Subordinated and elevated, commodities and nurturers, chattel

61
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation
Household (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 34.
62
Daguerreotype Collection, Graphic Arts Collection, and Pearson Collection, American
Antiquarian Society.
63
Bill of Sale of female slave, MS 3090, Whitridge-Thomas Family Papers, Maryland Historical
Society.
42

Madonnas served as the most conspicuous symbols of benevolent intimacy in the
proslavery visual arsenal.
The chattel Madonna icon became so important, in fact, that slaveholder Andrew
J. Boulware even made it the centerpiece of his household portrait at “Buena Vista,”
Boulware’s plantation in Spotsylvania County, Virginia (Figure 1.19).

Fig. 1.19. “Buena Vista,” daguerreotype, c. 1850
64

In front of the house, white family members and slaves posed for a carefully orchestrated
shot that miniaturized the contradictions of slavery. In the dead center of the picture, at
the doorway of the plantation household, stood a chattel Madonna. Though she and the
black woman in the balcony faced the camera as typical antebellum subjects, the slaves
on the ground served as little more than props. Two of the women framed the porch in

64
Museum Collections, Virginia Historical Society.
43

side profile, each standing with one leg on a step. More objects than subjects, they
served to enhance the symmetry of the portrait. Boulware’s image offered intimate
interracial relations even as it showed people as property.
Of course, chattel Madonna portraits erased as much as they made visible: the
sexual coercion enslaved women faced; the slave trade they feared; the physical violence
used by masters and mistresses to maintain control in the plantation household. In doing
so, slave photographs contested abolitionists’ visual, oral, and written depictions of
slavery, especially scenes of slaves in pain.
65
Especially since the 1830s, abolitionists
had represented chained, lynched, tortured, and, especially, whipped slaves in a whole
host of depictions, as seen in The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Figure 1.20).

Fig. 1.20. The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838
66

Despite little aversion to inflicting pain when necessary, southern defenders took
umbrage at abolitionist claims that the South was bereft of sympathy. In 1836, for
instance, South Carolina politician and slaveholder James Henry Hammond came to

65
Abruzzo, Polemical Pain, 146.
66
The American Anti-Slavery Almanac, for 1838 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, [1837]). Image courtesy
of American Antiquarian Society.
44

Congress and protested the “revolting” illustrations of flogged slaves in abolitionist print
culture.
67

In the 1850s, debates over benevolence and cruelty were increasingly pitched
within the categories solidified by Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
novel experienced astonishing success, selling 300,000 copies in the first year of its
American publication alone, and both northerners and southerners read it.
68
While
Stowe’s words depicting characters such as Tom, Eva, Eliza, and Harry resonated with an
international audience, the story also achieved its power through engravings by Hammatt
Billings of Boston. The head illustrator for Gleason’s Pictorial as well as the artist who
had recently reworked the masthead design of The Liberator, Billings was steeped in the
realms of mass-illustrations and antislavery imagery. The main element he had added to
the masthead, an image of Christ standing over a kneeling slave, revealed an evangelical
sensibility that made him the perfect fit for Stowe’s novel. In the first edition Billings
produced six full-page engravings. For the second American edition, published in
December of 1852, Billings crafted over 100 images, including Tom’s brutal beating at
close of the story (Figure 1.21).
69

67
Abruzzo, Polemical Pain, 133.
68
Claire Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852-2002 (Padstow: Ashgate,
2007), 13-17; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery,
rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 164-165.
69
Jo-Ann Morgan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2007), 2-3, 24; Ann Douglass, introduction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the
Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 9.
45

Fig. 1.21. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
70

Billings framed Tom’s martyrdom between Christ and Simon Legree, making the point
clear to slaveholders: God stood on the side of abolition.
The private letters of one Charleston family suggest that some slaveholders likely
viewed their chattel Madonna images as responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On August 6,
1852, Annie Middleton confided to her husband Nathaniel Russell Middleton that Stowe
had raised troubling questions for her as a slave owner:
I have been reading ‘Uncle Tom’s cabin’ this afternoon the second volume. What do you
think of it? Do you think there is any place like that of the monster Legree? It seems too
horrible to think of, but I do not see but our laws make it possible. I cannot express what
a new view of the whole subject the consideration of these pos-sibilities has opened to
me. I do not know what you will think of me but I feel that, if those things are possible I

70
Part-page illustration by Hammatt Billings for Chapter 40, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among
the Lowly, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Illustrated Edition. Original Designs by Billings; Engraved
by Baker and Smith (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1853). Jesus, Tom, Sambo, Quimbo,
Legree. Courtesy of Clifton Waller Barret Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley
Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. Accessed through “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive, Directed by Stephen Railton, University of
Virginia: http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/illustra/53illf.html
46

am willing to give up all claim that I may have to any property for the sake of redeeming
even those yet unborn from so fearful a doom.
71

After reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Middletons did not sell their slaves. But they did
soon go to George Smith Cook’s Charleston gallery to make an enslaved Madonna image
of their daughter Charlotte cradled by their slave Lydia (Figure 1.22).

Fig. 1.22. George Smith Cook, Charlotte Helen Middleton and her enslaved nurse, Lydia, ambrotype c.
1857
72

71
Annie DeWolf Middleton to N. Russell Middleton, August 6, 1852, in the N. Russell
Middleton Papers, #507, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
72
“Charlotte Helen Middleton and her enslaved nurse, Lydia, 1852,” by George Smith Cook
(American, 1819-1902), ambrotype,  Image courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art
47

Did this pristine image help Annie Middleton distance herself from the Simon Legrees of
the South? Did looking at a chattel Madonna portrait help owners reaffirm the Christian
benevolence Stowe had rattled while it helped them look away from the commonplace
racial violence of the antebellum southern household? Visual attachments within
sentimental photographs, for slaveholding parents, must have offered a tangible response
to the assertions of un-Christian southerners in Stowe’s text and Billings’s images.

The production and visuality of chattel Madonna photographs expanded and
deepened slaveholders’ expressions of interracial intimacy in the 1840s and 1850s. But
to fully understand these images we must look beyond them – to the ways in which
slaveholders gave them social lives. These photographs were visual-material objects,
which stood at the center of a new set of practices of display, circulation, and
preservation. Historians of photography have stressed how southern whites bolstered
white supremacy by circulating lynching photographs in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century.
73
But this fusion of racial power and photo-sharing actually began
during slavery. It involved images not of violence and raw power but of respect and
condescension, affection and possession.

Association, 1937.005.0010. Middleton family records show that Charlotte Helen Middleton was
born on August 23, 1854. Thus, I have approximated the production date of the image as 1857.
See “Record of Nathaniel Russell Middleton, Jr.,” Middleton Family Papers, Folder 11/298/3,
South Carolina Historical Society. In Cook’s written records, one finds other evidence that
suggests he might have made other enslaved caretaker photographs. See his entry for June 12,
1851, “Missy Aiken + Nurse [sup?] ¼ 5.00,” in Account Book 1851-1854, George Smith Cook
Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Likewise, see also
Cook’s entry from May 22, 1862: “Baby Seabrook + Nurse 4$ 1/6 4.” Account Book March
1862-Jan 1863, George Cook Papers, Valentine Richmond History Center.
73
On lynching photography, see, Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the
Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004),
Ch. 4.
48

Slaveholders did not often tell us why they made slave photographs or how they
used them. Yet one of the rare commentaries that exists – taken from private records in
Charleston – reveals how children took active roles in commissioning and keeping
photographs of their slaves. In 1859, the young Ella Grimball brought her slave Peggy to
a Charleston photograph gallery, where Peggy had her portrait taken. As Ella’s mother
Meta Grimball wrote in her diary, “the old woman looked so much pleased and has really
made a nice one. It is a great gratification to Ella having a likeness of the old woman for
she has always been particularly attached to her.”
74
Grimball took heart in the
photographic attachments her daughter made with her chattel.
Despite the sentimental associations, though, the landscape of slave photographs
stood as a particular variation of antebellum portraiture. From what I have found in my
research, individual photographs never employed two conventional photographic
elements: Slaves did not pose with books, the ubiquitous signs of literacy in portraits of
white women; slaves also did not gaze off into the distance or touch a hand to the chin in
a thinking pose. Photographers and slaveholders avoided picturing slaves with visual
devices that connoted romanticism and literacy.
Surprisingly, though, slave photographs did take part in many other conventions.
For instance, the likenesses of the enslaved Amy and the free Eliza Washburn (Figures
1.23-1.24) were defined by formulaic similarities. Both women pose in three-quarter-
length portraits, gazing to the side of the camera. Both women place one arm on a
clothed circular table (a common piece of daguerreotype furniture) and drape one hand
off the side.

74
Maurie D. McInnis, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 246.
49

Fig. 1.23. “Amy, a slave of the Blacklock family,” daguerreotype, c. 1850
75

Fig. 1.24. Eliza Washburn, daguerreotype
76

The placement of hands – typically orchestrated by the photographer – was a small but
significant detail in the gendered conventions of early photography. Famed Philadelphia
artist Marcus Root prescribed that the “hands of a lady” “may rest easily upon the lap,

75
“Amy, a slave of the Blacklock family,” Waring Family Papers, Manuscripts, South Carolina
Historical Society.
76
Daguerreotype Collection, Graphic Arts Collection, American Antiquarian Society.
50

and should be presented edgewise, neither too high nor too low, which will give them a
small, delicate appearance. Or one hand or arm may be laid upon a table, while the other
hand may hold a book or some other object, if the sitter so choose.”
77
Thus, Blacklock’s
pose suggests, at the very least, an effort on the part of the photographer to present her
body delicately.
Enslaved and free portraits also shared the convention of employing simple props
to convey identity. For instance, Rosetta, a slave of the Alston family of South Carolina,
holds a white handkerchief in her left hand (Figure 1.25). A slave of the Partridge family
of Jefferson County, Florida, Mauma Mollie posed in ways that accented her elderly
status – by leaning back in her chair and holding a walking stick (Figure 1.26).

Fig. 1.25. Rosetta, ambrotype, c. 1850s
78
Fig. 1.26. Mauma Mollie, daguerreotype, c. 1850
79

77
Marcus A. Root, The Camera and the Pencil (Philadelphia: M.A. Root, J.B. Lippincott & Co.,
and D. Appleton & Co., 1864), 106.
78
“Rosetta (Mamma), ca. 1840s,” By Unknown, Ambrotype on glass,  Image courtesy of the
Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association, XX1978.002. The ambrotype process was not
invented until the 1850s, so I have revised the production date. Museum records include the
following note attached to case: “Rosetta or ‘Mama’ as she was called – Belonged to Mrs. Paul
FitzSimons, then to her daughter Mrs. J. Motte Alston, my Grandmother – From Jennie C.
Calvert my cousin – To be given to the Carolina Art Association – Charleston, SC.” Rosetta may
51

Fig. 1.27. Minor Family Nurse, daguerreotype, c. 1850

The “Minor family nurse,” likely the slave of Lancelot Minor of central Virginia, sat in a
wooden chair, cradling a set of worn wool carders in her weathered hands (Figure 1.27).
80

wear the white and blue Welsh plaid common for the Alston slaves of low country South
Carolina. See J. Motte Alston, Rice Planter and Sportsman: The Recollections of J. Motte Alston,
1821-1909 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), 10, 46.
79
State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/25855
80
Minor was a farmer, blacksmith, lay minister, and mid-level slaveholder in central Virginia.
He might have also called this woman “Old Sukey.” He operated farms in Louisa County,
52

The props of such images linked bondspeople to urban gentility, elderly stature, and farm
labor.
As much as the postures and props reflected free-portrait conventions, though,
these images did not fully erase the visual symbols of slave culture. Embedded within
such respectability portraits was a limited degree of black self- and cultural expression.
Most noticeably, many slave women posed wearing headwraps, including Amy, Rosetta,
and Mauma Mollie. Though the origins of the headwrap remain unclear, by the
nineteenth century these coverings – also known as bandannas, headscarves,
headkerchiefs, or tignons – served many functions: they offered sun protection, kept hair

Virginia during the 1840s and Amherst County, Virginia in the 1850s and 1860s, primarily
planting tobacco, corn, and wheat. The Minor family nurse daguerreotype presently sits in the
Minor Family Papers at the University of Virginia. The original frame had the following note
inscribed on it: “Old family nurse in Minor Family/Her name is found in the farm ledger of
Lancelot Minor.” The farm ledger of Lancelot Minor does not list any slave specifically as a
nurse. Yet, given her age, the woman may have been called “Old Sukey.” In January of 1845,
1847, and 1848, Minor paid modest sums of cash to an “Old Sukey” – ranging from $2.00 in
1845 to $4.25 in 1847. We cannot be sure that this woman is, in fact, “Old Sukey,” nor can we be
sure she was a slave, but both seem likely for three reasons. First, in the 1850 Census’s Slave
Schedules, Lancelot Minor of Louisa County is listed as having 15 slaves, including a 62-year old
female slave. Second, Sukey was a distinctly African, popular name for slaves. Third, given the
fact that Lancelot Minor used slave labor on both his farms (Thompson Cron Roads in Louisa
County and “Briery Knowe” in Amherst County), it seems unlikely that he would have obtained
an occupational image of a free black woman. See entries for January 1845, January 1847, and
January 1848 in Lancelot Minor Logbook, Minor Family Papers, 1838-1944, Accession #6055,
6055-a, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA. See also 1850 Census Slave
Schedules, Lancelot Minor, Louisa County, Virginia. On the prevalence of the name “Sukey,”
see entry for “Names and Naming” in John C. Inscoe in Paul Finkleman, eds., Macmillan
Encyclopedia of World Slavery, Volume 2 (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, Simon &
Schuster Macmillan, 1998), 626. The Minor Nurse might have sat for her daguerreotype when
she accompanied Lancelot Minor on one of Minor’s trips to Fredericksburg, Charlottesville,
Washington or Richmond, or when an itinerant passed through the Virginia countryside. Minor
purchased various items – such as clothing, tumblers, candlesticks, spoons – from these cities.
See entries for February 1843, January 1844, and September 1847. For purchases from a peddler,
see entry for April 1843. Minor also recorded a purchase of a photograph in August 1846: “By
cash in exchange for likeness $3.00.” Lancelot Minor Logbook, Minor Family Papers, 1838-
1944, Accession #6055, 6055-a, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA.
53

clean, hid dirty hair, preserved braids, and, for runaways, concealed scars.
81
Sometimes
the presentation of the headwrap illuminated a diversity of style within slave culture, as in
the case of Judy Telfair Jackson (right), an enslaved cook and the grandmother of Lavinia
(left), both owned by Mary Telfair, a wealthy Savannah slaveholder (Figure 1.28).

Fig. 1.28. “Judy Telfair Jackson, Telfair cook with her granddaughter, Lavinia, Mary Telfair’s maid,”
daguerreotype, c. 1849
82

81
Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture, from Its
Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 58-59.
82
Telfair Family Papers, Georgia Historical Society.
54

Judy’s headwrap and her plain outfit contrast sharply with Lavinia’s stylish hair and her
more current, polka-dotted dress.
83
The resulting product offers a curious fusion of
African-American and Euro-American styles that, along with their facial expressions and
poses, works to individualize these women from two generations of one enslaved family.
Still, slaveholders’ commentaries often subtly undercut the respectability that
Americans commonly associated with such visually dignified portraits. Meta Grimball
described how Peggy was “quite delighted with her Ambrotype: only time she says that I
should like to have ‘my picture drawed,’ and after looking at it she said ‘I is a very
markable looking old woman.’”
84
There was a gentle racial humor in Meta’s recording
of this idiomatic remark; Peggy was at once the respectable adult sitter and the child-like
aspirant, an imposter only pretending to acquire bourgeois status. For slaveholders,
individual slave photographs linked a sense of intimacy to humorous condescension.
But such photographs also helped further a slaveholding impulse that was at once
intimate and possessive: the materiality of early photographs enabled southern whites to
touch, hold, and wield miniature versions of their chattel. Whereas the painting Rose Hill
measured approximately 35½ by 50½ inches, daguerreotypes ranged from the tiny
sixteenth-plate (1 3/8’’ by 1 5/8’’), to the most common size, the sixth-plate (2 ¾’’ by 3
¼’’), to the largest, the whole plate (6 ½’’ x 8 ½’’), which was best-suited for display on
a parlor table or mantel. Further, the cases of these images underscored their intimate
nature in social settings. Not only were daguerreotypes (as well as ambrotypes and
tintypes) typically bordered by golden mats, but they also came in wooden and leather
cases with small latches. Slaveholders needed to unhitch the latch and open the cover so

83
See Joan Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840-1900
(Kent: Kent State University Press, 1995), 60-61.
84
McInnis, Politics of Taste, 246.
55

an acquaintance could see the slave’s face and body, skin and clothing. In a sense, such
photographs extended a longstanding feature of southern mastery on a minute level: the
capacity to mediate between slaves and the broader public.
The emergence of portable images enabled slaveholding families to stretch bonds
of slaveholding intimacy, through the circulation of their chattel, as the nation expanded
from Atlantic to Pacific: they helped them to mobilize intimacy. Postal reforms in the
mid-1840s drastically reduced the costs of sending a daguerreotype in the mail. After
this point, all Americans began tucking photographs into envelopes and sending them
hundreds of miles away.
85
Slaveholding families such as the Pringles participated in this
broader practice. During the mid-1850s, Edward J. Pringle moved to San Francisco to
practice law. He kept in touch with his wealthy slaveholding family back in Charleston
through letters, and, on one occasion in the mid-1850s, wrote to his mother to thank her
for sending photographs of familiar faces westward. Pringle felt his mother’s portrait
was “good enough to recall you to me exactly as you are” and that looking at the image
was “almost like a visit to you.” He reserved his deepest enthusiasm, however, for the
photograph his mother had sent of Mack, an enslaved butler in the Pringle’s Charleston
home:
And old Mack! How Magnificent he is! I have laughed over him a dozen times. I keep
him in the office that I may exhibit him as a specimen of the “Institution.” How natural
the old fellow looks! What a magnificence of white cravat and white Pants! gold studs,
gold ring etc. Tell him I am delighted to see him looking so young and well. He does not
look a day older than when I left him. Tell him his white cravat is a miracle, that there is
nobody so well dressed in California. I wish you had sent some more of the servants
Mauma, Cretia, + Ishmael.
86

85
David Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-
Century America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 59.
86
Edward J. Pringle to Mary Pringle, August 18, 1856, Folder 28/630/08: Correspondence, 1855-
1856, Alston-Pringle-Frost Papers, Manuscripts, South Carolina Historical Society. While
Edward J. Pringle called the images “pictures” in his letter, the language he used to describe them
clearly indicates that these images were photographs. Edward’s recent history of correspondence
56

Pringle’s celebration of Mack as “a specimen of the ‘Institution’” placed the
image at the center of political debates over the expansion of bondage. This was not the
first time Pringle had entered the fray. In 1852, he had penned Slavery in the Southern
States, by a Carolinian, a proslavery pamphlet attacking the “wild and unreal picture of
slavery” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
87
Pringle lauded the humaneness of slave over wage
labor and the Christian and reciprocal bonds of the master-slave relationship. He sharply
rebuked the harsh world of northern and British liberalism, urbanism, and industrial
capitalism. In the South, Pringle argued, the slave “depends upon a master, whose
interest it is to raise him up,” whereas in the free states the “poor man may be starving in
his garret…because there is no visible claim upon him, and the evil is far out of his
sphere of life.”
88
Pringle likely saw Mack’s photograph as visual evidence of these
longstanding arguments, and likely urged others to see the image in the same way.
But Mack’s image was more than a simple reflection of written arguments. The
portrait emerged from and catalyzed new ways of asserting mastery in private and in
public. Mary Pringle had engaged in a series of sentimental performances when she first
commissioned the portrait of Mack in Charleston: bringing Mack to the studio; making
sure he was dressed properly; sending the image in the mail. That Edward could see
Mack’s gold jewelry indicates that Mary Pringle had even paid extra money to have those

with his mother adds further weight to the fact that these images were photographs. In 1854,
Mary, Edward’s mother, wrote about Edward in a letter to her daughter: “He has our
Daguerreotypes hung around him; he never imagined, that the Boston group could ever have been
so peculiarly valuable to him. He begs for a great family picture, with children and
grandchildren.” See Mary Pringle to daughter, June 13, 1854, Folder 28/630/7: Correspondence
1854, Alston-Pringle-Frost Papers, Manuscripts, South Carolina Historical Society.
87
Edward J. Pringle, Slavery in the Southern States, by a Carolinian (Cambridge: John Bartlett,
1852).
88
Pringle, Slavery in the Southern States, 25.
57

items colored (as early photographs could only be colored afterwards by hand).
Moreover, Mack’s photograph gave Edward J. Pringle a material touchstone to engage all
who walked into his San Francisco law office. It enabled a community of onlookers to
see Pringle as the familial master, and to encounter Mack through an image rather than
through social interaction. Unlike paternalistic rhetoric found in the proslavery tract,
sermon, and letter, Mack’s body presented a seemingly truthful vision of comfort,
loyalty, and respectability. Crucially, his image must not have shown him dissenting
from his own enslavement. The likeness served as evidence of the comfort and
obedience of a specific slave and an illustration of the broader system. Embedded in the
image was the implication that a sentimental trip had been taken to the gallery.
Embedded in its display were the suggested contours of Edward’s slaveholding
disposition. As the case of the Pringles illustrates, slave photography operated on two
evidentiary fronts: it lent visual proof of the benevolence of slavery (as channeled
through the well-dressed body of an individual slave). It further helped owners to
express their humaneness – in front of family, friends, and acquaintances – by investing
the time, money, and sentimental energy into representing their bondspeople.
The history of Mack’s image – and the broader patterns of production and display
it illustrates – revises how we understand the defense of slavery in the late antebellum
era. Past historians have largely looked to the written and oral arguments of public
spokesmen – of politicians, professors, protestant clergy, and doctors – to understand the
ideological justification of bondage from the 1830s onwards.
89
Average slaveholders
read the pamphlets, scholars have suggested, but they spent little energy in defending

89
Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery; Tise, Proslavery; Frederickson, The Black Image in the
White Mind; Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma; Ford, Deliver Us From Evil; Abruzzo,
Polemical Pain; Young, Domesticating Slavery.
58

slavery through cultural texts themselves. As historian Peter Kolchin writes, “For
decades, slaveholders supported slavery with a minimum of rationalization, accepting it
as natural without bothering to construct carefully articulated arguments in its behalf;
many – probably most – masters continued to do so down to the Civil War.”
90
But
proslavery photography reveals a broader justification that fused sentimentalism with a
growing consumer culture. The proslavery defense manifested itself in public words and
writing produced by the now well-known list of ideologues (Thomas Roderick Dew;
George Fitzhugh; Josiah Nott; James Henry Hammond) and a private and semi-public
photo-culture actively created by Mary Pringle and Annie Middleton – a culture of
pamphlets and speeches and a set of photographic practices. Increasingly in the late
antebellum era, the proslavery defense took the form of the everyday, even the mundane,
packaged as sentimental and visual evidence of intimate interracialism.
Although visual surrogates of slaves gave masters a formidable new mode to
extend and promote bonds, they also turned whites’ social interactions with blacks into
surface interactions. Such photographic mediation helped build slaveholding self-
deception, as in the case of the Quitman family of Natchez, Mississippi. John Anthony
Quitman spent the winter of 1846-1847 serving as a volunteer general in the Mexican
War. A proslavery extremist, Quitman would eventually become the governor of
Mississippi. When he traveled to Mexico, he – like many soldiering slaveholders –
brought along his trusted house slave, Harry. For Quitman, Harry performed a variety of
menial tasks during the war.
91
What Harry felt about the war in which he fought, a war
that his master hoped would ensure the future expansion of slavery, we know little. We

90
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 196.
91
Robert E. May, “John Quitman and His Slaves: Reconciling Slave Resistance with the
Proslavery Defense,” Journal of Southern History 46, no. 4 (1980): 553, 567.
59

only know he earned his master’s praise, as Quitman proclaimed that he could “not speak
sufficiently well of this excellent servant. He is invaluable to me.”
92

One day during the war, Quitman sent a photograph of Harry home to
Mississippi. He felt that Harry’s image would “cause a loud laugh in the kitchen.”
93

When she received the image, Quitman’s daughter felt similarly, calling Harry’s portrait
“admirable,” and mentioning how it met with “a good laugh both in the house + kitchen,”
perhaps because Harry looked “corpulent.”
94
Here, as in the example of the Pringle
family, was a social performance of the paternalist ideal, through which the Quitmans
expressed bonds with Harry with a tinge of humor. Their expressions hinged on the
photograph of a loyal slave. It is unclear how the Quitmans displayed this image in the
years to come, but it must have contributed, to some extent, to their later shock when,
during the Civil War, Harry “threatened to desert Monmouth and was dissuaded only by
the granting of wages.”
95
The Quitman example attests to how personal slave
photographs contributed, in part, to the very surprise slaveholders experienced when they
found their house slaves disloyal during the Civil War. By crafting a masterly self-image
through depictions of privileged slaves, owners such as the Quitmans were also
furthering their own self-deception.

92
May, “John Quitman and His Slaves,” 568.
93
John Quitman to Eliza, Feb. 27, 1847, Quitman Family Papers, 1784-1978, UPA Microfilm,
Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War,
University Publications of America, Series J, Selections from the Southern Historical Collection,
Part 6, Reel 7, OCLC No. 12894903.
94
Louisa Quitman to John Quitman, April 27, 1847, Quitman Family Papers, 1784-1978, UPA
Microfilm, Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil
War, University Publications of America, Series J, Selections from the Southern Historical
Collection, Part 6, Reel 7, OCLC No. 12894903.
95
May, “John A. Quitman and His Slaves,” 569.
60

The more dramatic acts of slave resistance made public how a benevolent image
could double as a tool for bodily control. No slave produced such an effect more clearly
than Dolly, a washer and a cook at the Manigaults’ Silk Hope Plantation, just outside
Charleston, and at Gowrie. When the Civil War came, Dolly accompanied her mistress
Fannie Manigault to safer inland terrain in Augusta, Georgia. On April 7, 1863, Dolly
took flight.
96
Her master Louis quickly responded, circulating at least two fugitive
advertisements in Charleston and Augusta (Figure 1.29).

Fig. 1.29. Dolly, Fugitive slave advertisement, 1863
97

96
William Dusinberre examines the Manigault family in his book, Them Dark Days: Slavery in
the American Rice Swamps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
97
Manigault Plantation Journal, Manigault Family Papers #484, Southern Historical Collection,
Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; for the second advertisement,
see Manigault Family Papers, Box VI, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.
61

The advertisements laid bare only part of what Louis Manigault felt he knew about Dolly.
Manigault described Dolly’s appearance in detail: “thirty years of age,” “light
complexion,” “rather good looking, with a fine set of teeth.” He considered one
personality trait worth mentioning: she “hesitates somewhat when spoken to.” The ads
also suggested Dolly had been “enticed off by some White Man.” But in private,
Manigault and the overseer at Gowrie, William Capers, discussed how they actually
suspected Dolly had run off with an enslaved man named Lewis, a bellhop at the L.L.
Hotel in Augusta.
98
It is entirely possible, particularly given the mention that Dolly was
“rather good looking,” that Manigault held or sought sexual relations with Dolly. This
could help to explain why he was willing to use various means to catch Dolly, but
unwilling to reveal that she had left with an enslaved man.
These means included the use of Dolly’s carte de visite, commonly made by the
dozen. Though photo-historian John Tagg has linked the practices of photographic
surveillance in the nineteenth century to state institutions, Manigault’s advertisements
suggest a revision to that story that includes the far more local power of southern
masters.
99
Manigault had updated fugitive slave ad technology – which had long used
generic, crude woodcuts of slaves, often holding a satchel of goods on a stick. His
private correspondence, moreover, reveals that he understood how the very qualities of
portability and transparency that made slave photographs windows onto seemingly
consenting slaves also made them ready-made tools to identify fleeing slaves. As he
wrote to a contact in Charleston, “Will you be kind enough to show the following to my

98
William Capers Sr. to Louis Manigault, April 9 and April 13, Louis Manigault Papers
Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
99
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (University
of Minnesota Press, 1993).
62

father who will stick it up at the Police Station + take all necessary steps.” He
highlighted how a “similar notice is at the Augusta Police Office, with likeness, which is
very important in such cases. This woman left during my absence to the plantation and
took with her an ample wardrobe of her own clothes.”
100
Manigault’s small mention that
the likeness “is very important in such cases” indicates that photographic control was
likely a broad practice in the South. More particular to the case at hand, Manigault knew
that Dolly’s “ample wardrobe” could easily defeat the typical slave ads, which mentioned
only what a runaway was wearing on departure. The photograph, however, captured
Dolly’s face. We know little about Dolly’s subsequent travels and life, but we know that
she was not captured. Her personal revolt turned an image of intimate benevolence into a
sign of dissent.
But the more prevalent remainders of proslavery photography would continue to
bolster a benevolent sense of mastery: visual-material intimacy lived on in white circles
well past emancipation precisely because various slaveholders moved visions of their
bondspeople squarely into the realm of private memory. The Manigault family, for
instance, put its carte de visite of Moses in a family record book (Figure 1.30).

100
Louis Manigault to Charles W. Henry, April 19, 1863, Box VI, Folder 131, Manigault Family
Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.
63

Fig. 1.30. Moses, carte de visite, 1857

An accompanying caption stated, “He died of an apoplectic fit in Charleston Co. [sic] Ca.
16
th
July 1863. He worked to the last, his occupation being to keep the yard clean, and
garden free from weeds.”
101
This 1850s image had once envisioned Moses’s role as both
decorative object and laboring subject for Charles Manigault in his aristocratic, low
country domain. The preservation of the image, in concert with written text, allowed the
Manigaults to freeze Moses in an individualized performance of hardworking loyalty and
racial deference – one that would endure into the late-nineteenth-century and beyond.
As image-preservation produced a romantic sense of enslaved loyalty, it also gave
whites a way to continue to forge bonds between each other through the bodies of their

101
Louis Manigault Family Record Book, Vol. III, Louis Manigault Papers, 177.01.01.02, South
Carolina Historical Society.
64

slaves. Take the case of two slave girls of Rebecca Harriet Pindar of Ringgold, Georgia
(Figure 1.31). The differing dresses, hairstyles, and jewelry of the tintype articulated the
girls’ individuality. Their contrasting poses, moreover, differentiated them as sisters.

Fig. 1.31. Slave girls of the Pindar Family, tintype, c. 1860
102
Fig. 1.32. Back of Pindar tintype
103

But a handwritten note on the back of the portrait undercut this subjectivity: “Two slave
girls given Aunt Harriet by her mother when she married” (Figure 1.32).
104
The very

102
Slave girls of the Pindar Family, Box 4, Folder 6, Pindar Family Papers, 1800-1979, Emory
University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
103
Slave girls of the Pindar Family, Box 4, Folder 6, Pindar Family Papers, 1800-1979, Emory
University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
104
Harriet Pindar married twice – first to Joseph Mooney of Ringgold, Georgia on December 6,
1855 in Savannah, second to Dr. William Woods in Savannah on January 20, 1864. Since
Harriet’s mother, Ann Margaret Tebeau Pinder, died on May 23, 1864 – four months after Harriet
married a second time, it is clear that she received these two slaves for her first marriage. The
tintype, invented in 1856, must have been taken sometime after the wedding. For genealogical
information on Harriet Pinder and Ann Margaret Tebeau Pinder, see F. Claiborne Johnston Jr.,
The Pinder/Ellett Families of Virginia and Georgia and Allied Families (Pinder, Tebeau,
65

visual conventions that marked these girls’ individuality also enhanced their status as
giftable property. The inscribable backside of the tintype cover enabled the Pindar family
to pass on knowledge of the girls as subjects and objects, with handwritten text that
revealed a personal touch in its own right. In this way, slaveholders materialized – and
personalized – the longstanding practice through which they linked white generations
with human commodities.
105
After emancipation, the Pindar family passed the
photograph, as they had once the slaves, from one generation to the next. Even though
they could no longer express white familial connections through the actual bodies of
slaves, the Pindars continued to do so with photographs of those slaves.

Proslavery photography forged a flexible tool of power in the late antebellum era.
It gave slaveholders a way to express intimacy with their chattel even as it furthered their
sense of possession over them as people. At the core of proslavery visuality was the
chattel Madonna, an image that oriented the eye towards the religiosity, domesticity, and
tenderness of bondage – and away from its violence and commodification. This
sentimental intimacy also pulsed through the hands of slaveholding men, women, and
children, who performed the paternalist ideal with miniaturized visions of the people that
stood for the world they sought to preserve. This image-culture increasingly tilted the
sense of attachment in one direction. It further gave slaveholders concrete evidence –
both aesthetic and social – of their benevolent ties to individual bondspeople. But
slaveholders were not the only inhabitants of the slave South who harnessed

Treutlen, Ellett, Spears, Womack, Sublett, Cheatham, Smith, Trabue) With Some Accounts of the
Pinder/Pindar Family Trail in the Bahama Islands, Bermuda and Barbados (Richmond: F.C.
Johnston, c.1988), Main Collection, Georgia Historical Society.
105
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 192.
66

photography. Bondspeople found ways to purchase and obtain their own images, which
they used to endure the market conditions of slavery that stood antithetical to the chattel
Madonna. It is to this undocumented cultural phenomenon that we now turn.
67

Chapter 2
Trading Photographs, 1839-1861

“The wall over the fireplace was adorned with some very brilliant scriptural
prints, and a portrait of General Washington, drawn and colored in a manner which
would certainly have astonished that hero, if ever he had happened to meet with its like.”
1

Although this passage could have easily described many white parlors in the mid-
nineteenth century, it actually depicted the most famous slave home in antebellum
America: Uncle Tom’s cabin in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s eponymous novel (1852).
Stowe offered a domestic image of bondage that would have been thoroughly familiar to
her primarily northern, white, middle-class audience.
2
But her depiction only partially
conveyed the realities of late antebellum slave life. Stowe could envision slaves using
popular patriotic and decorative images that memorialized national leaders and enlivened
their cabin walls; she was unable, however, to envision what had transpired in slave
culture since the 1840s: slaves had begun buying, obtaining, and exchanging photographs
– with their own money and of their own volition. In the hands of Stowe, as in those of
American historians writing from the 1850s to the present, this visual world has remained
invisible.
Of course this omission is not due to a lack of historical interest in the lives of
antebellum slaves. Our knowledge of their experiences has grown immensely over the

1
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly (New York: Penguin
Books, 1981), 68.
2
Stowe did not seek to justify this vision in The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Prints of George
Washington were some of the most commonly displayed images in early republican and
antebellum America. See Wendy Wick Reaves and Sally Pierce, “Translations from the Plate:
The Marketplace of Public Portraiture,” in Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth &
Hawes, eds. Grant B. Romer and Brian Wallis (New York: Steidl, George Eastman House, and
the International Center of Photography, 2005), 91.
68

past four decades. Offering a needed corrective to Stanley Elkins’s victimization thesis,
scholars of the 1970s offered path-breaking analyses of the songs and stories, family ties
and religious practices of the antebellum slave quarters.
3
In their search for “autonomy”
manifested in culture and community, however, these studies often downplayed tensions
between slaves, and divorced slaves from the leaden weight of the forced labor that
defined them. Thus, this generation of scholarship “from below” drew critique from
scholars of the 1980s and 1990s.
4
Yet among the 1970s analyses of slaves’ expressive
culture, Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977) has stood the test of time because of its
profound insights into slaves’ imaginative life. Perhaps Levine’s most important insight
was that slaves’ system of representations, particularly slave tales, were not just escape
hatches from drudgery but a means to navigate the world. As he wrote, “for the most part
tales were the vehicle through which slaves rehearsed their tactics, laughed at the foibles
of their masters (and themselves), and taught their young the means they would have to

3
These studies include John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the
Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Herbert Gutman, The
Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976); George Rawick,
From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of a Black Community (Westport: Greenwood, 1972).
4
Clarence Walker made the most forceful critique. As he argued, in these studies “when slaves
(male and female) entered the quarters and joined their family and friends, the concerns and
problems that governed their workplace evaporated or disappeared.” See Clarence Walker,
Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville: The University of
Tennessee Press, 1991), xiii. See also Nell Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully
Loaded Cost Accounting,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, eds. Linda
K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1995), 125-146; and Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in
the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985). Other important works on
antebellum slaves include Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave
Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet:
Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to
Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave
Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
69

adopt in order to survive.”
5
Levine demonstrated that expressive performances served as
mechanisms of endurance.
More recent scholarship urges us to reassess this question of individual and
communal endurance through the lens of forced mobility within the South. Levine’s
study was wedded to the historiographical focus on plantation life as a spatially
organizing unit (as it focused on the question of how African culture transitioned into
African-American culture). Since the 1990s, however, historians such as Michael
Tadman, Walter Johnson, and Steve Deyle have shown that the domestic slave trade of
the nineteenth century deeply influenced the imaginations and experiences of slaves and
masters.
6
Scholars now estimate that the internal trade sold approximately 2,000,000
million slaves between 1820 and 1860, and broke up roughly one half of all slave
families.
7
The trade expanded southern slavery from its origins along the eastern
seaboard to the lower southern states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
8

For slaves, it produced persistent uncertainty – since a downturn in the market or a
master’s death could abruptly lead to sale and removal – as it created isolation,

5
Lawrence W. Levine Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought
from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 125.
6
For recent scholarship on the domestic slave trade in America, see Michael Tadman,
Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: The University
of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave
Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome
Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2003); Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the
Americas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); and Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The
Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For
abolitionists’ encounters with the trade, see James L. Huston, “The Experiential Basis of the
Northern Antislavery Impulse,” Journal of Southern History 56, no. 4 (1990).
7
Johnson, Soul By Soul, 7; Lacy Ford, “Reconsidering the Internal Slave Trade: Paternalism,
Markets, and the Character of the Old South,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in
the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 146.
8
Calvin Schermerhorn, Money Over Mastery, Family Over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum
Upper South (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 3.
70

loneliness, and longing.
9
Scholars have only begun to illuminate how slaves responded
to the circumstances of domestic human trafficking. Most notably, historian Phillip
Troutman has offered a thoughtful and innovate assessment of how a small number of
literate slaves maintained affective ties through sentimental letter writing.
10
Troutman’s
work stands on the brink of a broader reassessment of slaves’ expressive culture – one
mindful of the question of endurance and focused on the conditions of immobility and
forced mobility.
While we cannot reduce the meanings of slaves’ photographs to the context of the
slave trade any more than we can empty them into the category of “resistance,” it is
abundantly clear that slaves used photographs as a matter of course when a family
member was sold, just as whites did when family members moved away. The stakes
were of course higher for African Americans, who could not look forward to future
reunions as whites could. Photographs were prized possessions for many whites; for
many enslaved people they were essential means of keeping a loved one’s memory from
fading.
11

9
Walter Johnson, “Introduction: The Future Store,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave
Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 12-13.
10
Phillip Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White: Sentiment and the Slave Market
Revolution,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, eds. Edward E. Baptist and
Stephanie M. H. Camp (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), 211-242. Heather
Andrew Williams incorporates slaves’ letters as evidence, and draws upon the methods of the
history of emotions, in her exploration of enslaved people’s feelings in relation to the trade. See
Heather Andrew Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family
Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Though not focused
in particular on expressive culture, Calvin Schermerhorn has illuminated how slaves built social
networks in response to the slave trade in Money Over Mastery.
11
This chapter does not intervene in the debate over whether slaves maintained and sought a
nuclear family, as Herbert Gutman argues, or whether they positioned a “malleable extended
family” as their ideal, as Brenda Stevenson asserts. The evidence I have found reveals
photographic exchanges within nuclear families, but this does little to disprove Stevenson’s
arguments. See Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, and Brenda E. Stevenson,
71

Slave narratives, newspapers, and photographers’ records demonstrate that slaves
mailed images to sold family members, stowed images of sold family members in their
cabins, and carried those images on their persons. Photography was in many ways
uniquely suited to the task of offsetting social and geographic instability. While its
portability offered the capacity for linking lives across distance and for keeping and
concealing unique mementoes, its visuality made literacy unnecessary for
communication. As slaves lacked control over the mobility of their bodies and the
categorical breakdown of these bodies into marketplace values, photography might have
given them a heightened sense of possession over their bodies. It did give them a new
way to endure the threat and actuality of constant separation before 1865. It would give
them a way to strengthen and re-build social ties in freedom.

Before slaveholders began viewing photographs of their slaves in the 1840s,
slaves had actually spent decades observing their owners’ images. While masters’
landscape and portrait paintings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century rarely
pictured slaves as central subjects, these images were not insignificant in the everyday
lives of some slaves. When enslaved people entered the wealthiest masters’ homes they
entered virtual galleries; some remembered the pictures. As Frederick Douglass recalled
upon leaving Colonel Lloyd’s plantation to return to Baltimore, “I had the strongest
desire to see Baltimore. Cousin Tom, though not fluent in speech, had inspired me with
that desire by his eloquent description of the place. I could never point out any thing at
the Great House, no matter how beautiful or powerful, but that he had seen something at

Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
72

Baltimore far exceeding, both in beauty and strength, the object which I pointed out to
him. Even the Great House itself, with all its pictures, was far inferior to many buildings
in Baltimore.”
12
Disdain and admiration were not mutually exclusive for Douglass,
whose perception of grandeur manifested itself in image-consumption as well as urban
spectatorship. Meanwhile, Daphne Williams, a slave in Florida, remarked that in her
mistress’s house, “They have they ownself painted in pictures on the wall, jus’ as big as
they is. They have them in big frames like gold. And they have big mirrors from the
floor to the ceilin’. You could see your ownself walk in them.”
13
Mirrors displayed in
slaveholders’ homes gave both whites and blacks the opportunity for self-visualization.
Paintings, moreover, forged a shared viewing experience. Yet the means for self-
presentation within paintings divided slave from free in the nineteenth century.
Some masters believed painted portraits could serve as sentimental touchstones to
bridge the cultural gulf that separated blacks and whites. Historian Erskine Clarke has
documented a revealing moment in which John Jones brought a painted portrait of his
deceased father, slaveholding patriarch Joseph Jones, back to his plantation home in
Liberty County, Georgia. John opened the portrait and left the house. When he returned,
he found one of the family’s slaves – the old driver Pulaski – “bending over the picture in
a most solemn attentive manner.” John related how Pulaski exclaimed, “Massa know me,
but he wont talk to me. He see me, he know me, but he wont speak to me.’’ According
to John, a weeping Pulaski later remarked, “We are so thankful that you brought old

12
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and American Slave (New
York: Anchor Books, 1989), 31.
13
Daphne Williams, WPA Slave Narrative Project, Texas Narratives, Volume 16, Part 4, pg 160,
Federal Writer's Project, United States Work Projects Administration (USWPA), Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress.
73

master to see us.”
14
Pulaski could surely distinguish between Joseph Jones and a painting
of Joseph Jones; he may have hoped Jones would speak to him through his mind, and
John may have understood. Recounted by John, the incident goes much further in
revealing white perceptions of black understandings of portraiture than it does in
illuminating slaves’ actual perceptions. Slaveholders such as John found in large
portraits a way to project and imagine their own benevolence through the eyes of their
slaves.
Two recollections of slaves describe how slaveholders also sought to use personal
portraits to supervise bondspeople. As Francis Fedric recalled, when he was a teenager
his “mistress was anxious to teach me to pick some wool. ‘You must pick it very
quickly,’ she said. ‘Your master's brother will watch you, and tell me if you don't.’ She
placed me in a room where my master's brother's portrait hung on the wall. ‘There he is,’
she said, ‘looking at you. Now, mind, you must pick away as fast as you can. Don't stop,
or he will come and tell me.’”
15
Fedric described how he went over to the wall and
touched the image, at which point his mistress returned and immediately flogged him as
punishment. “She was no doubt annoyed that I had found out she was fooling me,”
Fedric noted. “When working within sight of the picture afterwards, I would say, ‘I's not
going to work. You don't know nothing. They don't give us nothing.’”
16

14
Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005),
245-246.
15
This incident likely occurred in the early 1820s. See Fedric, Francis. 1863. Slave Life in
Virginia and Kentucky; or, Fifty Years of Slavery in the Southern States of America.
Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 1999. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/fedric/menu.html
16
Fedric, Francis. 1863. Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky; or, Fifty Years of Slavery in the
Southern States of America. Documenting the American South. University Library, The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/fedric/menu.html
74

Published in 1863, Fedric’s story seems at first a fabrication – a creative new way
to present the stifling power of a slaveholding mistress. But in the 1930s, former slave
Julia Blanks remembered a similar incident from the antebellum era: “When my aunt
would go to clean house, she (Mrs. Wilcox) would turn all the pictures in the house but
one, the meanest looking one – you know how it always looks like a picture is watching
you every where you go – and she would tell her if she touched a thing or left a bit of dirt
or if she didn’t do it good, this picture would tell.”
17
As it seems unlikely that Blanks
would concoct such a specific and unusual story, her recollection likely indicates the
great lengths whites went to extend their visual authority through the watchful eyes of
portraits. At the very least, we can interpret these stories as slaves’ and former slaves’
expressions of surveillance as an unremitting practice in the plantation household.
Long spectators in the master’s gallery, antebellum slaves also stood as an
audience for religious images. Christian iconography served an important visual aid for
the white missionaries who, especially after the 1830s, sought to convert and instruct
slaves as part of a broader movement to preserve the peculiar institution by reforming it.
At missionary gatherings, Charles Colcock Jones, an influential Presbyterian minister in
Liberty County, Georgia, supplemented hymns and prayers with “scripture cards.”
Produced by the American Sunday School Union, these large posters showed scenes
ranging from Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark to the Tower of Babel. Jones portrayed a
common ocular-centric disposition when he declared the usefulness of these images:

17
Julia Blanks, WPA Slave Narrative Project, Texas Narratives, Volume 16, Part 1, pg. 4, Federal
Writer’s Project, United States Work Projects Administration (USWPA), Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress.
75

sight, he argued, “greatly assists the memory.”
18
A tool of religious instruction, religious
imagery also served as a means to represent missionary work to outsiders, as this half-
stereograph (a form popular among middle-class consumers) illustrates (Figure 2.1).

Fig. 2.1. Osborn and Durbec, Rockville, S.C., half-stereograph, 1860
19

The Charlestonian photographic duo of Osborn and Durbec made the image at a slave
chapel in the sea islands south of Charleston.
20
They constructed a scene that stressed

18
Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005),
126-127.
19
Courtesy of the collections of Robin Stanford.
20
This was likely a slave chapel built by the Episcopal Church in Rockville, an area on
Wadmalaw Island. The Episcopal Church built St. John’s Church on John’s Island, just north of
Wadmalaw Island, in 1817. By the late 1840s, the church had added a rectory, a Sunday school,
and a chapel at Rockville; by the 1850s it boasted hundreds of black members. During the late
1850s, Rev. Paul Gervais Jenkins began ministering to the slaves at the recently built Zion
76

slaves’ attentiveness to the crucifixion. But most didacticism went unpublicized. In
plantation households, owners used images to maintain domestic control. While
slaveholding women such as Francis Fedric’s mistress used personal images as visual
scare-tactics to deter misdeeds, they supplemented this practice with religious imagery.
As one former bondswoman recalled about bondage in Texas, “On Sunday mornings
before breakfast our Mistress would call us together, read de Bible and show us pictures
of de Devil in de Bible and tell us dat if we was not good and if we would steal and tell
lies dat old Satan would git us.”
21
Cautionary images on Sunday mornings helped
southern whites to instruct slaves of the invisible forces (such as the devil) that monitored
their behavior.
By the late 1830s, slaves had served as image consumers in at least three ways: as
casual observers of paintings; as audiences for masters’ portraits; and as subjects of
religious instruction. The emergence of the daguerreotype altered their relation to
mainstream visual culture on two fronts. First, as the slave narrative of Allen
Allensworth reveals, the materiality of photographs gave bondspeople new opportunities
for resistance in visual form. At the beginning of the Civil War, Allensworth’s master,
Fred Scruggs, departed Louisville to travel south for business. Scruggs left Allensworth
to work on the nearby farm of James Ficklin in Jefferson County. By his own account,
Allensworth quickly found solidarity with other slaves on the farm, bound as they were

Chapel, six miles away from the village of Rockville. See Albert Sidney Thomas, A Historical
Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South Carolina, 1820-1957 (Columbia: R.L.
Bryan Company, 1957), 339.
21
Ida Henry, WPA Slave Narrative Project, Oklahoma Narratives, Volume 13, Federal Writer’s
Project, United States Work Projects Administration (USWPA), Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress. On devotional and didactic images in nineteenth-century American Protestantism, see
David Morgan, Protestants & Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass
Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
77

by a common thirst for education and a mutual enemy in Ficklin.
22
But they did not
express their antagonism through the well-known conventions of everyday dissent – by
breaking tools or stealing. They did so with photographs:
Mr. Ficklin was what they called a "mean man." So much so, that the boys all hoped that
he would take sick and die. They resorted to every known device to realize their hopes.
They tried every remedy known to the superstitious among them. They had heard that if
the face of the picture of a person were covered with ink, and the picture buried in the
road where a great many people would walk or drive over it, the owner would dwindle to
death. So some of the boys took from the house a daguerreotype picture of their common
enemy, covered the face with ink, buried the picture, and waited for him to die,--but he
didn't die. This superstition, firmly believed in by the slaves, never worked where white
people were concerned.
23

Allensworth and his fellow bondsmen had made the daguerreotype of Ficklin into a
counter charm. Historian of slave religion Albert J. Raboteau argues that the “use of
charms and counter charms, to harm or to ward off harm, is an essential trait of
conjuring.” Raboteau details how slaves used materials such as hair, nail clippings,
clothing, dirt, powders, roots, herbs for “fixing” someone – for causing or curing
illness.
24
Photographs, it appears, offered new tools for “fixing” southern masters that
focused in particular on the meanings of the face and the body. Some slaves understood
photographs not simply as aesthetic visions but also as material objects that contained the
souls of sitters.
Photography brought about a second and even more dramatic shift: it allowed
individual bondspeople to become practitioners (rather than only spectators) of images.

22
Alexander, Charles. 1914. Battles and Victories of Allen Allensworth, A.M., Ph.D., Lieutenant-
Colonel, Retired, U.S. Army. Documenting the American South. University Library, The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/alexander/menu.html
23
Alexander, Charles. 1914. Battles and Victories of Allen Allensworth, A.M., Ph.D., Lieutenant-
Colonel, Retired, U.S. Army. Documenting the American South. University Library, The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/alexander/menu.html
24
Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South, rev. ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 82.
78

Since photographers set out across the highways and byways of the South, since
photographs were far more affordable than paintings, and since owners initially did little
to restrain slaves’ access to photo-galleries, slaves found ways of taking part in the
broader practices of commodified visual self-representation. Their active participation
reveals that the leveling effects of the daguerreotype – often seen as opening up
portraiture for the middle-class – were far more pronounced than historians of
photography have suspected. More broadly, it illuminates a specific way in which
slaves’ culture changed with broader trends in nineteenth-century consumer culture.
Urban slaves (and rural slaves hired out in cities) undoubtedly had the easiest
access to daguerreotypes. The conditions of bondage in cities such as Baltimore,
Richmond, and Charleston gave these slaves greater freedom of movement and more
cash in their pockets. Likewise, photographic galleries were concentrated in cities. In
fact, black abolitionist photographer James Presley Ball remembered selling photographic
portraits to slaves in a gallery very close to the Virginia state capitol in Richmond in
1846. As Ball remarked, “Virginians rushed in crowds to [my] room; all classes, white
and black, bond and free sought to have their lineaments, stamped, by the artist who
painted with the Sun’s rays.”
25
As Ball portrayed his enslaved clientele as conspicuous
(rather than illicit) portrait sitters, he also suggested how photography had injected a form
of novelty into slaves’ lives.
Slaves may have also bought portraits from the most prominent white urban-
studio daguerreans in the South. The logbook of artist George Smith Cook offers a

25
James Presley Ball, Ball’s splendid mammoth pictorial tour of the United States: comprising
views of the African slave trade, of Northern and Southern cities, of cotton and sugar plantations,
of the Mississippi, Ohio and Susquehanna Rivers, Niagara Falls, &c. (Cincinnati: A. Pugh,
1855), 8.
79

window into this image consumption in early 1850s Charleston. While Cook spent the
mid- to late 1840s traveling through Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, he established a
permanent gallery in Charleston in 1849, and worked there until after the Civil War. As
he became a leading national artist, Cook continued to photograph slaves at the behest of
their masters.
26
But, as his logbook shows, Cook also made numerous daguerreotypes of
African Americans who came to his studio unaccompanied by whites, images that ranged
in cost from $2.50 to $4.75. Cook’s language may reveal clues to these sitters’ identities.
While, in November of 1849, Cook recorded images of “Two Colored Ladies,” in June of
1851 he made a sixth-plate daguerreotype of a “Negro Girl.”
27
Cook may have simply
used the terms “lady” and “girl” to designate the relative ages of free black sitters.
(Antebellum Charleston did boast a relatively large and successful free black
community.
28
) But Cook might also have used terms such as “lady” and “girl” (as well
as “colored” and “negro”) to designate free blacks and slaves, respectively. At the very
least, his logbook reveals the interracial nature of urban-gallery consumption.
Itinerant daguerreans also diminished the divide between slave and free, black and
white, by linking rural areas with broader patterns of image-taking. The bondspeople of
Winchester, Virginia – in the northwestern part of the state – discovered white itinerant

26
See, for instance, the quarter-plate daguerreotype for “Master Leslie Nichols Col Boy” in
January of 1850. Entry for January 14, 1850, Account Books 1845-1861, George Smith Cook
Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Even for this notation,
though, it is difficult to know whether this slave came in with Leslie Nichols or whether he came
in on his own. The same is true for a notation in which Mr. [Motte? Martha? Mary?] Pringle
purchased a quarter-plate daguerreotype for $5.00 of herself and was followed by “Negro 1/6
3.00.” See entry for August 20, 1851, Account Books 1845-1861, George Smith Cook
Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
27
Entries for November 10, 1849, and June 13, 1851, Account Books 1845-1861, George Smith
Cook Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
28
Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: The
New Press, 1974), 221, 236.
80

John W. Bear to be a particularly welcoming traveling salesman. Born in Maryland to
“poor but respectable parents,” Bear spent the 1820s and 1830s as a blacksmith, learning
the trade in Ohio. Since 1840, he had made a name for himself as the “Buckeye
Blacksmith” – a popular stump speaker for the Whig party.
29
Accustomed to the itinerant
lifestyle, familiar with small tools, and seeking to make money, Bear took up
daguerreotypy in 1845. He spent the later part of the decade traveling throughout the
Northeast and the South, selling images from Boston, Massachusetts and Alexandria,
Virginia to Wilmington, Delaware and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
30
Bear arrived in
Winchester, Virginia in the fall of 1847. As he recalled, “I opened my business here with
the fairest prospects that I had ever had. The people had never had a picture taken for less
than three dollars, so when I hung out my sign at one dollar and a half everybody came to
see me….”
31
As Bear sold cheap pictures to whites, he advertised an especially low rate
for the local slaves:
[i]n this place I reserved every Friday afternoon for colored people, this seemed to please
both white and colored; I also published that slaves would be taken for fifty cents less
than others, this made me very popular with them, they came in droves to see me on their
day, the white people all agreed that my plan was a good one, so much so that the owners
of them willingly gave them time to get their pictures taken, and many of them came with
them to see that they got good ones taken.
32

By catering to bond and free, Bear sold over 1,500 photographs in Winchester from the
fall of 1847 to the spring of 1848. (Bear attributed the eventual demise of his business to
a nearby lottery office where he gambled away all of his money.) It is unclear why local
slave owners encouraged transactions between their slaves and Bear. Two scenarios

29
John W. Bear, The Life and Travels of John W. Bear, “The Buckeye Blacksmith.” Written by
Himself (Baltimore: D. Binswanger & Co., 1873), 23-108.
30
Bear, The Life and Travels of John W. Bear, 138-146.
31
Bear, The Life and Travels of John W. Bear, 147-148.
32
Bear, The Life and Travels of John W. Bear, 148.
81

seem likely: they might have seen this allowance as an extension of their own
benevolence. They might also have seen it as a new way to control slaves’ self-
presentation and self-definition, much in the same way they had long sought to control
the naming of slaves.
33
But this much is clear: the mechanization of photography had
allowed Bear, a blacksmith, to become an image-maker. That very same mechanization
allowed him to make portraits cheaply enough to cater to slaves.
34
The modernization of
portraiture opened up the opportunity for slaves to visually represent themselves, linking
their means of expression to the southern marketplace.
We might suspect that photographs would have proven particularly important for
enslaved people in the Chesapeake region. A main entry-point for African slaves in the
colonial era, the Chesapeake hit an economic downturn in the late eighteenth century, as
decades of tobacco cultivation had sapped its soil of vitality; the region turned into the
primary exporter of slaves. Masters and traders began selling slaves, or moving with

33
On naming, see Joyner, Down By the Riverside, 217-222.
34
Historians of photography have not investigated the ways in which slaves actively used the new
medium as it emerged. They have, however, written at length about the fifteen daguerreotypes
Louis Agassiz, a Harvard scientist, commissioned of a group of South Carolina slaves in 1850.
Agassiz sought these photographs to corroborate the theory of polygenesis. Molly Rogers’s
recent book, Delia’s Tears, offers the fullest historical account of this incident. But her attempt
to imagine what these slaves felt at the time they were photographed – written in brief, fictional
interludes between chapters – poorly accounts for late-antebellum slaves’ historical experiences
regarding both images and technology. For instance, seeking to convey an enslaved woman
named Delia’s inner thoughts, Rogers writes, “She was not supposed to be there. Nothing in her
life so far had prepared her for this. All those years of working, sweating, laboring in the fields
and later in the forge, none of it had so much as hinted at this. Oh, she knew there were places,
other places where everything looked and smelled different, where the air seemed lighter and the
light less harsh – she knew these places existed, but she was never supposed to be in one.
Perhaps she had seen a photograph, once, in the great house. But she herself was never supposed
to have her picture made. This was no place for a slave. This much she knew.” Rogers assumes
that a slave such as Delia had little knowledge of photography or a daguerreotype studio by 1850.
Yet as I show in this chapter, it was entirely possible that a slave such as Delia would have been
familiar with the medium and its social spaces by this moment. See Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears:
Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010).
82

them, to the expanding Upper South (Kentucky and Tennessee) as well as to the
Carolinas. At the turn of the nineteenth century, various factors pointed slave coffles
increasingly towards the southwest. The invention of the cotton gin (1793) along with
the purchase of Louisiana (1803) created a boom in cotton and sugar production.
Government wars eradicated the Indian population of these lands, opening up new
territory for white settlers, who migrated to the new states of Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana.
35
In Virginia, masters and slave traders brought slaves to Washington,
Richmond, and Norfolk, where they then shipped them by land and sea to markets in
New Orleans, Natchez, and Mobile. In all, historians estimate that 1,000,000 slaves were
shipped from the upper to the lower South between 1790 and 1860.
36

This constant market of human commodification was a conspicuous element in
John Quincy Adams’s everyday experience as a slave in Winchester, Virginia. As
Adams remembered, Winchester was “one of the handsomest little towns I ever saw,”
with “some very fine hotels, the best one was called Taylor's Hotel, where all the "big
bugs" stopped; and I will tell you who else stopped there – those great and unthinking
gentlemen who called themselves Negro Traders. You could see them walking around
with their bags of silver and gold that they had received from selling the poor slaves.”
37

The constant sight of slave traders must have played a role in propelling the slaves of
Winchester “in droves” to the mobile gallery of John W. Bear. They could obtain
indexical portraits to identify loved ones in case of separation.

35
Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
36
Johnson, Soul By Soul, 5-7.
37
Adams, John Quincy. 1872. Narrative of the Life of John Quincy Adams, When in Slavery, and
Now as a Freeman. Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/adams/menu.html
83

These likenesses were part of a broader realm of property ownership for
nineteenth-century slaves. Over the past three decades, a sizeable contingent of
historians has shown how many slaves in antebellum America accumulated and spent
cash.
38
Many scholars have focused on whether the bulk of slaves’ consumption took
place as “underground” interactions between slaves and non-elite whites or as public
interactions between slaves and white shopkeepers. In doing so, these historians have
uncovered ample evidence for both types of consumption. Moreover, they have shown
that slaves’ internal economy and property ownership transcended the particular labor
roles and labor regimes of the South – from privileged house slaves to ordinary field
hands, from the task system in the South Carolina and Georgia low country to the gang
system that thrived across much of the rest of the region.
39
As historian Dylan

38
Given the sizeable scholarly literature on the internal economy, one might expect that past
scholars would have uncovered the history of slaves’ using photographs. Yet this history has
likely remained hidden for two reasons. First, George Smith Cook’s papers stand as the only
archived records from a southern photographer. Second, one of the main source-bases used by
scholars such as Dylan Penningroth – the Southern Claims Commission – would not have
detailed photographs amongst slaves’ property. As Penningroth notes, during the early 1870s the
Southern Claims Commission sought to “hear claims from Unionist southerners who had lost
‘stores or supplies…taken or furnished for the use of the [Union] army’ during the Civil War.”
Almost five hundred former slaves filed claims. Yet the parameters of the claims – “movable
property taken by Union troops for legitimate army use” – meant that slaves would not have
sought compensation for photographs. See Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African
American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 2003), 5, 139. Other works that address the internal economy include
Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the
Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1993); Philip D. Morgan, “The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century
Low Country,” The Journal of Southern History 49, no. 3 (1983); David E. Paterson, “Slavery,
Slaves, and Cash in a Georgia Village, 1825-1865,” The Journal of Southern History 75, no. 4
(2009); Timothy J. Lockley, “Trading Encounters Between Non-Elite Whites and African
Americans in Savannah, 1790-1860,” The Journal of Southern History 66, no. 1 (2000); Jeff
Forret, “Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy of the Rural Carolinas,” The
Journal of Southern History 70, no. 4 (2004); Loren Schweninger, “Slave Independence and
Enterprise in South Carolina, 1780-1865,” The South Carolina Magazine 93, no. 2 (1992); Larry
E. Hudson, Jr., To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina
(Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997).
39
Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 46-51, 77.
84

Penningroth notes, “slaves buying and selling small items was probably a familiar sight
for people in nearly every part of the South before the Civil War.”
40

It is obvious but important to remember that slaves as a social class were defined
by extreme poverty. As within any class, however, internal diversity manifested itself, as
slaves took part in the economy in various ways. At southern markets, women primarily
sold the handcrafts they made, and the fruits, vegetables, and staple crops (such as corn)
that slaves grew in their own gardens.
41
The overwhelmingly male job of boatman could
turn water travel into income. Some boatmen owned their vessels and used them to
transport passengers over large and tiny southern tributaries alike.
42
Hiring out one’s
labor could also reap small rewards, and historians estimate that, in 1860, as much as 31
percent of the urban enslaved population (and 6 percent of the urban population) did so.
43

In Upson County, Georgia, slaves could earn 50 cents per day by hiring themselves out to
local businesses.
44
Skilled slaves such as carpenters and coopers stood to profit the most;
historian Roderick McDonald has shown how three enslaved coopers in Louisiana
received sums including $19.50, $16, and $8 respectively for exceeding their quotas of
barrel and hogshead production.
45
In short, slaves’ practices of entrepreneurship made
the purchase of photographs possible.

40
Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 78.
41
Slaves also sold crops on plantations to their owners. In Louisiana, for instance, slaves sold
pumpkins in the mid-1840s for 2 cents apiece; they garnered 37.5-70 cents per barrel of corn
from the 1830s to the 1850s. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves, 53-70.
42
Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 65.
43
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 110.
44
Paterson, “Slavery, Slaves, and Cash in a Georgia Village, 1825-1865,” 892. By comparison,
the average free laborer in 1856 earned $1.22 per day, and artisans earned $1.94 per day. See
Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 78.
45
McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves, 61. Historian Charles Joyner has
also noted that, in the low country rice plantations of South Carolina, “Good carpenters were in
demand and were able to hire out their labor off the plantation, paying their masters a portion of
85

The avenues for photographic purchases – from gallery owners and traveling
peddlers – fell in line with slaves’ broader patterns of consumption. Ex-slave Charles
Ball recalled how, in South Carolina and Georgia, “the store-keepers are always ready to
accommodate the slaves, who are frequently better customers than many white people;
because the former always pay cash, whilst the latter almost always require credit.”
46

Sometimes the entrepreneurs came to the slaves. One Canadian traveler observed
considerable economic activity between boat-peddlers and blacks on his travels between
Natchez and New Orleans: “the small vessels which, owned by pedlars [sic], pass from
plantation to plantation, trading with the negroes principally, taking in exchange the
articles which they raise….”
47
This peddler-slave exchange included transactions in
visual prints. Martha Stuart, a slave on the Black Creek plantation in Louisiana,
described how bondspeople had “‘pictures on the wall’ in their houses and would either
‘send off and buy ‘em’ or else acquire them from ‘picture men [who] come thru the
country.’”
48
Such itinerants, who passed swiftly and quietly through the southern
countryside and along the southern waterways, created more anonymous outlets than
shops for slaves to purchase goods of all kinds.
Slaves’ material acquisitions represented a negotiation that often fit neatly into the
material needs and everyday wants of slaves and the efficiency demands of owners.

As
Dylan Penningroth notes, “slaveowners stood to save a lot of money because the average
cotton plantation spent more than one-fifth of its total output on feeding and clothing the

their income,” though Joyner does not specify the amount of money these slaves made. Joyner,
Down By the Riverside, 73.
46
Quoted in Paterson, “Slavery, Slaves, and Cash in a Georgia Village, 1825-1865,” 890.
47
Quoted in McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves, 70.
48
McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves, 146.
86

slaves.”
49
By purchasing food and drink, house wares and livestock, dresses and shoes,
slaves did little to unravel the southern power structure.
50
What deeply concerned
southern whites, however, was that slaves would consume antislavery messages through
written and visual materials – a concern that grew more pronounced in the late 1820s and
1830s because of the circulation of David Walker’s Appeal and the abolitionists’ postal
campaign of 1835. Slaves’ displays of antislavery images, for instance, could lead to
violent punishment. When Missouri master William Lewis searched the room of his
slave Mrs. Jackson, he found “a picture of President Lincoln, cut from a newspaper,
hanging in her room.” She told her master “she liked” the portrait, and he responded with
violence: he “knocked her down three times, and sent her to the trader’s yard for a month
as punishment.”
51

How did photography fit into this negotiation between masters and slaves?
Southern whites do not seem to have universally condemned slaves’ photographic
consumption. But during the 1850s consumption of photographs became paradoxically
easier and harder for slaves. On the one hand, slaves (like all Americans) surely found it
progressively easier to seek out and afford personal portraits, for the medium had grown
from an unusual scientific curiosity in the 1840s to a ubiquitous presence in the 1860s.
Image prices dropped across the country and the number of southern itinerant and gallery
photographers increased dramatically. Most slaves would have struggled to purchase a
daguerreotype in the mid-1840s, when the average portrait cost $5.00. (There is no
evidence that other daguerreans followed John W. Bear in lowering prices to a dollar for

49
Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 55.
50
McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves, 80; Paterson, “Slavery, Slaves, and
Cash in a Georgia Village, 1825-1865,” 918.
51
Camp, Closer to Freedom, 115-116.
87

slaves.) Even in the average price range, though, some slaves were willing and able to
buy “luxury goods.” In Louisiana, for example, a slave of Colonel Pugh’s had his watch
repaired for three dollars; meanwhile Elias, a slave on the Gay Plantation, paid three
dollars for a “Fine Russian Hat” in New Orleans.
52
By the mid-1850s, many
photographers advertised daguerreotypes for 25-cents; by the early 1860s, artists
everywhere sold a dozen cartes de visite for a dollar.
53
This drop in prices indirectly
legalized the sale of photographs to slaves in some states. In Georgia, for instance, an
1833 law required the master’s written permission for a slave to purchase anything
costing more than one dollar: by the 1850s, however, this law no longer applied to
photographs.
54

As price shifts helped slaves to afford photographs, changes in production time
also likely facilitated slaves’ consumption. The transition from painting to daguerreotypy
drastically reduced the duration of sitting for one’s portrait, to as low as an average of 15-
20 seconds in the 1850s.
55
Moreover, the introduction of the ambrotype, in 1854,
allowed sitters to obtain their images on the spot.
56
If particular slaves sought their
portraits against the wishes of their masters, the sharp drop in production time would
have reduced the risk of being caught.
On the other hand, the sectional crisis intensified in the 1850s, and photographic
transactions grew increasingly dangerous for bondspeople and the artists who catered to

52
McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves, 81, 84.
53
Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.,
1938), 81; Andrea L. Volpe, “Cheap Pictures: Cartes de Visite Portrait Photographs and Visual
Culture in the United States, 1860-1877” (PhD. diss, The Graduate School – New Brunswick
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1999), 44-45.
54
Paterson, “Slavery, Slaves, and Cash in a Georgia Village, 1825-1865,” 852.
55
Taft, Photography and the American Scene, 98.
56
On the technological shift to the ambrotype see Beaumont Newhall, The History of
Photography, rev. ed. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 63.
88

them. In 1860, the American Anti-Slavery Society reported the execution of a southern
daguerreotypist who was charged with inciting slaves to revolt against their masters. The
Society’s A fresh Catalogue of Southern Outrages upon Northern Citizens reprinted a
notice from the Mail of Montgomery, Alabama that described how “A Man by the name
of Palmer, a daguerrean artist, has been detected at Opelika, Ala., tampering with the
slaves of John Smith and others, between Opelika and Auburn. He gave several negroes
bowie knives, and otherwise attempted to instil[sic] into their minds seditious acts. He
was detected, pursued and apprehended, and the proof being positive, he is to be hung at
Auburn to-day.”
57
This “man by the name of Palmer” was likely E.G. Palmer, who had
been working in Opelika since at least September of 1860.
58
It is unclear whether Palmer
gave slaves bowie knives when he photographed them, or whether he kept his business
and his subversive actions separate. From the language in the article, it appears that
Palmer’s work as a daguerrean was incidental to his punishment. But this was not always
the case in the Deep South.
In May of 1859, a daguerreotypist named Robbins was flogged for taking pictures
of black subjects in Alabama. As the Eutaw Alabama Whig triumphantly reported,
Warning to Evil Doers – We learn from a friend that a Deguarrean Artist, Robbins by
name, was found on Sunday last in his room in Warsaw, busily engaged taking pictures
for negroes. He was waited on forthwith, summary punishment was dealt out to him with
a rope’s end, and he was then ordered to pack up his traps and leave instanter. Which
request was readily complied with.
59

57
William Lloyd Garrison, A Fresh Catalogue of Southern Outrages Upon Northern Citizens
(New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860), 31. Digitized by Samuel J. May Anti-
Slavery Collection, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Library:
http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=mayantislavery;idno=38921711
58
Frances Robb, “Checklist of Photographers and Others Associated with Photography in
Alabama, 1839-1861,” in The Daguerreian Annual: Official Yearbook of the Daguerreian
Society, eds Mark S. Johnson (Pittsburgh: The Daguerreian Society, 2004), 239.
59
“Warning to Evil Doers,” Eutaw Alabama Whig, May 5, 1859.
89

Warsaw was a small river landing on the Tombigbee River in Sumter County. It was the
type of place a floating daguerreotype gallery might stop in the South. Several factors
suggest that the “negroes” to whom Robbins catered on this Sunday by the river were
probably slaves. First, Sumter County had a large enslaved population of 75.3 percent in
1860, and the state of Alabama had a free-black population of only 2,690 in 1860 (as
compared to an enslaved population of approximately 435,000).
60
Second, the fact that
these blacks sought their likenesses on a Sunday was not insignificant. On Sunday,
bondspeople, particularly field hands, received time off from work, and they used this
time to sell their goods and spend their earnings in town.
61
Third, Robbins’s punishment
– presumably a whipping with the “rope’s end” – reflected laws regarding economic
exchanges between whites and slaves in many southern states. In 1857, for instance, the
South Carolina legislature had passed a law detailing how a person convicted for a
second time for trading with slaves should be whipped – “not exceeding thirty-nine
lashes.”
62
In general these laws were only partially enforced in the South, suggesting
how subversive this photographic transaction must have seemed to the whites in Warsaw.
The Eutaw Alabama Whig went no further in identifying Robbins. Though he too
might have been an abolitionist, he was probably one of the many southern whites who,

60
On Sumter County statistics, see “Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the
Southern States of the United States, Compiled from the Census of 1860,” Drawn by E.
Hergesheimer, Engraved by Th. Leonhardt, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/query/h?ammem/gmd:@field%28NUMBER+@band%28g3861e+cw0013200%29%29;
statistics on Alabama accessed through website of Alabama Department of Archives and History,
http://www.archives.state.al.us/timeline/al1801.html
61
McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves, 68. As Timothy J. Lockley shows,
the issue of biracial trading on Sundays was controversial in Savannah from at least the 1820s
through the Civil War. See Lockley, “Trading Encounters Between Non-Elite Whites and
African Americans in Savannah, 1790-1860,” 40-48.
62
Quoted in Lockley, “Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy of the Rural
Carolinas,” 816.
90

despite state laws and local customs, catered to slaves to earn their livings.
63
The paper
also failed to mention what happened to the black portrait-seekers. If they were enslaved
and had acted covertly, then these African Americans might have drawn physical
punishment once they brought their images back home. As former slave Ben Brown
recalled, “De slaves wuz not allowed any learnin an’ if any books, papers or pictures wuz
foun’ among us we wuz whipped if we couldn’t explain where dey cum from.”
64
Like
Ben Brown’s master, the Eutaw Alabama Whig expressed similar concerns about the
power of images: its notice largely functioned as a cautionary tale to future “evil doers”
who might help local blacks obtain portraits. As this incident along the Tombigbee River
reveals, photographic transactions between artists and southern blacks – at least in the
Deep South states – had grown increasingly controversial and even dangerous by the eve
of the Civil War.
Nonetheless, slaves managed to acquire photographs. It is impossible to know
how many slaves acquired and used daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and cartes de
visite. Photographic ownership may have grown common for bondspeople in the years
prior to and during the Civil War, or at least prevalent enough so that most slaves knew
other slaves who owned portraits. Yet quantity alone does not signal historical
significance. A photographic portrait – which a slave could hold in the palm of her or his
hand – offered a visually realistic and portable surrogate of the body amidst the
oppressive violence of bondage. Evidence from slave narratives and abolitionist records

63
Timothy J. Lockley emphasizes how whites’ economic self-interests drove commercial
interactions with slaves. See Lockley, “Trading Encounters Between Non-Elite Whites and
African Americans in Savannah, 1790-1860.”
64
Ben Brown, WPA Slave Narrative Project, Ohio Narratives, Volume 12, pg 13, Federal
Writer's Project, United States Work Projects Administration (USWPA), Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress.
91

illustrates how photography gave slaves a new form of cultural mobility – the ability to
transcend one’s bodily immobility through the transport of images – to communicate. In
one sense, mailing photographs was an extremely common practice, by which all
Americans sought to reduce the physical and emotional distance between loved ones.
Scholars have tied the popularity of this practice in the United States to the sharply
increasing mobility that accompanied industrialization and urbanization in the North and
national expansion to the West.
65
But photographs also proved especially important
precisely because of the market conditions of slavery.
Slave narratives and rare slave letters suggest that slaves sought the virtual gaze
that photography offered. Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon: or Inside Views of Southern
Domestic Life (1861) published a letter written from Elizabeth Ramsey, still in slavery in
Texas, to her free daughter Louisa Picquet in Cincinnati. As the letter concluded, “I want
you to hav your ambrotipe taken also your children and send them to me I would giv this
world to see you and my sweet little children.”
66
It is unclear whether Ramsey actually
wrote this note herself. The editor of the narrative quickly assumed “some white person”
had written it. Other evidence, however, suggests this was a common sentiment for
slaves. Separated by sale, one enslaved daughter wrote to her father, “I want to see you
very bad and you to rite to me.”
67
As with any person distant from loved ones in the
antebellum era, slaves expressed the desire for the surrogate presence of portraits. But

65
David Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-
Century America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).
66
Picquet, Louisa and Hiram Mattison. 1861. Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, or Inside Views of
Southern Domestic Life. Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/picquet/menu.html
67
Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White,” 229.
92

theirs must have been a particularly powerful desire, since they were ripped from friends
and family and thrust into new communities of strangers.
Mailing pictures inside letters was possible after 1845, but it was no sure-fire way
for slaves to stay connected, for such exchanges involved the use of the mail, which in
turn required the help of a master or mistress.
68
For example, a slave named Owen, a
blacksmith and wheelwright living in Clear Springs, nearby Hagerstown, Maryland, was
separated from his wife and son at a Baltimore slave market. Once she was sold, as black
abolitionist William Still described, Owen “sent her his likeness and a dress; the latter
was received, and she was greatly delighted with it, but he never heard of her having
received his likeness.”
69
Since a photograph sent was no guarantee of a photograph
received, photographic mobility could sometimes only compound the sense of distance.
On occasion, however, slaves successfully used photographs to bridge the divide
wrought by the auction block. Take the story of John Quincy Adams, a slave in
Winchester, Virginia, who detailed a photographic exchange on the eve of the Civil War.
In 1857, Adams’s twin brother Aaron and his sister Sallie were sold away from
Winchester. Adams related how he was especially sad to have lost his twin Aaron,
recounting, “if I could just die to get rid of my sorrow and distress, I would be satisfied. I
could do no good, but suffered day and night for months and years.” Adams would not
hear from his sister again, but he did eventually regain contact with his brother Aaron,
who had been sold seven more times before finally ending up as a house slave in
Memphis. Around 1859, Aaron wrote to his family, and Adams told of the surprise he,
his oldest brother, and his father felt in receiving this letter. “What a rejoicing time we

68
Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White,” 229.
69
William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1871). Accessed
through Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15263/15263-h/15263-h.htm
93

had that Sunday,” he recalled. Since all were illiterate (Adams’s father and oldest brother
“could read print, but not writing”), they found a friend to read the letter, and to write one
back to Aaron. Soon thereafter, Aaron sent Adams another letter as well as “his picture,”
which was almost certainly a photograph, given the popularity and affordability of the
medium.
70
Though photographic consumption and slave sales occurred across the South,
it stands to reason that the circulation of Aaron Adams’s photograph was typical: the
exchange of slaves’ photographs mirrored the geographic thoroughfares of slave
trafficking.
Moreover, the exchange between Adams and his twin shows how photographic
mobility initiated a new form of communication between distant slaves. Historian Phillip
Troutman has documented the select population of literate slaves who, separated by sale,
used letters to keep connection and to commiserate over their fate.
71
Photographs
emerged within this tradition but also broadened it, for they made reading and writing
skills irrelevant. Though the South never enacted a comprehensive ban on slave reading,
a volatile mix of internal and external threats, including the infiltration of northern
literature such as David Walker’s incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
(1829) and Nat Turner’s shocking Virginia rebellion (1831), led to a series of restrictive
measures initiated by southern states in the early 1830s, and Virginia, North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Georgia banned the instruction of slaves until 1865.
72
Historians
estimate that less than 25% of the enslaved population acquired reading skills, and an

70
Adams, John Quincy. 1872. Narrative of the Life of John Quincy Adams, When in Slavery, and
Now as a Freeman. Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/adams/menu.html
71
Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White.”
72
Janet Duitsman Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion
in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 12-32.
94

even a smaller percentage (5% or less) learned how to write.
73
Such measures deeply
divided enslaved from free when it came to the means for acquiring knowledge and for
communicating with each other through the written word. These barriers further tied
literacy to a sense of pride for the slaves who could achieve it. Such effects are well
known by historians, but the less obvious result of literacy curbs was that they made
visual communication more important to slaves: though John Quincy Adams and his
family members could not read the letter written by Aaron, they required no special skills
for viewing his image.
While a means of conveying and maintaining familial attachments, slave
photographs also must have represented a form of symbolic resistance to the particular
conditions of the slave trade. Sold a total of eight times before he sent his photograph
from Memphis to Winchester, Aaron Adams could have understood this act as a way of
re-asserting some measure of control over his body. Moreover, looking at such images
might have given slaves ways to distance themselves from the degrading experience of
being viewed at the bustling slave markets of the antebellum South. As Mississippi
planter John Knight stated, “as to the character and disposition of all of the slaves sold by
the traders, we know nothing whatever, the traders themselves being generally such liars.
Buyers therefore can only judge the looks of the Negroes.”
74
Buyers carried out physical
examinations, routinely striping slaves either down to the waist or fully naked.
75
Masters
and traders were looking for injuries, illnesses, and the scars from whippings that they
read as signs of rebelliousness. They were also looking at skin color, seeking blacker
slaves for fieldwork and lighter-skinned slaves for skilled and domestic work.

73
Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White,” 216.
74
Johnson, Soul by Soul, 138.
75
Johnson, Soul by Soul, 138-149.
95

Bondspeople’s bodies were often viewed closely and intensely for their industriousness
and sexual appeal.
It is quite possible that Robert Brown, a Virginia slave, would have had these
experiences in mind when he gazed upon his wife’s image. After his wife was sold to a
slave trader, Brown fled to the North with her daguerreotype on his person. When he
made contact with abolitionists on the Underground Railroad, as William Still noted,
Brown revealed the image, “speaking very touchingly while gazing upon it and showing
it.”
76
Ironically – and for very different reasons – both slaveholders and slaves likely
valued how slave portraits removed slave bodies from the cruel realities of the
mechanisms of commodification. The portability of photographs that gave slaves a
means of communication also gave them a private counter-archive. It let them ponder
their bodies and those of their kin on their own terms.
The flight of Stephen Jordon reveals how much care slaves took to keep portraits
of sold loved ones, illuminating a transition in slave culture towards more visual and
material forms of social attachment. When Jordon’s master (who was also his biological
father) went broke, Jordon was sold to a nearby plantation, while his mother was sold to a
New Orleans merchant. Jordon had a wife on a neighboring plantation, but his new
master forced him to live with a new woman. This indignity led Jordon to run away. In
his preparations for escape, Jordon forged a set of free papers from a free black man who
lived nearby. He would use these, if ever caught, to “get off all right.”
77
Yet in the
crucial hours before his planned departure, it was not simply the practical words on a

76
William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1871). Accessed
through Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15263/15263-h/15263-h.htm
77
Historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger argue that forging free papers happened
a great deal in New Orleans. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves:
Rebels on the Plantation, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 133.
96

page that Jordon hid away. As he recalled, “I took those papers and stowed them away in
a secret place in my cabin, together with my mother's picture and my own picture, which
was taken when we belonged to Mr. Jordon, my first old master, together with some old
passes, books, and papers.”
78

Jordon did not elaborate any further on the origins or later uses of these images.
We might suspect that they served a practical function for him. Jordon may have seen his
mother’s picture as a precious document that could help the dispersed family reconnect –
which, in fact, the family did after the Civil War. But these images were surely more
than just visual information to Jordon, based on the care he took to keep both his
mother’s and his own image in such a dramatic moment. They may have served as
emboldening visions, images of dignity that Jordon sought to realize more fully by
fleeing. Surely such visual mementoes also shaped his own lived experience of time. He
remembered how at least his picture “was taken when we belonged to Mr. Jordon, my
first old master….” These images gave Jordon many things, not the least of which was a
specific and material marker of a “before” and “after” amidst the uncertainties of past and
future in bondage and in escape. In his usage we find the makings of a culture of visual-
material memory that linked enslaved family members severed by the slave trade.

78
Jordon went on to relate the following series of events: the overseer, hunting for a different
runaway, found the papers in Jordon’s cabin; Jordon’s master sold him to a new master, Mr.
Valsin; Jordon attempted to runaway to Union lines during the war and was caught and put in jail
to be executed; Jordon was saved from execution by being bought by a new master from Texas
Mr. Maxwell; when the war ended, Jordon was freed, and he reunited with his mother and a wife
he married while at Mr. Valsin’s. See Albert, Octavia V. Rogers. 1890. The House of Bondage,
or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, Original and Life Like, As They Appeared in Their Old
Plantation and City Slave Life; Together with Pen-Pictures of the Peculiar Institution, with Sights
and Insights into Their New Relations as Freedmen, Freemen, and Citizens. Documenting the
American South, University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/albert/menu.html
97

Historians of photography have shown how ex-slaves such as Frederick Douglass
and Sojourner Truth used photography to craft public personas in the antebellum North,
and how African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois used photography to publicly
contest racism in the late nineteenth century. But slaves’ consumption of photographs in
Richmond and Winchester, as well as the uses of photographs by John Quincy Adams,
Robert Brown, and Stephen Jordan, demonstrate a far deeper history of nineteenth-
century African Americans as photographic practitioners. Such evidence reveals that
African Americans actually initiated a set of photographic image-practices during
slavery.
79

These practices would aid them in keeping and re-forging connections through the
Civil War and into emancipation. For instance, slaves brought images of kin northwards
when they fled during the conflict, as in the case of Thomas Sims, his family, and a
number of other slaves who took off from Vicksburg.
80
The Liberator, which recorded
the story of these fugitives, described how they “hope soon to [greet]” the slaves in the
photographs “as free.”
81
Photographs thereby offered practical tools to find old faces.

79
On Frederick Douglass and photography, see John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical
Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). For
studies of Sojourner Truth’s photographic image, see Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life,
A Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996); Augusta Rohrbach, “Profits of Protest: The
Market Strategies of Sojourner Truth and Louisa May Alcott,” in Prophets of Protest:
Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, eds. Timothy McCarthy and John Stauffer
(New York: The New Press, 2006); Teresa Zackodnik, “The ‘Green-Backs of Civilization’:
Sojourner Truth and Portrait Photography,” American Studies 46, no. 2 (2005); and Darcy
Grimaldo Grigsby, “Negative-Positive Truths,” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011). See also
Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual
Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); and Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle
Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and The Making of African American
Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
80
“A Returned Fugitive Slave Again Free,” The Liberator, May 1, 1863. Accessible Archives:
The Liberator.
81
“A Returned Fugitive Slave Again Free,” The Liberator, May 1, 1863. Accessible Archives:
The Liberator.
98

Like many soldiers during the war, one slave-turned-Union-soldier, Aaron Oats, sent a
portrait back to his wife in Kentucky.
82
After the war, John Quincy Adams – the slave
from Winchester – kept in touch with his twin brother Aaron through letters and images.
Receiving a portrait of Aaron around 1867, Adams described how “You could not tell it
from mine.”
83
In Aaron’s portrait, Adams saw time pass: with two photographs of his
brother, one from slavery and one from freedom, Adams could see his twin aging from
afar. These instances of image-sharing reveal a new wrinkle in the trajectory from
slavery to freedom. The adoption of photographic practices meant that ex-slaves could
travel and remain distant without forgoing the attachments of kin. They entered freedom
with private counter-archives of dignified depictions.

In the late antebellum era, bondspeople drew upon the image culture of the
southern marketplace to endure the conditions of the slave marketplace. The rise of
photography allowed slaves to transition from viewing their masters’ images to making
their own images. The cheapness of daguerreotypes (and later photographic forms)
opened up access for slaves to buy unique visions. The portability and materiality of
these images, moreover, gave slaves new ways to communicate and remember. It is
difficult, given the paucity of sources left by slaves, to estimate the extent of this cultural
transformation. For some bondspeople, however, photography clearly served as a means
of maintaining familial attachments across distance; the brutalities of slavery may have
given them an even greater need than free people for this practice. Within the South,
slaves’ uses of photography may have done little to subvert the power structure, though

82
Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White,” 241.
83
Adams, John Quincy. 1872. Narrative of the Life of John Quincy Adams, When in Slavery, and
Now as a Freeman. Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/adams/menu.html
99

they are important evidence of the way that material culture has played a central role in
constructions of modern subjectivity. Slaves’ uses of photographs would actually take
political effect in the North. As we shall see in the next chapter, fugitive slaves would
help undermine slavery from beyond its borders, as the photographs they brought
northwards proved important symbols of subversion in the culture of antislavery
photography.
100

Chapter 3
Documenting Abolition, 1839-1861

Fig. 3.1. Abby Kelley Foster, daguerreotype, 1846
1
Fig. 3.2. Abby Kelly Foster, Lithograph, 1846
2

In the spring of 1846, sometime after radical abolitionist and feminist Abby
Kelley Foster sat for a fairly conventional daguerreotype portrait (Figure 3.1) at the
Philadelphia gallery of black abolitionist photographer Robert Douglass Jr., she received
a warm, urgent letter from the artist himself. “Esteemed Friend,” Douglass Jr. wrote,
Anxious to give the world a correct transcript of the features of one so entirely devoted to
the interests of humanity as yourself, I have placed one of the Daguerreotype Pictures
you so kindly allowed me to take in the hands of a skilful [sic] artist, for the purpose of
being lithographed. I have to ask pardon for the liberty thus taken, which would be
certainly inexcusable, were it not for the motive which has impelled me. I have imagined
that others feel the same pleasure in contemplating an accurate representation of the
features of the good and kindhearted, which I experience myself, and if in regarding your
Portrait a single spirit is encouraged to enter upon the same glorious although arduous
labor, or excited to action for the advancement of the great and Holy cause in which you
are so indefatigably engaged I shall be amply rewarded.
Please send me your autograph which I intend placing beneath the Portrait.
With sincere prayers for your happiness + the speedy triumph of Liberty.

1
Daguerreotype Collection, Graphic Arts Collection, American Antiquarian Society.
2
Abby Kelley Foster (lithograph), by Alfred M. Hoffy from a daguerreotype by R. Douglass Jr.
Printed by Wagner & McGuigan, Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.
101

I remain yours,
Robt Douglass
3

In one sense, Douglass Jr.’s letter confirms many aspects of abolitionist culture that
scholars have illuminated in the past few decades: the interracial and inter-gender
friendships distinctive to this radical wing of the broader antislavery movement; the
religious infused fiber of the movement (“the great and Holy cause”); and, of course, the
actual use of letter-writing to build intimate bonds and political networks. But Douglass
Jr.’s words and actions also reveal how photography had catalyzed the abolitionist
investment in the power of radical self-representation and political identification, a
transformation scholars have only begun to explore.
4
While Douglass Jr. could not mass-
reproduce Foster’s portrait with the daguerrean process, he found a way around this issue
through lithography (Figure 3.2), a transfer which seemed to bother him little, perhaps
because the paper print (45cm x 31cm) actually enlarged the size of Foster’s sixth-plate
daguerreotype (7cm x 8.3cm), and turned her gaze upwards and away from the viewer,
offering a more displayable image and a more romantic persona. To build and energize
abolition, as Douglass Jr. suggested and enacted, he and others needed images of
inspiring abolitionists as much as suffering slaves.

3
Robert Douglass to Abby Kelley Foster, May 12, 1846, Folder 22: Letters, 1846, May-
November, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, Manuscripts, American Antiquarian Society.
4
Thus far, scholars have focused on how photography helped Sojourner Truth and Frederick
Douglass to forge their public identities. See Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A
Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996); Augusta Rohrbach, “Profits of Protest: The
Market Strategies of Sojourner Truth and Louisa May Alcott,” in Prophets of Protest:
Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, eds. Timothy McCarthy and John Stauffer
(New York: The New Press, 2006); John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical
Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Teresa Zackodnik, “The ‘Green-Backs of Civilization’: Sojourner Truth and Portrait
Photography,” American Studies 46, no. 2 (2005); and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Negative-
Positive Truths,” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011).
102

Studying such acts of photographic representation complicates the conventional
view of antislavery visual media in the United States. Past scholars have stressed how
abolitionists applied a host of visual forms to spark sympathy towards slaves and venom
towards slaveholders.
5
Pictures of southern plantations and slave markets trickled
through America in the late eighteenth century and flooded through it from the 1830s
onwards. These scenes reached onlookers in almanacs, novels, broadsides, engravings,
and lithographs, expanding their mental and moral horizons and creating new forms of
voyeurism in the process.
6
Photography, however, could not give abolitionists their
customary views of slavery, for early cameras lacked the physical mobility and quick
exposures necessary to make eyewitness shots of flogging scenes and auction sales.
Abolitionists found their photographic subjects close at hand: rank-and-file activists and
national leaders, white martyrs and fugitive slaves who escaped under their aegis. These
images raise a new set of issues about self-representation rather than southern
representations.
Abolitionist photography helped forge intra-movement sympathy and political
solidarity, a process historians have typically associated with the functions of social

5
Phillip Lapansky, “Graphic Discord: Abolitionist and Anti-abolitionist Images,” in The
Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Ante-bellum America, eds. Jean Fagin
Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Jean Fagan Yellin,
Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989); Jo-Ann Morgan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2007); Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art
and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Marcus Wood,
Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (New
York: Routledge, 2000).
6
Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,”
The American Historical Review, 100, no. 2 (1995); Elizabeth B. Clark, “’The Sacred Rights of
the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” The
Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995).
103

institutions including churches, political organizations, and Masonic lodges.
7
It should
not surprise us that abolitionists never articulated any overarching strategy for their uses
of photography, for it constituted the “new media” of the late antebellum era. As
photography emerged, abolitionists learned about its technical capacities and shaped its
uses as a political tool. They did so through three main image-practices. First, they built
social and political bonds by exchanging portraits with each other. If Kelley Foster’s
high forehead is any indication, they were inviting themselves to admire one another’s
moral standing and heroism. Second, they photographed white martyrs who suffered in
attempts to rescue slaves and spark slave rebellion, circulating these images within the
movement. Third, they documented fugitive slaves who traveled northwards along the
liberty lines that made up the Underground Railroad, displaying these images at
abolitionist gatherings and sharing them amongst friends. By the late 1850s, abolitionists
had initiated the use of photography as a political tool for social movements in America,
and for conveying the suffering of others (though surprisingly by picturing the suffering
of white northerners rather than slaves).
8
In doing so abolitionists produced a largely
internal documentary culture that heightened their sense of social connection and political
urgency, adding fuel to the broader sectional crisis.

7
Two important studies of social connections with an attention to place, including the formation
of interracial bonds, are Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial
Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than
Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (New York: The
Penguin Press, 2012).
8
The relation between photographs of pain, empathy, and political engagement continues to
interest scholars of visual culture. Susan Sontag has inspired much of this work in her theoretical
books about the capacity of photography to spur empathy and voyeurism, a process by which
spectatorship has come to constitute a form of political engagement in the modern world. See
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973); Susan Sontag,
Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). Sharon Sliwinski takes up these
questions in the finest study of human rights photography to date. See Sharon Sliwinski Human
Rights in Camera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
104

In the decade prior to the emergence of the daguerreotype, American abolitionism
witnessed a foundational shift in political aims and cultural tactics. Though abolitionist
societies had emerged in the late eighteenth century, particularly in Pennsylvania, the
early 1830s marked the first moment in which a sizeable white population turned from
gradual plans for emancipation and colonization to the notion that slavery could – and
should – end immediately.
9
By the 1830s, an estimated 140,000 activists had established
around 1,300 societies, spread across the North and concentrated in the states of
Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio.
10
A confluence of forces brought about this sea
change, and historians have increasingly pointed to the work of black activists as the
primary factor in bringing about this white conversion. Most notably, William Lloyd
Garrison came to reject colonization through interracial social encounters during his work
as a newspaper editor in Baltimore. Founding The Liberator in 1831, William Lloyd
Garrison famously called for “immediate, unconditional, and uncompensated
emancipation,” but his quest for the “revolution in public sentiment” that black activists
called for undoubtedly elicited the support of black subscribers, who soon made up the
majority of the paper’s readership.
11

Whereas the first generation of abolitionists in the early republic had relied
primarily on legal efforts to free slaves, 1830s immediatists launched a broad cultural
assault against slavery and racism, a campaign of “moral suasion” they carried out
through institutions and meetings as well as the textual-triumvirate of oral culture

9
Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom, 51. For the best recent treatment of the abolitionists of the
early republic, and the transition to the 1830s, see Richard S. Newman, Fighting Slavery in the
Early Republic: The Transformation of American Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 2001).
10
Goodman, Of One Blood, 66.
11
On Garrison’s shift, see Goodman, Of One Blood, Ch. 4; Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom, 52-
53.
105

(lectures and songs), print culture (newspapers, pamphlets, children’s magazines), and
visual culture (mastheads, broadsides, lithographs). The emergence of new media aided
this campaign, especially the accessibility of lithographs, which Americans adopted from
Europe in the late 1820s and 1830s.
12
Transformations in printing technologies further
fueled such efforts in political persuasion. In 1833 the introduction of the steam-powered
press gave abolitionists a way to print materials at a tenfold increase from older presses.
13

A cheaper and more diverse set of cultural tools equipped immediatists to link themselves
across space and to achieve an influence that far outweighed their population.
As emergent print technologies helped abolitionists to create imagined
communities in the North, they also helped them to infiltrate the South. In the mid-
1830s, William Lloyd Garrison and Elizur Wright set out to convert a group of
approximately twenty thousand moderate southerners from colonization to immediatism
through a cultural onslaught that came to be known as the “Postal Campaign.” By the
end of 1835, abolitionists had printed over one million pieces of print material that they
sent directly to southern moderates. Most southerners detested the “vile Pamphlets,
Prints &c distributed by the Abolitionists and their agents,” as one Georgian planter put
it.
14
Supported by President Andrew Jackson, southerners responded by blocking the
dispersal of mail to its intended recipients. As historian Daniel Walker Howe notes, this
“refusal of the Post Office to deliver abolitionist mail to the South may well represent the

12
Invented in the 1790s in Europe, lithography grew influential in America in the late 1820s and
1830s, as various firms emerged, particularly in Boston (Pendleton), New York (Imbert, Mesier,
and Currier), Philadelphia (Pendleton, Kearney, and Childs), Hartford (Kellogg), and Baltimore
(Weber). Jay T. Last, The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography (Santa
Ana: Hillcrest Press, 2005), 17
13
Lapansky, “Graphic Discord,” 202.
14
Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the
Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 103.
106

largest peacetime violation of civil liberty in U.S. history.”
15
Some states passed laws to
block visual materials in particular. Not only did the state of Mississippi bar abolitionist
print materials, but, in 1840, it modified this earlier provision by also barring “any
pictorial representation calculated to produce disaffection among the slave population
herof.”
16

Abolitionists complemented their strategy of shear numerical quantity – numbers
mattered to them – with visual appeals that underscored southern barbarism. Drawing
upon visual formulas that dated back to the late eighteenth century, engravers and
illustrators offered up a world of cruel masters, violent overseers, and suffering slaves,
typically inhabiting plantations and domestic slave markets. Flogging scenes in
publications such as the American Anti-Slavery Almanac, for instance, were indebted to a
decades-old British iconography of half-nude Africans, receiving beatings as spectators
looked on from the margins (Figures 3.3-3.4).

Fig. 3.3. Isaac Cruikshank, “The Abolition of the Slave Trade,” Print, 1792
17
Fig. 3.4. Anti-Slavery
Almanac, 1838
18

15
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 427-430.
16
Camp, Closer to Freedom, 99-104.
17
Cruikshank, Isaac. The abolition of the slave trade Or the Inhumanity of dealers in human
flesh exemplified in Captn. Kimber’s treatment of a young Negro girl of 15 for her virjen [sic]
modesty. 1 print: etching, hand-colored. London: S.W. Fores, 1792. From Library of Congress
107

Angelina Grimke felt these images altered the most basic perceptions of bondage from
afar. "Until the pictures of the slave's sufferings were drawn and held up to the public
gaze,” she argued, “no Northerner had any idea of the cruelty of the system, it never
entered their minds that such abominations could exist in Christian, Republican
America."
19
Grimke undoubtedly exaggerated the power of images, perpetuating a
disposition, one with roots in eighteenth-century moral philosophy and humanitarianism,
which privileged sight as the sensory vehicle for best sympathizing with distant pain.
20

More than any other image, the kneeling slave performed this function in
abolitionist culture. Like scenes of violence, this icon gained influence in Britain (in the
1780s) before it entered America culture.
21
In the 1830s, Americans continued to
reproduce male and female versions of the image, likely more than ever before, on
numerous forms including broadsides (Figure 3.5), coins (Figure 3.6), and writing paper
(Figure 3.7).

Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, British Cartoon Prints.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98510128/
18
The American Anti-Slavery Almanac, for 1838 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, [1837]). Image courtesy
of American Antiquarian Society.
19
McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 42.
20
On this notion of “spectatorial sympathy,” see Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the
Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture.”
21
On the iconography of the kneeling slave and its uses in public monuments for the Civil War
and emancipation, see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and
Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
108

Left, Fig. 3.5. “Am I Not A Man A Brother?” woodcut, 1837
22

Middle, Fig. 3.6. “Am I Not a Woman a Sister?” token, 1838
23

Right, Fig. 3.7. Theodore Dwight Weld, letter, 1837
24

Visual elements made the kneeling slave a powerful tool not simply for
illustrating a slave and concretizing the abstraction of slavery, but also for helping
abolitionists to imagine themselves and to express their commitments. Whether a man or
woman, the slave crouched with one knee on the ground, looking upwards in side profile,
wrists shackled, pleading for help and acknowledgement of humanity. The typical
caption, “Am I Not A Man And A Brother,” further strengthened the purpose of evoking
the viewer’s identification. These qualities resonated deeply with prominent immediatist
minister Theodore Dwight Weld when he wrote to Angelina and Sarah Grimke in 1837,
so much so that he could not help beginning his letter with exclamatory remarks about
the bondsman kneeling at the top of the page (Figure 3.7):

“Ah! Still kneeling, manacled,

22
“Am I not a man and a brother?” 1 print: woodcut on wove paper. 1837. From Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, American Cartoon Prints, Miscellaneous Items
in High Demand. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661312/
23
Image courtesy of Dr. Jo-Ann Morgan. Find at “Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A
Multi-Media Archive, Directed by Stephen Railton, University of Virginia:
http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/interpret/exhibits/morgan/morgan.html
24
Theodore Dwight Weld to Angelina Grimke Weld, December 15, 1837, Box 4, Weld-Grimke
Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan. The image was engraved by
Patrick Reason, a black artist from New York.
109

looking upward, pleading for help! As I caught a sheet at random from a large quantity
on the desk at the office to write you a line my dear sisters, I had almost dashed my pen
upon it before I saw the kneeling slave! The sudden sight drove home a deeper lesson
than my heart has learned these many days! The prayer of the slave!”
25
The kneeling
slave’s romantic performance of submission and its abstraction from the social world
allowed distant abolitionists such as Weld to envision themselves as the Christian
liberators who could answer slaves’ prayers.
As the icon shaped the political identities of individuals, it came to serve broader
purposes in the movement. It stood as an instant symbol of the abolition movement,
which explains why it was plastered across Weld’s letterhead. A nascent form of
political branding, the kneeling slave also became a material commodity. In 1836, for
instance, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society rescued a young slave girl known as
“little Med.” Soon thereafter, they memorialized this event – and raised money from it –
by selling workbags that pictured a slave kneeling before the icon of justice, most likely a
white woman.
26
As a brand and a commodity, the kneeling slave gave thousands of
northern activists visceral membership in a movement of the righteous.
In 1839, the daguerreotype arrived in the United States, and northern commercial
photography soon blossomed at a rate that far exceeded the southern industry. Boston,
Philadelphia, and New York became centers of image-making, with an explosive growth
in studios from the mid-1840s to the 1850s: from 1845 to 1856, the number of
daguerreotypists working in Boston rose from 6 to 39. In New York, meanwhile, the

25
Theodore Dwight Weld to Angelina Grimke Weld, December 15, 1837, Box 4, Weld-Grimke
Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.
26
Yellin, Women and Sisters, 19.
110

number of studios surged from 16 in 1844 to 59 in 1850.
27
How would this
transformation re-shape abolitionist political culture?
Like slaveholders, some abolitionists became photographers in the 1840s and
1850s. In Philadelphia, Robert Douglass Jr. began his artistic career as a portrait painter
and printmaker before becoming the first black photographer.
28
In York, Pennsylvania
(fifty-two miles north of Baltimore) three black brothers – Glenalvin, Wallace, and
William Goodridge – became daguerreans with a studio advertised in Frederick
Douglass’s North Star beginning in the late 1840s.
29
In Hartford, black photographer
Augustus Washington, the son of a former slave, opened up a gallery in the mid-1840s;
the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, however, led Washington to emigrate to Liberia in
the early 1850s.
30
Lastly, in Cincinnati, black artist James Presley Ball established a
studio in 1849; it would soon gain national acclaim in the 1850s, covered in spreads by
Gleason’s Pictorial and Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
31

Abolitionists adopted photographic metaphors in their language as well. Wendell
Phillips equated abolitionists’ rhetorical tactics to photographic artistry, relating that, like
“a Grand Jury fir Christendom, we summon the slaveholder, and his apologists and

27
Floyd Rinhart and Marion Rinhart, The American Daguerreotype (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1981), 91.
28
Richard J. Powell, “Cinque: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,”
American Art 11, no. 3 (1997), 71.
29
Frederick Douglass advertised the Goodridge Brothers’ business as early as 1848 in The North
Star: “Mr. Goodridge, in addition to other qualifications, is a Daguerreotypist, and keeps a fine
gallery at his father's dwelling, where he has a private study, and operates at leisure hours.” The
North Star, December 15, 1848. Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers. On the
Goodridge Brothers, see also, John Vincent Jezierski, Enterprising Images: The Goodridge
Brothers, African American Photographers 1847-1922 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
2000).
30
Marcy Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the
Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), Ch. 5.
31
Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 7.
111

instruments, before us. If their character appears bad, it is not our fault; the fault is in the
character. We are daguerreotype painters, sir. Our pictures may, like them, be sad, but
are always faithful and exact.”
32
Harriet Beecher Stowe introduced the character Uncle
Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin with such photographic language: “At this table was seated
Uncle Tom, Mr. Shelby’s best hand, who, as he is to be the hero of our story, we must
daguerreotype for our readers.”
33
The language of Phillips and Stowe was utterly
common at the time, for photography became a popular “linguistic practice,” as Alan
Trachtenberg puts it.
34
Rooted in the apparent objectivity of the mechanism of the
camera, rather than the subjective work of the paintbrush, “daguerreotyping” a scene
connoted an unmediated vision of bondage, seemingly technological rather than political.
By the 1850s, abolitionists had even begun to notice photographic practices of
intimate power in the South. In 1853, The Liberator republished a New York Examiner
article describing how Virginian men “keeping an office, who are unable to own a slave,
find no difficulty in hiring one from planters or farmers for purposes of prostitution.”
These “gentlemen of the first families,” the story noted, “present their daguerreotype
likenesses (a common thing it is said at the galleries, where, in some instances, we have
witnessed it) to those Cyprian mistresses, and oftentimes upon the same place[sic] with
themselves, doubtless that the 'noble blood of the Old Dominion' may be thus contrasted

32
The Liberator, February 4, 1848. Accessible Archives: The Liberator.
33
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (New York: Penguin
Books, reprinted 1982), 68.
34
Alan Trachtenberg, “Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword,” in Photography in
Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum,
1991), 17.
112

with the 'inferior animal.'”
35
For northerners, the corruption of sentimental photo-
practices made the coercive sexual practices in the slave South all the more cruel.
Despite the ease with which the daguerreotype seeped into the businesses,
metaphorical language, and perceptual landscapes of abolitionists, the medium initially
proved ineffective as a tool to extend many of the mass-persuasion strategies cultivated in
the 1830s. For instance, in the 1840s abolitionists could not mass-reproduce photographs
with the daguerreotype process. They found their way around this problem by
transferring portrait photographs into mass-reproducible prints, as Robert Douglass did
with Abbey Kelley Foster’s image.
The more significant issue abolitionists faced was that daguerreotypy could not
easily show the scenes of subjection that had come to constitute slavery in the radical
imaginary. On the rare occasion, abolitionists did talk of photographing the South.
Commenting on two southerners who had recently shot down a resistant slave, Frederick
Douglass’ Paper noted that these “two such monsters as this owner and overseer ought to
be daguerreotyped and placed where the scorn of the whole world should be pointed at
them.”
36
Doing so was easier said than done, though. An engraver or illustrator could
easily imagine a barbarous slaveholder with his whip in the air, poised to lash the back of
a slave. A daguerreotypist, on the other hand, needed to be present. Moreover, bulky
cameras and long exposure times made eyewitness photography nearly impossible in the
1840s and 1850s. Lastly, getting a slaveholder to stop and pose for an abolitionist
camera would have been no easy task. In the 1840s and 1850s, eyewitness imagery
would be left to travelers, who toured the South and returned to tell of what they saw, to

35
“Morals of Society in the ‘Old Dominion,’” The Liberator, January 7, 1853. Accessible
Archives: The Liberator.
36
Dinius, The Camera and the Press, 198.
113

fugitives, who described their experiences on the bustling abolitionist lecture circuit, and
to sketch artists, who snuck into slave auctions and published their illustrations in mass-
presses such as the Illustrated London News and Harper’s Weekly.
37

But we must look past technical matters to more fully understand the possibilities
and limitations of photography as a tool of abolitionist propaganda. As the case of
Jonathan Walker and the Branded Hand illustrates, the mechanical nature of photography
enabled abolitionists to represent violence in new ways, but it also enabled them to avoid
making such images. A white shipwright and tradesman, Walker moved in the early
1840s from New England to Pensacola, Florida, where he soon agreed to help seven
slaves escape to the Bahamas by boat.
38
Walker and the slaves set sail, but only fourteen
days into their journey an American ship caught them and brought them back to land. A
Florida judge subsequently sentenced Walker to an hour in the pillory, fifteen days in jail,
and a lifetime with a particular brand on his right hand: “SS,” for “slave stealer.” Scarred
but free, Walker returned to Boston, where prominent Boston physician and abolitionist
Henry Ingersol Bowditch suggested he daguerreotype his branded palm. Walker eagerly
complied, placing his right hand on a table before the camera of Southworth and Hawes,
two prominent photographers located on Tremont Row (Figure 3.8). The daguerreotype
process, which captured a mirror image of its subject matter, reversed Walker’s hand
(making it look like a left hand) as well as the “SS” inscribed in his palm.

37
The most famous example is British artist Eyre Crowe and his images of the slave trade in
1850s Richmond. See McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale.
38
In Walker’s narrative, Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, he only briefly mentioned a
discussion with a few of the fugitives before they departed. He “had an interview” with them and
indicated he would “share the risk with them” – likely the risk of punishment if they were caught.
Jonathan Walker, Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola, Florida, for aiding
slaves to escape from bondage: With an appendix containing a sketch of his life (Boston: Anti-
Slavery Office, 1845), 10.
114

Fig. 3.8. Southworth & Hawes, “The Branded Hand of Captain Jonathan Walker,” daguerreotype, 1845
39

Tiny in size, measuring only 2 x 2.5 inches, the Branded Hand did much to
authenticate and dramatize Walker’s recent suffering.
40
In its original form, the
daguerreotype reached the Boston community, displayed, for instance, at the Twelfth
National Anti-Slavery Bazaar (1845) at Faneuil Hall, where it “elicited much attention,”
as The Liberator noted.
41
Most abolitionists saw the Branded Hand reproduced as an
engraving in newspapers, pamphlets, and in Walker’s popular biography.
42

39
Daguerreotype Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.
40
In lectures, Walker showed his actual hand and scars to the crowd. Martin A. Berger, “White
Suffering and the Branded Hand,” Mirror of Race:
http://www.mirrorofrace.org/show_interp.php?photo_id=18
41
“The Twelfth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, January 23, 1846. Accessible
Archives: The Liberator.
42
Berger, “White Suffering and the Branded Hand.”
115

Fig. 3.9. Southworth & Hawes, “The Branded Hand of Captain Jonathan Walker,” daguerreotype, 1845
43

Fig. 3.10. “The Branded Hand,” pamphlet, c. 1845
44

Rarely did abolitionists let the hand stand without the aid of written text. The photograph
served as the pre-text to illustrations. One pamphlet followed the image with a poem by
John G. Whittier (Figure 3.10), who paid tribute to Walker and his hand, “smote” by the
“fiery shafts of pain!” The poem turned Walker’s sacrifice into a symbol of ongoing
Christian struggle: “lift that manly right hand, bold ploughman of the wave! Its branded
palm shall prophecy, ‘Salvation to the Slave!” The Boston Chronicle made the links
between Christ and Walker even clearer as it admonished the Southern branders: “Into
His hands, still bearing the nail-marks of the cross, have ye burned the liberal signet of
your malignity to man and human freedom.”
45
Through a combination of print and

43
Daguerreotype Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.
44
J.G. Whittier, “The Branded Hand” (Salem: Office of the Anti-Slavery Bugle, c. 1845). Image
courtesy of American Antiquarian Society.
45
Berger, “White Suffering and the Branded Hand.”
116

daguerreotypy, Walker’s hand became an icon of white Christ-like suffering – a
condition incurred to alleviate black suffering.
In the mid-1840s, the Branded Hand revealed to abolitionists how they could use
the daguerrean process for politics. They could draw upon the same photographic powers
of mechanical objectivity that photographic boosters had envisioned as a boon for
science. As Samuel Morse had proclaimed, “We are soon to see if the minute has
discoverable limits. The naturalist is to have a new kingdom to explore, as much beyond
the microscope as the microscope is beyond the naked eye.”
46
The Branded Hand – the
first atrocity photograph in American history – applied Morse’s vision to illuminate a
body abused by southern whites with unprecedented visual detail.
Yet it is striking, given the extensive publicity around the Branded Hand, how
rarely abolitionists employed the tactic of atrocity photography over the next two
decades. One might have expected the immediatists to have capitalized on Walker’s
success by picturing the scarred bodies of the many fugitive slaves who came northwards
in the 1840s and 1850s. Between 1850 and 1858, for instance, the vigilance committee in
Boston helped 407 fugitive slaves find homes and livelihoods, and surely some had
scars.
47
Such aftermath images would have partnered with the many scenes of whippings
in abolitionist prints, magazines, and books. In 1863, abolitionists would pursue this
path, widely distributing the “Scourged Back” (Figure 3.11), a carte de visite that
displayed the flagellated back of a fugitive slave, called both Gordon and Peter at

46
Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), 45.
47
Lois E. Horton, “Kidnapping and Resistance: Antislavery Direct Action in the 1850s,” in
Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, ed. David W. Blight
(Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 166-167.
117

different points by newspapers, who entered Union army lines near Baton Rouge (and
soon became a soldier).

Fig. 3.11. Matthew Brady, “Gordon,” albumen silver print, 1863
48

But in the pre-war era, abolitionists do not appear to have made any photographs that
documented ex-slaves’ scars or brands. If they did, none have come to light.
Why did the “Scourged Back” (1863) not happen sooner? Many white and black
abolitionists encountered, or at least read about, ex-slaves with scars. In his Narrative of
William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847), William Wells Brown recalled how a
slaveholder from Natchez “struck me over the head with the cowhide, the end of which
struck me over my right eye, sinking deep into the flesh….” Brown received this

48
Collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
118

bludgeon for merely conversing with another slave who was being punished, but the
cowhide left “a scar which I carry to this day.”
49
Georgian slave John Brown also
acquired scars, though not from a master’s whip. They came from a doctor’s racial
experiments. Brown’s master Thomas Stevens had lent him to a local doctor named
Hamilton for a series of crude racial experiments regarding sunstroke. For one
experiment, Hamilton wanted to see, as Brown put it, “how deep my black skin went.”
The doctor did so by applying blisters to Brown’s legs, feet, and hands, which, as Brown
lamented, “bear the scars to this day.”
50

The best-known scars might have been those on Frederick Douglass’s back. As
the Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent reported, Douglass described his back to a
lecture audience as follows during a speech on his mid-1840s tour through Ireland: “I am
the representative of three millions of bleeding slaves. I have felt the lash myself; my
back is scarred with it.”
51
Abolitionist leaders commented on these scars as well. After
seeing Douglass lecture in 1842, William Lloyd Garrison noted in The Liberator, “He
stood there a slave – a runaway from the southern house of bondage – not safe, for one
hour, even on the soil of Massachusetts – with his back all horribly scarred by the lash –
with the bitter remembrances of the life of slavery crowding upon his soul – with
everything in his past history, his present condition, his future prospects, to make him a

49
Brown, William Wells. 1847. Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Documenting
the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brown47/menu.html
50
Brown, John and Louis Alexis Chamerovzow. 1855. Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the
Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England. Documenting the
American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/menu.html
51
Frederick Douglass, “Irish Christians and Non-Fellowship with Man-Stealers: An Address
Delivered in Dublin, Ireland, on 1 October 1845,” in John Blassingame, ed., The Frederick
Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Volume 1: 1841-1846 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 36.
119

fierce outlaw, and a stern avenger of outraged humanity!”
52
As Douglass’s intellect on
the lecture podium often led audiences to question his bona fides as a former slave,
Garrison’s bodily reference worked to reinforce Douglass’s authenticity for abolitionist
readers.
Abolitionists could have taken a photograph of Douglass’s back to display at their
well-attended public functions. Indeed, the 1845 Faneuil Hall Bazaar exhibited a
daguerreotype of Douglass alongside the Branded Hand – yet newspaper accounts
mention nothing unusual about the image, indicating it was a regular portrait.
53

Moreover, the notion of such a photograph might have crossed Douglass’s mind, for he
knew the Branded Hand well. He would later recall “the sensation produced by the
exhibition of the branded hand. It was one of the few atrocities of slavery that roused the
justice and humanity of the North to a death-struggle with slavery.”
54
Why did
abolitionists not photograph Douglass’s back? Why did Douglass not do it himself,
especially since he clearly recognized the capacity for such an image to intensify
antislavery sentiment?
Even though Douglass never commented on why he avoided photographing his
own scars, one can infer that he opposed doing so from his publicized ideas about visual
representation and his personal image-practices. In Douglass’s 1849 review of Wilson
Armistead’s A Tribute for the Negro in the North Star, he argued that it was “next to
impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly

52
Quoted in Timothy Patrick McCarthy, “A Culture of Dissent: American Abolitionism and the
Ordeal of Equality” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2006), 263.
53
“The Twelfth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, January 23, 1846. Accessible
Archives: The Liberator.
54
“The Branded Hand,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 2, 1878, 1. ProQuest Historical
Newspapers.
120

exaggerating their distinctive features. And the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other
white persons have adopted a theory respecting the distinctive features of negro
physiognomy” which led them to “associate with the negro face, high cheek bones,
distended nose, thick lips, and retreating foreheads.”
55
These images found expression in
the everyday perceptions of whites, as Douglass recalled hearing them say that “negroes
all look alike.”
56

From the 1840s onwards, Douglass offered a massive body of photographic
counter-evidence to these widespread racial perceptions. In fact, new scholarship reveals
that he posed for his portrait photograph over 160 times in his lifetime – more than any
other nineteenth-century American (including Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman).
57

His most aggressive visual counter-attack came in a side portrait (Figure 3.13), an
unusual image that posed a clear challenge to the scientific racism of George R. Gliddon
and Josiah C. Nott, who placed blacks at the bottom of a racial hierarchy understood
through the anatomy of the skull, and used image comparisons as their own evidence.
58

55
Dinius, The Camera and the Press, 223.
56
Dinius, The Camera and the Press, 231-232.
57
This research is the focus of a forthcoming book: Celeste-Marie Bernier, John Stauffer, and
Zoe Trodd, eds., Picturing Frederick Douglass: The Most Photographed American of the
Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, forthcoming, 2015).
58
On scientific racism, see George W. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The
Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971),
especially Ch. 3.
121

Fig. 3.12. Frederick Douglass, daguerreotype, c. 1848
59
Fig. 3.13. Frederick Douglass, daguerreotype, c.
1850
60

Prior to the Civil War, Douglass made at least five other daguerreotypes that challenged
popular imagery. We might suspect that he went to the gallery to concretize the vision of
a fugitive slave, for in his review of Armistead’s book, he had faulted his own image,
describing how it had “a much more kindly and amiable expression than is generally
thought to characterize the face of a fugitive slave.”
61
The overall effect of his images,
however, was to reveal how a slave could become a dignified, human, bourgeois subject,
in a suit, tie, and vest (Figures 3.12-3.13). For Douglass, evidentiary photography
revealed his humanity and the potential for black middle-class life in the North.
Though Frederick Douglass made far more images than anyone at the time, his
search for visual dignity and self-representation was hardly unique amongst fugitive

59
Chester County Historical Society, West Chester, PA.
60
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
61
Quoted in Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men, 51.
122

slaves. John W. Jones, a fugitive slave who became an operative on the Underground
Railroad in upstate New York, portrayed pride and dignity rather than victimization
(Figure 3.14). Likewise, ex-slave John Brown – the Georgian slave scarred by medical
experiments – posed for a dignified photograph which was translated into the frontispiece
for his 1854 narrative, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and
Escape of John Brown (Figure 3.15).

Fig. 3.14. John W. Jones, photograph, c. 1850
62
Fig. 3.15. John Brown, frontispiece, 1854
63

The frontispiece bolstered the expressed aims of Brown’s book: “to advance the anti-
slavery cause by the diffusion of information; and to promote the success of the project
John Brown has formed, to advance himself by his own exertions, and to set an example

62
Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society (Item ID, OHS: AL03088.tif).
63
Brown, John and Louis Alexis Chamerovzow. 1855. Frontispiece image of Slave Life in
Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in
England. W. M. Watts. Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/menu.html
123

to others of his ‘race.’”
64
A portrait of his well-dressed respectability may not have sold
as many books as a picture of his earlier victimization, but it may have proved essential
to his ongoing quest for employment and acceptance. With this visual opening, Brown
visualized his present and his future, not his past.
The dearth of photographs depicting the damage of ex-slaves in the wake of the
Branded Hand forces us to revise our estimate of abolitionist political culture. In recent
years, scholars have stressed how abolitionists capitalized on the new media of the
nineteenth century to convert the unconverted.
65
While this argument rightly
characterizes abolitionists’ uses of such forms as magazines and prints, it fails to account
for their relative avoidance of photography. For a white abolitionist like Jonathan
Walker, a photographed brand could spur sympathy and mobilize energy without
downgrading his own humanity. Fugitive slaves, on the other hand, needed every tool
they could find to build and convey their sense of personhood. They jeopardized this aim
if they pictured victimization, particularly since they would lose control over a circulating
image. Those who had escaped from a slave state after 1840 may even have reviled the
whole idea of a “slave portrait,” which was already common in their experiences as a
testament to slaveholding benevolence. White abolitionists might have loved to circulate
more images of victimized slaves; their putative black subjects appear to have resisted
that opportunity to serve the cause. For African Americans, freedom meant they could
now shape the uses of photography negatively and positively: they could sit for images

64
Brown, John and Louis Alexis Chamerovzow. 1855. Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the
Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England. Documenting the
American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/menu.html
65
See, for instance, Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest:
Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York: The New Press, 2006), xxi.
124

they considered liberating, and refuse to sit for those that evoked past humiliations. In
that way they compelled the abolitionist movement to revert to the older technologies of
engravings and lithographs if they sought to show the suffering of bondage.

Rather than extending the abolitionist iconography of suffering slaves,
photography enacted a transformation that re-shaped the means through which
abolitionists understood themselves and their relations to one another. From the 1840s
onwards, abolitionists used photography to document and express their own political
bonds rather than to imagine the slave South. On the rare occasion, they did so within
group portraits. In 1850, for instance, British abolitionist George Thompson posed for at
least three group daguerreotypes with William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips in
Boston (Figures 3.16-3.17). The ocean that separated the trio must have reinforced the
need for photographic bonds.

Fig. 3.16. Phillips, Garrison, Thompson, daguerreotype, 1850
66

66
Cased photographs, Boston Public Library. Courtesy Trustees of the Boston Public Library.
125

Fig. 3.17. Phillips, Garrison, Thompson, daguerreotype, 1850
67

All three men had made names for themselves through their prowess as orators. On
Garrison’s first encounter with Thompson, in 1833, Thompson’s lecturing had filled his
“mind with admiration.”
68
The daguerreotypes brought them down from the podium,
placing them casually around a parlor table in a simulated group conversation. Black
Garrisonian William Cooper Nell was likely struck by this image of white radicals as
parlor gentlemen, telling Phillips that, if mass-produced, they would make a “handsome
penny,”
69
though it is unclear if he ever followed through on the idea.
The more popular expression of political bonds was through the exchange of
individual portrait photographs (rather than picturing activists socializing and strategizing

67
Cased photographs, Boston Public Library. Courtesy Trustees of the Boston Public Library.
68
Ronald M. Gifford II, “George Thompson and trans-Atlantic antislavery, 1831-1865” (PhD
diss., Indiana University, 1999), 77.
69
Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell: Selected
Writings, 1832-1874 (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002), 277.
126

within the frames). One such visual-material connection that emerged was between
George Thompson and American activists. While Thompson posed with Garrison and
Phillips, he also found that, as he lectured throughout the Northeast in 1850, many a rank-
and-file abolitionist sought a visual souvenir of his visit. “Locks of my hair – autographs
-- & likenesses are in great demand,” Thompson remarked about his visit to Rochester.
70

For Thompson, this visual connection was actually a two-way street, as reports revealed
how he kept images of American abolitionists in his home in England. As London
reporter William Farmer noted in The Liberator, “Mr. Thompson's drawing-room table is
greased with the daguerreotype portraits of a few of the choicest of what may be termed
American Anti-Slavery Apostles….”
71
Even if most abolitionists could not obtain their
own daguerreotypes of Thompson – or Garrison or Phillips, for that matter – newspaper
accounts helped them to imagine the reach of their movement across the Atlantic.
Image-exchanges also occurred across racial lines, a practice which distinguished
abolitionists from the rest of northern culture (and ironically allied them with the photo-
culture of masters and slaves). Upstate New Yorker Gerrit Smith – a white abolitionist –
owned a photo-album with cartes de visite of many comrades, including his friend, black
abolitionist James McCune Smith.
72
Frederick Douglass gave one of his daguerreotypes,
made around 1847 (Figure 3.12), to his Rochester friend (and women’s rights activist)
Susan B. Anthony. We do not know when Douglass did so, but we do know that in the
1890s Anthony displayed the image on the mantel in her house.
73

70
Gifford II, “George Thompson and trans-Atlantic antislavery, 1831-1865,” 284.
71
The Liberator, January 2, 1852. Accessible Archives: The Liberator.
72
Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 62-65.
73
Author email with Mary Ellen Sweeney, Susan B. Anthony House, January 18, 2013.
127

Photo-historians have associated such exchanges of unique photographs with the
sentimental practices that bolstered middle-class families in the antebellum North. But
we have not considered how these practices could just as easily build political networks.
Every one of the tens of thousands of abolitionists likely made at least one photograph,
and we must consider that many shared these images with other activists, not just family
members. Of course, this practice was not distinctive to abolition. It would have helped
the mid-nineteenth-century temperance and women’s movements in the same way,
though scholars have surprisingly done little work in this area. Every social network –
whether familial, reform, or radical – benefited from the introduction of photo-sharing
practices in the 1840s.

During the first decade of photography, abolitionists experimented with
harnessing this new medium for political ends. Activists started making portraits of
individuals and groups, and began displaying and exchanging these images. They made
their first martyr photograph in the Branded Hand, and found ways of reproducing
photographs in print media for wide distribution. But in the 1850s, abolitionists grew
more confident in the moral and political possibilities of the daguerreotype, and
photography began to take on a more prominent role in their reform efforts, shaping the
public and private events that injected the movement with urgency and lit broader fires of
sectional animosity.
The impetus for this shift was the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.
Part of the Compromise of 1850, the law penalized northern citizens (up to 1,000 dollars
and six months in jail) for failing to aid in returning fugitive slaves, instituted federal
128

commissioners (rather than state judges) as overseers, and barred fugitive slaves from
testifying in court and from the right to a trial by jury.
74
Abolitionists responded quickly,
organizing protest meetings across the North. In November of 1850, senator Charles
Sumner spoke before a crowd at Faneuil Hall, urging the nonviolent approach which had
long served as a touchstone of immediatism: “There is another power, stronger than any
individual arm, which I invoke; I mean that irresistible public opinion inspired by love of
God and man which, without violence or noise, gently as the operations of nature, makes
and unmakes laws. Let this public opinion be felt in its might, and the Fugitive Slave bill
will become everywhere among us a dead letter.”
75
Others took a more aggressive tone,
as exemplified by Frederick Douglass’s more hostile comments in Pittsburgh. For him,
the only way to limit the power of the law was “to make a dozen or more dead
kidnappers,” which would “cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity
in check.”
76
Though abolitionists such as Sumner and Douglass pitched different
messages, the law bound them in a common antagonism against the Slave Power.
Abolitionists began to respond to the law with direct action, if rarely violence,
during the 1850s. They formed organizations to aid fugitive slaves, including the
Committee of Vigilance and Safety in Boston, the New York Vigilance Committee, and
the new Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. Over eighty times in the 1850s, abolitionists
sought to rescue fugitive slaves and free blacks before they were returned to slavery,
including the famous cases of Shadrach Minkins (Boston, 1851), Thomas Sims (Boston,
1851), Jerry McHenry (Syracuse, 1851), Anthony Burns (Boston, 1854), and Charles

74
James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, rev. ed. (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 124.
75
Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 51-52.
76
Campbell, The Slave Catchers, 52-53.
129

Nalle (Troy, NY, 1860). Many of these incidents attracted national attention, and, as
historian Lois E. Horton notes, “each one infuriated slaveholders, garnered increasing
Northern sympathy for antislavery, and intensified the determination of abolitionists to
fight the Fugitive Slave Law.”
77

Within the movement, images of white martyrs and escaping fugitives – what I
term “martyr photography” and “underground photography” – shaped the meanings of
this transition from moral suasion to direct action.
78
Changing in tandem with the
increasingly confrontational culture of the 1850s, photography reoriented abolitionist
visuality from a culture of idealization and imagination to a culture of documentary
evidence – one that served as symbolic resistance to the government and the Slave
Power, and as a form of visual-material solidarity amongst activists.
On August 21, 1850, only two days after Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave
Law, over 2,000 abolitionists gathered in Cazenovia, New York, where they enacted a
social, written, and photographic protest.
79
The primary purpose of the Convention was
to write “A Letter to the American Slaves from those who have fled from American
Slavery,” actually penned by Gerrit Smith and endorsed by the approximately fifty
fugitives in attendance, which characterized slavery as a state of war and urged slaves
that, “by all the rules of war, you have the fullest liberty to plunder, burn, and kill, as you
may have occasion to do to promote your escape.”
80
(Not surprisingly, this provocation
for insurrection generated national controversy.) Many who authorized the letter also

77
Horton, “Kidnapping and Resistance” 166.
78
Horton, Kidnapping and Resistance”; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Confrontation and
Abolition in the 1850s,” The Journal of American History 58, no. 4 (1972).
79
“Circular from the Chaplin Fund Committee,” The North Star, September 5, 1850. Accessible
Archives: African American Newspapers.
80
“A Letter to the American Slaves from those who have fled from American Slavery,” The
North Star, September 5, 1850. Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers.
130

posed for the camera of Cazenovia daguerreotypist Ezra Greenleaf Weld, brother of
Theodore Dwight Weld (Figure 3.18).

Fig. 3.18. Ezra Greenleaf Weld, Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Convention, Cazenovia, daguerreotype, August
22, 1850
81

At first glance, the image appears an early attempt to record a political event, and
many scholars have treated it this way. They have pointed to the interracial character of

81
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ezra Greenleaf Weld, Fugitive Slave Law
Convention, Cazenovia, New York, August 22, 1850, daguerreotype, 1/6 plate image.
131

the crowd as the most important feature of the daguerreotype. But for those at the
convention, the image held more specific purposes and meanings, which surrounded one
particular white abolitionist: William L. Chaplin. Only a few days before the convention,
Chaplin had been imprisoned for seeking to help the slaves of Georgia congressmen
Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs escape in Washington D.C.
82
Since his arrest
came so close to the start of the convention, Chaplin played an unusually prominent role
in its activities. The incendiary “Letter to American Slaves” advised bondspeople of how
“the precious name of William L. Chaplin has been added to the list of those, who, in
helping you gain your liberty, have lost their own. Here is a man, whose wisdom,
cultivation, more worth, bring him into the highest and best class of men: and, yet, he
becomes a willing martyr for the poor, despised, forgotten slave’s sake.”
83
At Cazenovia,
abolitionists agreed to raise $20,000 to aid this “willing martyr.”
84
As The Liberator
reveals, they also sought to aid Chaplin with a group photograph:
Novel Idea. —At the meeting of fugitives and sympathizers held at Cazenovia, much
sympathy was expressed for W.L. CHAPLIN, Esq., who, in his efforts to let the
oppressed go free, has fallen into the hands of the 'Philistines.' But in order to give him an
idea of the meeting, at which he was prevented by 'circumstances' from attending, a
daguerreotype picture of the Convention, with some of the most prominent members on
the stand, was taken, to be sent to him. This must be highly gratifying to him, as
affording the sensible proof that the Convention are not unmindful to 'remember them
that are in bonds.'
85

The notice in The Liberator illuminates how the daguerreotype operated on
multiple levels. On one level, it served as a means of communication between the group
and Chaplin held “in bonds,” a material token of solidarity, a shared image of symbolic

82
Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 164; “An Affray – The Arrest of William Chaplin,” The
National Era, August 15, 1850. Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers.
83
“A Letter to the American Slaves from those who have fled from American Slavery,” The
North Star, September 5, 1850. Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers.
84
“Convention of Slaves at Cazenovia,” The North Star, September 5, 1850. Accessible
Archives: African American Newspapers.
85
The Liberator, September 6, 1850. Accessible Archives: The Liberator.
132

protest and togetherness. One can clearly view the personal and political connections
between Chaplin and the subjects in the portrait. His fiancée, the bonneted Theodosia
Gilbert, literally took center stage, seated next to Frederick Douglass. The Edmonson
sisters, ex-slaves who had gained their freedom with Chaplin’s help, stood behind the
desk; white abolitionist Gerrit Smith stood between them.
86
Those at the convention
would have taken pride in the fact that this portrait revealed the blurry outlines of tree
branches. Gerrit Smith had initially scheduled the convention to be held in a church, but
he moved it to a nearby apple orchard when too many attendees arrived; the trees, in
other words, signified the strength of abolitionist resolve.
87
It is not clear if Chaplin ever
received the daguerreotype and saw his loved ones and friends under those apple trees,
though we may suspect he did, for abolitionists such as Joseph C. Hathaway would soon
visit Chaplin in his Washington jail cell. (Chaplin would not leave jail until December of
1850.
88
) On another level, the image achieved its influence through its written
description in The Liberator. Terming the image a “Novel idea,” The Liberator revealed
these abolitionists’ self-conscious efforts to engage in a new practice of photographic
solidarity with an imprisoned martyr, in doing so highlighting Chaplin’s very inability to
see the convention firsthand.
In ensuing years, abolitionist photography would continue to testify to white
rebels who suffered for the cause. In the summer of 1855, abolitionist Passmore
Williamson helped slave Jane Johnson escape while she traveled in Philadelphia with her

86
Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 163-165.
87
Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the
End of Slavery (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 31.
88
“Convention of Slaves at Cazenovia,” The North Star, September 5, 1850; “William L.
Chaplin,” The National Era, December 26, 1850. Accessible Archives: African American
Newspapers.
133

master, John H. Wheeler, the U.S. minister to Nicaragua. Jailed for three months,
Williamson became a national sensation, his story covered extensively by mainstream
papers such as The National Tribune as well as the antislavery press. Black luminaries
such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman visited his cell; senator Charles Sumner
wrote him a letter, published in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, noting that it was a
“privilege to suffer for truth.”
89
Williamson was also visited by a photographer, perhaps
Philadelphia artist John Steck, the only known artist listed in the visitors’ register for
Williamson’s prison stay (Figure 3.19).
90
In jail, Williamson posed defiantly – arms
crossed, gazing boldly at the camera in front of the cell door that signified his captivity.

89
“Senator Sumner to Passmore Williamson,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 31, 1855.
Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers.
90
James Oliver Horton, “A Crusade for Freedom: William Still and the Real Underground
Railroad,” in Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, ed.
David W. Blight (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 186-187;
http://www.librarycompany.org/janejohnson/; author email with Pamela C. Powell, archivist at
Chester County Historical Society, January 9, 2013.
134

Fig. 3.19. Passmore Williamson, daguerreotype, 1855
91

Likewise, in 1858, a group of men from Oberlin helped free an arrested Kentucky
fugitive named John Price; they immediately hastened Price off to Canada.
Subsequently, at least twenty of the “Oberlin-Wellington” rescuers were jailed for more
than a year, becoming yet another case of abolitionist martyrdom in the presses. In April

91
Chester County Historical Society, West Chester, PA.
135

of 1859, Cleveland photographer J.M. Green captured the captured activists as they stood
in the courtyard of the Cuyahoga County jail (Figure 3.20).
92

Fig. 3.20. “The Oberlin Rescuers at Cuyahoga County Jail,” April, 1859
93

In 1855 Williamson posed as the lone defiant; in 1859 the Oberlin men exhibited a
collective martyrdom emblematic of the grassroots nature of antebellum abolitionism.
Later in 1859, Dr. John Doy posed for two photographic portraits after his own
direct actions found him in jail. Doy had sought to help thirteen blacks – who feared they
would be kidnapped and sold into slavery in Missouri – by transporting them in wagons
from Lawrence, Kansas Territory to Iowa. Only twelve miles outside Lawrence,
however, Doy and the group of African Americans were accosted by a group of ruffians,

92
Horton, “Kidnapping and Resistance,” 171.
93
Courtesy of Oberlin College Archives.
136

who kidnapped Doy and brought him to Weston, Missouri. Eventually convicted of
abducting slaves, Doy was sentenced to five years in the St. Joseph’s jail.
94
But Doy
would not need to wait five years, for in the summer of 1859 a group of rescuers helped
him escape. As The National Era detailed, the rescuers presented themselves to the jail
guard as men who sought to throw a horse thief in jail. Seeing a supposed thief tied up in
ropes, the guard let them inside. Once inside, the men pulled their guns, obtained the
keys, set Doy free, and ferried him back across the river to Lawrence. There, they posed
for at least two emancipation images, taken by a local photographer, Amon Gilbert
DaLee (Figures 3.21-3.22).
95

Fig. 3.21. Dr. John Doy and rescuers, ambrotype, 1859
96

94
John Doy, The narrative of John Doy of Lawrence, Kansas: "a plain unvarnished tale". New
York, 1860. 136pp. Sabin Americana. Gale, Cengage Learning. University of Southern California
Libraries.
95
The National Era republished reports from the St. Louis Democrat. See “RESCUE OF DR.
DOY-PARTICULARS,” National Era, August 4, 1859. Accessible Archives: African American
Newspapers.
96
Courtesy of kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society.
137

Fig. 3.22. Dr. John Doy and rescuers, ambrotype, 1859
97

The proudly brandished guns and knives of the rescuers and the lack of such weaponry
on Doy’s person pulled differing strands of abolitionism into one frame: the nonviolent
martyr and the militant dissidents, unafraid to use force in the service of freedom.
Direct, voluntary action tied these men together, but so too did their experience as
prisoners. Ironically, the Fugitive Slave Law proved a boon to abolitionist photography,
for jails – as physical sites and places of national and religious significance – were tailor-
made for documentary pictures. First, long prison stays – like downtime during the Civil
War – gave photographers the necessary time to make images that seemed part of the
event. Second, prison-escapes created easy before and after moments, in which
abolitionists such as John Doy became emancipated figures. Third, the prison experience
helped abolitionists make imaginative connections between white martyrs and black

97
Courtesy of kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society.
138

slaves, for they often called slavery a “prison house.”
98
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
urged abolitionist support to “give liberty to every slave” and to “open the prison door of
every Passmore Williamson….”
99
Lastly, these events would have easily recalled to
many abolitionists biblical stories of those imprisoned for their beliefs, including Paul
and Silas.
100
Abolitionists’ prison photography resonated throughout the 1850s precisely
because it testified to the drama and specificity of direct action as it simultaneously
recalled a multiplicity of narratives to northern radicals.
In the fall of 1859, the greatest output of martyr photographs surrounded the
violence, suffering, and martyrdom of John Brown. On October 16, 1859, Brown had led
a group of black and white radicals into Harper’s Ferry, a town at the split of the
Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers in northern Virginia. Brown and his men sought to
seize the arsenal and armory – and to spark a broader slave rebellion. They immediately
captured prisoners, shot the night guard for the Potomac River bridge, and sent sentries to
alert local slaves to the rebellion. Brown had thought his actions would create an army of
revolutionary slaves, but all he attracted was a horde of southern militiamen, who sought
to crush his efforts. By the morning of October 18, Marines had captured Brown as he
made his last stand at the engine house. News of Brown’s failed raid at Harpers Ferry
and his subsequent trial touched off a ferocious national debate over a looming sectional
conflict; within abolitionist ranks, Brown’s raid sparked a photographic explosion. By

98
“A Letter to the American Slaves from those who have fled from American Slavery,” The
North Star, September 5, 1850. Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers.
99
“Fourth Anniversary of the Jerry Rescue,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 24, 1855.
Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers.
100
Hazel Catherine Wolf, On Freedom’s Altar: The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), 62.
139

mid-November of 1859, after Brown’s death sentence but before his execution,
abolitionists had begun circulating photographs of Brown en masse.
Photographs of Brown and others amplified the suffering of white male
abolitionists: the Branded Hand served as the basis for engravings; Williamson’s
photograph became the visual foundation for a lithograph of him in his cell; Frank
Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper made the photograph of the Oberlin martyrs its front-
cover illustration on May 7, 1859; John Doy’s The Narrative of John Doy, of Lawrence,
Kansas (1860) soon sold “a fine likeness of Dr. Doy” – as well as “the grouped picture of
the heroic Kansas men who rescued him” – likely based upon one of his emancipation
ambrotypes.
101

But it was John Brown who multiplied the most through his photographs, which
abolitionists sold widely in their newspapers. William Cooper Nell quickly launched into
the sale of Brown’s portraits, collaborating first, in December of 1859, with artist Thomas
M. Johnson and photographer T.H. Webb for a photo-lithograph.
102
Many others joined
Nell, and perhaps no abolitionist took more interest in this enterprise than Thaddeus
Hyatt. A manufacturer from New York, Hyatt had helped fund the National Kansas
Committee to support free state battles in Bleeding Kansas.
103
“I have a photograph of
the old man presented to me by his own [h]ands, an admirable likeness,” Hyatt
advertised. “Let all who sympathize in the purpose send each a dollar, and I will forward
for each such sum an exact copy of the original, and with it, if possible, John Brown's

101
John Doy, The narrative of John Doy of Lawrence, Kansas: "A plain unvarnished tale." New
York, 1860. 136pp. Sabin Americana. Gale, Cengage Learning. University of Southern California
Libraries.
102
“Portrait of John Brown,” The Liberator, December 9, 1859. Accessible Archives: The
Liberator.
103
http://www.kshs.org/p/thaddeus-hyatt-papers-1843-1898/14047
140

autograph.”
104
In November of 1859, Hyatt felt there would be little problem in selling
10,000 pictures. He made sure to mention in his advertisements that the images would
“all be photographs, and not engravings.”
105
Hyatt sold Brown’s images, in part, through
their very form, capitalizing on the public perception of the photograph as an unmediated
relation to Brown.
Brown’s portraits gave abolitionists the best of both worlds: recognition of his
courage and sacrifice, and a closer material connection to these qualities, without visual
evidence of the actual violence at Harpers Ferry (as well as in Kansas). J.B. Heywood
produced one of the most widely circulated portraits (Figure 3.23).

104
“Aid for the Family of John Brown,” The Liberator, November 25, 1859. Accessible
Archives: The Liberator.
105
The Liberator, November 25, 1859. Accessible Archives: The Liberator. By the summer of
1860, Hyatt had profited $2,600. See “Distribution of John Brown Fund,” Douglass’ Monthly,
October 1860. Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers.
141

Fig. 3.23. J.B. Heywood, John Brown, May 1859
106

Many of Brown’s previous portraits had cast him as a fierce and sharp man, with a gaunt
face and a piercing gaze, as in the now-famous daguerreotype Augustus Washington

106
Image courtesy of Boston Athenæum
142

made in 1847, or the late-1850s portrait taken by John A. Whipple and J.W. Black.
107

The Heywood image, on the other hand, offered a mellower Brown. Boasting a long grey
beard, hands in his pockets, Brown was at one and the same a Moses-like figure who
sought an enslaved mass exodus and an elder statesmen of the radical community, more
ready to converse and advise than instigate violent rebellion.
In public and in private, photographs marking Brown’s death actually gave him
new cultural life. At a memorial in Cleveland, for example, viewers saw “a fine
photograph of the Hero of Harper's Ferry, in gilt frame encircled with a wreath” on the
stage of Melodeon Hall. The display surrounded Brown’s portrait with lofty phrases like
“Remember then that are in bonds as bound with them—his noble spirit makes despots
quail, and Freedom triumphs.”
108
These images soon decorated abolitionists’ homes.
Lydia Maria Child sought to buy “every form of his likeness that can be devised, and
have no corner of my dwelling without a memorial of him. The brave, self-sacrificing
noble old man.”
109
In a sense, abolitionists had re-worked the broader tradition of post-
mortem photography, a popular practice through which Americans pictured the dead
bodies of loved ones in order to preserve them in memory. Whether a signal of Brown’s
continuing presence or a sign of his absence, Brown’s portraits filled up abolitionists’

107
R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long Reckoning with Violence,
Equality, & Change (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 14, 43.
108
The Liberator, January 27, 1860. Accessible Archives: The Liberator. A similar use of
Brown’s photograph took place at a meeting in Boston, as The Liberator recorded: “In front of
the speaker's desk was a likeness JOHN BROWN himself, coped from the last photograph taken
of him. It was surrounded by a cross, and around the whole was a wreath of evergreen and
amaranth. Before the picture, and on each side of it, were three large printed placards, each
bearing a sentence uttered by John Brown.” The Liberator, December 9, 1859. Accessible
Archives: The Liberator.
109
Paul Finkleman, ed., His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers
Ferry Raid (The University Press of Virginia, 1995), 53.
143

private visual shrines, and Brown lived on as the most famous of photographic martyrs
for decades to come.
This direct-action photography revises the customary scholarly narrative of
abolitionist visual culture, and it sheds light on the history of photography and its relation
to sympathy. While we have paid much attention to abolitionist images of suffering
slaves, the tradition of “martyr photography” generated sympathy for suffering whites. In
a strange reversal, the fugitive slaves at the Cazenovia Convention sent a photograph to
show white abolitionist William L. Chaplin that they were “not unmindful to 'remember
them that are in bonds.'” Through this tradition of “martyr photography,” moreover,
abolitionists actually helped to initiate the practice of photographing and consuming “the
pain of others.” Though scholars have discussed photographs of dead soldiers and
impoverished prisoners of the Civil War, they have largely looked to the turn-of-the
twentieth century (and after) to understand the role that suffering photographs have
played in shaping political and moral sentiment in America. The history of suffering
photographs, however, begins with abolitionists’ efforts to connect to the suffering of
white martyrs, from Jonathan Walker to John Brown.
110

Along the Underground Railroad, abolitionists began developing a quieter photo-
culture that also bolstered movement solidarity, through images that documented and
expressed dramatic action rather than Christian suffering. A decentralized web of escape

110
On images of poverty – including the 1890s New York tenement scenes of Jacob Riis and the
1930s rural photographs of the Farm Securities Administration artists and Walker Evans – see,
for starters, Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure
Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York (New York: The New Press,
2007); and William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1986). On images of atrocity, see Jay Prosser, Geoffrey Batchen,
Mick Gidley, and Nancy K. Miller, eds., Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London:
Reaktion Books Ltd., 2012).

144

routes for fugitive slaves, the Underground Railroad played an important role in
hastening the arrival of the Civil War. As historian David Blight writes, the “traffic in
escaped slaves exerted pressure on slavery itself, caused significant political tensions
between North and South, and prompted a small but important group of abolitionists to
resist the law by aiding fugitives to freedom.”
111
Yet the social and cultural experience of
the Underground Railroad, and the relation between this experience and the politics of
slavery, has proven notoriously difficult for historians to access, given the lack of
sources.
112
This dearth of evidence is due in large part to the secretive nature of the
work, which led some abolitionists to destroy their records, as Robert Purvis did with his
logbook of fugitives who passed through Philadelphia.
113
Thus, not many photographs
have survived in archives. But newspaper accounts, slave narratives, and the written
records of operatives such as William Still offer a tantalizing glimpse into the making and
social uses of underground photographs.
114

Take the story of Richard Easler and Abram Galloway, two enslaved friends from
Wilmington, North Carolina. After Easler broke North Carolina law by marrying a free
woman, he faced a whipping and imprisonment. He decided to flee to the North, and
Galloway joined him. They sought freedom by ship, but knew any vessel leaving a North
Carolina harbor would be smoked – to root out hideaway slaves stowed below deck. So

111
Blight, Passages to Freedom, 3.
112
For recent scholarship about the Underground Railroad, see David W. Blight, ed., The
Underground Railroad in History and Memory (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004); and
Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York: Back Bay Books, 2004).
113
Clinton, Harriet Tubman, 64.
114
For more on Still and the new Vigilance Committee’s use of newspapers and lectures to
publicize their work, see Elizabeth Varon, “’Beautiful Providences’: William Still, the Vigilance
Committee, and Abolitionists in the Age of Sectionalism,” in Antislavery and Abolition in
Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly
Love, eds. Richard Newman and James Mueller (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2011).
145

Easler and Galloway dressed for the voyage in shrouds of silk oil cloth to be drawn over
their heads to breathe more easily (though, for whatever reason, the ship was not smoked
on this occasion). Easler and Galloway arrived safely in Philadelphia, connecting with
members of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. Before helping Easler and Galloway
onwards to Canada, the conductors sought visual mementoes of the fugitives: “Desiring
to retain some memorial of them,” William Still noted, “a member of the Committee
begged one of their silk shrouds, and likewise procured an artist to take the photograph of
one of them.”
115

Philadelphia Vigilance Committee members complemented their memorializing
portraits of Easler and Galloway with an image of Lear Green, an enslaved woman from
Baltimore. Like Galloway and Easler, Green fled north by ship, but her escape took an
even more sensational course: she escaped inside a chest, with only food, water, a
blanket, and a pillow to sustain her. Green eventually arrived in Philadelphia with the
rest of the cargo. Before she continued onwards, Green and members of the Vigilance
Committee re-enacted her escape north through photography. When Green left for
Elmira, New York, she left behind a photograph of herself inside the getaway chest.
116

These stories of Easler, Galloway, and Green reveal how photo-making had become part
of the very transition from slavery to freedom in Philadelphia, one of the primary
underground hubs.
117
That the Vigilance Committee never publicized these photographs

115
William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1871). Accessed
through Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15263/15263-h/15263-h.htm
116
William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1871). Accessed
through Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15263/15263-h/15263-h.htm
117
The Philadelphia Vigilance Committee does not appear to have publicized these photographs
in the antebellum era; in his postbellum book, William Still published illustrations of Galloway
and Green, perhaps based upon their antebellum images.
146

in the antebellum era reveals how photography offset the public invisibility of
Underground Railroad work through acts of private documentation.
Written and visual evidence reveals the reach of underground image-making. In
Rochester, where almost 400 fugitives found shelter with Frederick Douglass before
traveling onwards to Canada, it seemed commonplace by 1860 for a fugitive to leave his
photograph in passing.
118
Describing the story of Ben, a fugitive from Georgia,
Douglass’ Monthly humorously jabbed at Ben’s master, “be assured that your lost BEN
for whom you mourn by this time 'as those that have no hope,' shall be 'arrested' if he
comes this way, and detained long enough to get a good night's sleep and a warm
breakfast, and if he should leave us his daguerreotype, you shall see it when you come
this way, for it would give us pleasure to let you view the 'shadow' of Ben, now his
'substance has fled.'”
119
Douglass’s taunt reveals that we might best locate Sojourner
Truth’s later motto, “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” in the culture of the
Underground Railroad. It further suggests that this seditious culture drew upon
mainstream practices in one regard: operatives were keeping mementos of travelers, in
this case fugitives, like any antebellum American would to preserve a moment and a
personal connection.
In Cincinnati, abolitionists possessed the two essential elements for underground
image-making during the 1850s: a movement photographer in J.P. Ball, and a renowned
“stationmaster” in Levi Coffin. In 1862, with the Fugitive Slave Law still in force, Ball

118
Clinton, Harriet Tubman, 64.
119
Ben had escaped, a fact which the paper attributed to Ben’s experience in the courts, where he
“must have heard many declarations of the principles; of abstract human rights, even in a Georgia
court; and as he probably never read, the Dred Scott decision, he seems to have applied these
principles to his own case.” “A Judge in a Fix,” Douglass’ Monthly, August 1860. Accessible
Archives: African American Newspapers.
147

and Coffin collaborated to make one known fugitive carte de visite, described by Coffin
in his Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the reputed president of the underground railroad.
120

The history of the image began when an eighteen-year-old slave woman found herself
sold to a new master who “designed placing her in a house of ill-fame at Lexington,
Kentucky.” Anticipating her future in a brothel, the woman fled to a Union army camp in
Nicholasville, Kentucky, where she made contact with the Twenty-Second Wisconsin
volunteers, a group known by many as the “Abolition regiment” due to the politics of its
leader, Colonel Utley. Two members of the regiment, Jesse L. Berch and Frank M.
Rockwell, aided her to Cincinnati and made contact with Coffin. At Coffin’s house they
rested for a few days as the soldiers arranged for the fugitive to travel to their hometown
of Racine, Wisconsin. Before the fugitive boarded her literal train, however, she and the
soldiers stopped by J.P. Ball’s gallery on West 4
th
Street and posed for a picture (Figure
3.24). The fugitive sat in a dress, shawl, and hat, while Berch and Rockwell stood behind
her, brandishing their guns in a common gesture for soldiers at the time. The image
offered the same composition as the portraits of John Doy and his rescuers in Kansas
territory, revealing a broader abolitionist rescue iconography. As in the Doy image, this
carte de visite testified to the courage of the rescuers, or at least Levi Coffin felt as much,
commenting on how the men revealed “their readiness thus to protect her, even at the cost
of their own lives.”
121

120
The Fugitive Slave Law was not struck down until June 28, 1864. See Campbell, The Slave
Catchers, 194.
121
Coffin, Levi. Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground
Railroad; Being a Brief History of the Labors of a Lifetime in Be Half of the Slave, with the
Stories of Numerous Fugitives, Who Gained Their Freedom through His Instrumentality, and
Many Other Incidents. London; Cincinnati, Ohio, [1876], 606-608. The Making Of The Modern
World.
148

Fig. 3.24. James Presley Ball, “Jesse Berch, quartermaster sergeant, 25, Wisconsin Regiment of Racine,
Wis. [and] Frank M. Rockwell, postmaster 22 Wisconsin of Geneva, Wis.” photographic print on carte de
visite mount, 1862
122

122
Ball, James Presley, photographer. “Jesse Berch, quartermaster sergeant, 25, Wisconsin
Regiment of Racine, Wis. [and] Frank M. Rockwell, postmaster 22 Wisconsin of Geneva, Wis.”
1 photographic print on carte de visite mount: albumen. Cincinnati, Sept. 1862. From Library of
149

The speed of photography made such fugitive portraits a cultural possibility.
Abolitionists and fugitives likely never thought much about making fugitive paintings
when they met on the Underground Railroad. Paintings cost more money, and they also
took far more time to complete. By the 1850s, however, activists and escapees could take
a daguerreotype in only 15-20 seconds (sitting time), and an ambrotype and tintype in
only 6-10 seconds.
123
Getting in and out of the galleries likely posed the greater
challenge. At the moment American photographers were still experimenting with the use
of artificial light for portraits, and they relied on large skylights for natural light, which
they directed into different spaces in the gallery with screens and mirrors.
124
In
photograph galleries known as spaces of middle-class refinement, fugitive slaves posed
quickly enough to avoid detection.
125
Indeed, visual evidence suggests that Ball may
have rushed his portrait of the Kentucky slave with the Wisconsin soldiers, for the
unknown cylindrical object in the foreground reveals a sloppy composition, perhaps one
born out of haste.
Occasionally abolitionists used fugitive photographs as visual evidence in public
settings. For example, at an 1859 commemoration of West Indian emancipation in
Abington, a town south of Boston, former slave Lewis Clark displayed ambrotypes of
fugitives for the crowd, which had just heard such speakers as William Lloyd Garrison,
Charles Lenox Remond, and Samuel May Jr.. Clark sought to show, as The Liberator

Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Gladstone Collection of African American
Photographs. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008678814/
123
Taft, Photography and the American Scene, 23, 98-99, 164-165.
124
Rinhart and Rinhart, The American Daguerreotype, 104, 263-267.
125
Katherine C. Grier, Cultures & Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850-1930
(Rochester: The Strong Museum, 1988), Ch. 1.
150

noted, “that slavery is not at all particular as to the color of its victim.”
126
As the paper
further detailed, “Some of the faces exhibited were as white as the fairest Anglo-Saxon of
the tribe, and as beautiful, too. Mr. Clark said he did not care how man[sic] Fugitive
Slave Bills were passed, some slaves would still find their way to Canada, for Congress
could not black their faces, or make their eyes other than blue.”
127
Clark’s delivery
method fused the old and new, the podium lecture with the photograph – thereby
prefiguring the lantern-slide lectures that gained popularity in the late nineteenth century.
Drawing upon a prominent 1850s narrative of white slaves, which any audience member
would have immediately linked to masters’ raping of slave women, Clark revealed the
unintentionally self-destructive nature of this behavior, which whitened the slave
community and thus rendered it more difficult to police. Photography proved the perfect
visual aid, for it was widely perceived as the premier medium for showing skin color, in
this case the whiteness that never failed to rile northerners.
128

Abolitionists also used fugitive images to reveal individual slave resistance in
private settings, as the case of black abolitionist Charlotte Forten illustrates. In July of
1857, Forten visited the gallery of Samuel Broadbent in Philadelphia. She recorded in
her diary that she went on the request of a friend to have her likeness taken. While
Forten was at the studio, as she recalled, “Miss J.[ames] was there and showed me a
daguerreotype of a young slave girl who escaped in a box” – probably Lear Green. As
she detailed, “My heart was full as I gazed at it; full of admiration for the heroic girl, who

126
“Anniversary of West India Emancipation,” The Liberator, August 5, 1859. Accessible
Archives: The Liberator.
127
“Anniversary of West India Emancipation,” The Liberator, August 5, 1859. Accessible
Archives: The Liberator.
128
On lantern-slide lectures, see James R. Ryan, “On Visual Instruction,” in The Nineteenth-
Century Visual Culture Reader, eds. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New
York: Routledge, 2004).
151

risked all for freedom; full of indignation that in this boasted land of liberty such a thing
could occur. Were she of any other nation her heroism would receive all due honor from
these Americans, but as it is there is not even a single spot in this broad land, where her
rights can be protected, -- not one. Only in the dominions of a queen is she free. How
long, Oh! how long will this continue!”
129
Forten might have been shocked to see a
picture of any female slave, since male slaves escaped far more often. This female slave
offered special resonance, for her courage struck Forten as unsurpassed. Her emotional
reaction also reveals how the eyewitness nature of Underground photography – which
captured specific moments of enslaved courage in action – strengthened its potency in
symbolizing abolitionist resolve.
These visual-material objects gave abolitionists new ways to view and share the
actions of fugitives. But we must resist the easy assumption that only the abolitionists,
black and white, did the photographic work of the Underground Railroad – for runaway
slaves brought photographs northwards when they fled. Sometimes they were caught in
the act of absconding with images. In August of 1858, an article in the Louisville Courier
described the story of William Lewis, a local man charged with seeking to help slaves
flee, including a mother named Maria and her child, Cena. When officers arrested Lewis,
they found in his room “divers[e] suspicious things, including the wearing apparel of the
negroes, and the daguerreotype of one of them, that of a small child, all nicely packed in
a new chest.” The slaveholding mistress, Mrs. Wisotzki, “recognized the things in the
chest as the clothes of her slave woman, Maria, and the child Cena. She also fully
recognized the daguerreotype as that of the child, taken when it was three years old. It is

129
Sunday, July 5, 1857, in Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 235.
152

now six.”
130
The specificity of photography gave fugitives intricate family mementoes,
but it also gave southern whites intricate evidence to identify escapees.
When slaves succeeded in escaping, they became the figures that introduced
photographs of actual slaves, still toiling in bondage, into abolitionist ranks. In January
of 1856, William Still published a letter in the Provincial Freeman, which was re-
published in the New York Daily Times, that described a fugitive man who fled bondage
after his master sold his wife and four children to a trader in Richmond. At the moment
of flight, as Still narrated, “the severed and bleeding heart of the husband resolved to
escape at all hazards, taking with him a daguerreotype likeness of his wife, which he
happened to have on hand, and a lock of hair from her head, and from each of the
children’s, as mementoes of his unbounded (though sundered) affection for them.”
Arriving in the North, the fugitive made contact with Still’s Vigilance Committee, and as
soon as he entered a safe house he “took from his pocket his wife’s likeness, and while
gazing upon it made touching remarks, and showed it, &c.” As Still described, “His
wife, as represented by the likeness, was of fair complexion, prepossessing and good-
looking – perhaps not over 33 years of age.” Still did not mention any specific details
about the man’s identity in this 1850s article, certainly to ensure his safety, but in a post-
slavery account Still identified the fugitive as Robert Brown, a slave from Martinsburg,
Virginia.
131

The case of Robert Brown reveals how abolitionist and southern photography
were not linked by the aesthetic re-appropriations enacted by famous activists and rich

130
“Charge of Theft and Abetting Slaves to Runaway” Louisville Courier, August 17, 1858, 1.
131
“The Underground Railroad,” New York Daily Times, January 28, 1856, 6. ProQuest
Historical Newspapers; and William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter &
Coates, 1871). Accessed through Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15263/15263-h/15263-h.htm
153

slaveholders, but actually by fugitive slaves, who swam across rivers, traipsed through
the woods, and hid themselves away in safe houses – all with photographs in their
pockets. On the ground, these fugitives extended their own culture of southern
photographs into the North. In doing so, fugitives humanized themselves in the eyes of
those they encountered, by showing their kin and demonstrating their participation in the
common sentimental practices of the day. They joined the many other Americans
travelers who kept images to preserve bonds across space. By the 1850s, fugitive slaves
had helped create a largely secretive visual exchange between their communities and
abolitionists’ communities, between the slave cabins of Virginia and the parlors of the
North, tied together by a new international technology.
It is not hard to imagine that fugitives, once they arrived in the North, used
photographs for two additional purposes. First, to communicate with loved ones by
sending their images back into the South. Most fugitives escaped as individuals, but, as
historian Catherine Clinton notes, they “spent enormous time and effort trying to keep in
touch with family members still in slavery.” Clinton and others have excavated fugitives’
letters that worked to such effect, including one James Masey wrote to his wife from
Canada: “I take this opertunity to inform you that I have Arive in St. Catherines this
Eving. After Jorney of too weeks, and no find myself on free ground and wish that you
was here with me.” Photography would have given illiterate fugitives a similar way of
interacting with their families across space.
132

The second way fugitives could have used images was by giving their family
photographs to Underground operatives for rescue operations. Harriet Tubman, for
instance, often helped to rescue the kin of escapees. Using Tubman’s biblical nickname,

132
Clinton, Harriet Tubman, 76-77.
154

William Wells Brown described how “Men from Canada who had made their escape
years before, and whose families were still in the prison-house of slavery, would seek out
Moses, and get her to go and bring their dear ones away.”
133
Newspaper reports add
further support to the idea that photography could have aided in this regard. In 1860, a
Louisville man named A.H. Scott and a slave were arrested on suspicion of helping other
slaves to escape. As the Louisville Daily Journal reported, officers “arrested both Scott
and the negro. In the possession of the former they found several daguerreotypes of
negro men and women, which have led to the supposition that he is an agent of the
Underground railroad.”
134

There was another facet of the Underground Railroad in which photography more
clearly enabled action: for Harriet Tubman, the portability and indexicality of
photographs served as a safety mechanism. Tubman lived an extremely mobile life after
she escaped slavery in 1849 and began working as an Underground rescuer, her work
taking her through abolitionist hotspots in upstate New York – from Troy and Auburn to
Petersboro and Rochester – and to fugitive hotspots in Canada West (including St.
Catherines and Chatham, in what is now Ontario). Her rescue attempts required dramatic
trips into Maryland and Virginia, where she retrieved slaves and ferried them northwards,
through Wilmington, Philadelphia, and New York City.
135
How could she know whom
to trust among the many strangers she encountered on her journeys?
While most antebellum Americans would have written introduction letters for
these trips, Tubman – an illiterate former slave – could not, so she used photographs
instead. Biographer Catherine Clinton details Tubman’s practices, in which she showed

133
Clinton, Harriet Tubman, 94.
134
“A Kidnapper and a Runaway Arrested,” Louisville Daily Journal, May 9, 1860, 3.
135
Clinton, Harriet Tubman, 74.
155

people she encountered “her images and asked them to name the people in the pictures to
test their credentials. If they could identify the images of her antislavery friends, she felt
secure, knowing she was dealing with someone who had a personal relationship with her
comrades.”
136
Though photo-historians such as John Tagg have argued that photographic
identification bolstered state-sponsored surveillance in the nineteenth century, Tubman
shows how photographic identification could just as easily aid the efforts of those who
subverted southern masters and national laws.
137
Hand-held photographs gave Tubman
the visual proof to maintain the private social networks that were absolutely essential for
carrying out her distinctly mobile work.

Like most social movements in United States history, abolitionists did not invent
new media technologies as much as they took them and adapted them to new moral and
political objectives, a case exemplified by photography. During the 1840s and 1850s,
abolitionists harnessed photography as a way of strengthening political networks and of
conveying the often-dramatic work of fellow radicals and fugitive slaves; this culture
originated in abolitionists’ own acts of self-representation as well as in the slaves’ culture
of private images. Rather than a photographic culture of “moral suasion” which largely
sought to transform the external culture – a system of representations to convert the
average moderate northerner to their cause – abolitionists and fugitives established a
public and private culture of self-representation that bolstered the movement from within.
It should not surprise us, then, that abolitionists did not initially head south to photograph
slavery once the Civil War began, for they had never done so in the past. Their

136
Clinton, Harriet Tubman, 89-90.
137
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (University
of Minnesota Press, 1993).
156

propaganda efforts relied on and re-appropriated the images made by northern
commercial photographers, who would follow the Union army and transform the ways in
which the world of slavery entered the photographic frame.
157

Chapter 4
Slavery’s Victims, Freedom’s Servants, 1861-1865

Past scholars have shown how northern Civil War photographers conveyed the
brutal cost of battles at Antietam and Gettysburg, how they created a gallery of Union
politicians and generals, and how they produced narratives of the conflict in post-war
books, including Alexander Gardner’s Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War
(1866) and George Barnard’s Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (1866). The
images these artists produced have played an incalculable role in shaping the public and
private memory of the war. Indeed, it would be difficult for anyone to think of the Civil
War today without thinking of a Civil War photograph. We know surprisingly little,
however, about how Civil War cameramen pictured – and shaped – the death of slavery
and the birth of freedom.
1
Thus, this chapter asks two interrelated questions. First, how
did proslavery and antislavery photography evolve during the Civil War? Second, how
did photography influence the interracial visions that emerged – largely in Union army
camps – as slavery fell?
At the beginning of the conflict, it was not clear that antislavery photography
would come to overwhelm proslavery photography. Rather, during the build-up to the

1
Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to
Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), Ch. 2; Keith F. Davis, “’A Terrible
Distinctness’: Photography of the Civil War Era,” in Photography in Nineteenth-Century
America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1991); William A.
Frassanito, Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1978); Mary Panzer, Mathew Brady and the Image of History (Washington:
Smithsonian Books, 1997); Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, On Alexander Gardner’s
Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Bob
Zeller, The Blue and Gray in Black and White: A History of Civil War Photography (London:
Praeger Publishers, 2005); Keith F. Davis, George N. Barnard: Photographer of Sherman’s
Campaign (Kansas City: Hallmark Cards, Inc., 1990); Keith Davis, The Origins of American
Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1865 (Kansas City: Hall Family
Foundation and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007).
158

battle at Ft. Sumter, and in its aftermath, southern photographers actually took the lead.
They began by making photographs of military leaders and ruins, not slaves. In January
of 1861, Charleston photographer George Smith Cook received requests from various
photographic firms in the North to picture Major Robert Anderson, commander of Fort
Sumter. “As major Anderson is quite popular [in the] North, I think that we might make
considerable money if we had his picture,” Walter Dinmore of Philadelphia wrote to
Cook. “Answer soon, delays are dangerous; the furor may wear off.”
2
In late December,
Major Anderson had stirred sectional controversy when he sought to inconspicuously
move his approximately 80 soldiers from Ft. Moultrie to Ft. Sumter, a federally occupied
garrison at the mouth of Charleston Harbor that South Carolina had unsuccessfully
sought to wrench from President Buchanan when it seceded.
3
Though Anderson might
have made this move to avoid war – he worried Ft. Moultrie was susceptible to a
southern assault – he only heightened sectional animosity, becoming a hero to the North
and a villain to the South in the process.
4
It is not surprising northerners wanted his
portrait.
On February 8, Cook packed up his camera and chemicals and took the ferry to
Fort Sumter, where he made portraits of Major Anderson and a number of other federal
officers. While Cook subsequently sold these images at his Charleston studio, he also
sent the negatives to artists in cities including New York and Louisville; other northern

2
Walter Dinmore to Cook, January 11, 1861, George Smith Cook Collection, Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress; Edwin Mayall for Thomas Faris to Cook, January 28, 1861,
George Cook Papers, Valentine Richmond History Center.
3
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 264-265.
4
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 254.
159

artists wrote to him, clamoring for their own copies.
5
Many northerners would have also
seen the woodcut engraving of Cook’s photograph in Harper’s Weekly on March 23,
1861.
6
Even as Cook amplified the importance of Ft. Sumter, he became part of the
news. Influential New York photographic manufacturer Edward T. Anthony advertised
Cook’s 25-cent photographs not by describing Major Anderson but instead discussing
Cook, casting the Yankee-turned-slaveholder as the intrepid wartime photojournalist:
“under cover of a bright sun, Col. George S. Cook, of the Charleston Photographic Light
Artillery, with a strong force, made his way to Fort Sumter,” where he “penetrated to the
presence of Maj. Anderson, and leveling a double barreled Camera, demanded his
unconditional surrender in the name of E. Anthony and the Photographic community.”
7

For the photographic community in these early months, profits, artistic innovation, and
admiration far outweighed sectional animosity. This heightened the public role of the
photographer as the nation edged towards war.
No photographer took action shots of the actual battle at Ft. Sumter (April 12-14,
1861). As soon as the battle ended and Major Anderson relinquished the fort to
Confederate Pierre Beauregard, however, Charlestonian photographers were on the scene,
producing the first images of wartime destruction. Within a week, operators from at least
two well-known Charleston firms arrived: James M. Osborn, who ran a gallery with
Frederick E. Durbec, and Alma A. Pelot, assistant for Jesse H. Bolles, owner of the
“Temple of Art.” Eschewing the grandeur of history paintings, these photographs
evidenced Confederate victory from multiple perspectives that privileged the destroyed

5
Webster and Brothers to Cook, March 18, 1861, Cook Papers, Valentine Richmond History
Center. M. Harvey of Philadelphia also asked for a portrait from Cook in late February 1861.
See M. Harvey to Cook, Feb 22, 1861, George Cook Papers, Valentine Richmond History Center.
6
Zeller, The Blue and Gray in Black and White, 31-35.
7
Quoted in Zeller, The Blue and Gray in Black and White, 33.
160

landscape over the human narrative. Pelot and Osborn canvassed the terrain of the fort,
taking more than forty photographs from various heights and angles to show the extent of
the damage in a fragmented panorama.
8
The artists were clearly drawn to the crumbling
walls (Figures 4.1-4.2), busted turrets (Figure 4.3) and the piles of rubble on the ground
(Figure 4.4). Newspapers and advertisements stressed the extensive coverage of these
views. The Charleston Mercury pointed out that Pelot made images from “five different
points of view.”
9
Osborn and Durbec lauded how their “views of Fort Sumter comprise
the whole interior in twenty sections for the Stereoscope, and six large Photographs for
framing.”
10
The artists and their publicists amplified the evidentiary value of the images
through their emphasis on perspectivalism: here was war from all angles.

Fig. 4.1. Alma A. Pelot, Ft. Sumter, April 1861
11

8
Zeller, The Blue and Gray in Black and White, 44.
9
Quoted in Zeller, The Blue and Gray in Black and White, 42.
10
The Charleston Mercury, May 6, 1861. Accessible Archives: The Civil War Collection.
http://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/the-civil-war/
11
Attributed to Alma A. Pelot and Jesse H. Bolles, The Evacuation of Fort Sumter, April 1861,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005
(2005.100.1174.13), Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
161

Fig. 4.2. J.M. Osborn, Ft. Sumter, April 1861
12

Fig. 4.3. Alma A. Pelot, Ft. Sumter, April 1861
13

12
J.M. Osborn, The Evacuation of Fort Sumter, April 1861, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005 (2005.100.1174.2), Image  The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
13
Attributed to Alma A. Pelot and Jesse H. Bolles, The Evacuation of Fort Sumter, April 1861,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005
(2005.100.1174.8), Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
162

Fig. 4.4. J.M. Osborn, Ft. Sumter, April 1861
14

It is unclear how widely these images circulated in the South during the spring of 1861
and beyond. We can only speculate as to whether they offered the proof that states such
as Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee needed to secede.
15
At least in
Charleston, these images steeled Confederate resolve in the first months of the war. The
Courier felt Pelot’s images would assuage concerns of southern supporters as it
prescribed their material uses: “These pictures for the time will afford appropriate
ornaments for our Drawing Rooms, Scrap Books and Albums, and a most acceptable
present to distant and anxious friends.”
16
In the South, the first photographic
representations of wartime ruins served not as symbols of a shameful past but as prideful
reminders for southerners to keep in their homes.
17

14
J.M. Osborn, Salient with North-west Casemates, Fort Sumter, The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005 (2005.100.1174.15), Image  The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
15
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 279-282.
16
Quoted in Zeller, The Blue and Gray in Black and White, 42.
17
On ruins and the Civil War, see Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the
American Civil War (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012); and Nick Yablon,
163

In one sense, these images of Confederate firepower at Ft. Sumter did constitute a
new part of proslavery photography – at least to the extent that they immediately propped
up an explicitly proslavery nation. As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens
had argued in March of 1861, this new nation was founded “upon the great truth that the
negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and moral condition. This,
our new government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this
great…truth.”
18
But how did Confederates picture slaves during wartime? After Ft.
Sumter, how did they more explicitly extend their pre-war photographic proslavery
culture?
Even though black faces did not appear in images at Sumter, they were present in
the military images of ordinary southern soldiers. Indeed, portrait-taking forged a
constitutive element of southern military preparations, as galleries explicitly catered to
Confederate troops ready to depart for duty. For instance, in May of 1861, Pugh &
Brothers Gallery of Art in Macon, Georgia sold portraits to soldiers for half price, and it
announced to the 5
th
Regiment Georgia Volunteers that it had placed a photographer
within their camp so those “who wish their pictures with their guns, knap-sacks, and
every thing on to start for the seat of war” would not need to travel to the uptown
saloon.
19
In turn, Confederate militarization masculinized proslavery photography.
Alongside chattel-Madonna portraits, masters increasingly made military manservant

Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2009). On how photography shaped the geographical imagination
in the nineteenth century, see Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, eds., Picturing Place:
Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003).
18
Quoted in Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War
South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 12.
19
The Macon Daily Telegraph, 5/20/1861, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers. Web. 3
April 2013.
164

portraits, which presented pairings of black and white men, a rare composition in the pre-
war era. The typical visual conventions of this subgenre – exemplified by Burrell and
John Wallace Comer – inverted social power and height, a formula that drew upon
contemporary depictions of husbands and wives (Figure 4.5).

Fig. 4.5. Burrell (slave) and John Wallace Comer
20

This image and other Confederate manservant portraits held the same implication of
consent as pre-war proslavery photographs. While antebellum images had pictured

20
Photograph of John Wallace Comer in Civil War uniform with his slave, Burrell, Comer
Family Papers # 167-z, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill; For a similar visual composition, see the carte de visite of a Confederate
captain and a young black boy, made by Macon, GA photographer A.J. Riddle, in Zeller, The
Blue and Gray in Black and White, 38.
165

enslaved complicity in the peculiar institution, wartime images pictured enslaved
complicity in the fight to preserve that institution. These images must have bolstered
masters’ self-deceptive sense that slaves were loyal participants in furthering the southern
cause (and, of course, the slaves’ own exploitation).
Still, a broader proslavery photographic culture never took hold for the
Confederacy due to the particular events of the war. On April 15, the day after Major
Anderson surrendered at Ft. Sumter, Lincoln called 75,000 men into service to put down
the southern rebellion.
21
On April 19, he issued a proclamation to blockade all ports in
the Confederacy, barring domestic or foreign ships.
22
The blockade posed an immediate
problem for southern photography, since southern artists relied on northern supplies.
George Smith Cook – a major middleman for supplies between North and South –
purchased alcohol, silver, and acid from Garrigues & Magee in Philadelphia,
23
plates,
cases, tubes, boxes, and holders from Scovill Manufacturers in New England, and cases
and glass from Edward T. Anthony in New York.
24
Immediately after Lincoln issued the
blockade, artists turned to Cook to begin making the material himself. On April 20,
Columbia, S.C. photographer Joseph T. Zealy proposed, “I will take the liberty of
suggesting to you to start a factory in this section, what do you think of it.”
25
Early on,
southern artists such as Zealy foresaw the collapse of their livelihoods at the hands of the
blockade.

21
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 274.
22
Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 280.
23
Receipt from January 19, 1861 from Garrigues & Magee, George Smith Cook Collection,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
24
See Account Book, August 1860-December 1861, George Cook Papers, Valentine Richmond
History Center.
25
Joseph T. Zealy to George Smith Cook, April 20, 1861, George Smith Cook Collection,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
166

From this point onwards, southern artists struggled to keep their businesses afloat.
In South Carolina, thirty firms operated on the eve of the war, yet by 1862 very few were
placing advertisements in the major newspapers, and by 1864 only George Smith Cook
and Richard Wearn of Columbia still remained open.
26
In Vicksburg, Mississippi, John
H. Fitzgibbons operated until just before the city fell. The American Journal of
Photography reported that Fitzgibbons had struggled due to the lack of some goods and
the exorbitant costs of others (“alcohol at twenty-four dollars per gallon”). Further, there
was “no money among the people to pay for pictures if he could produce them.”
Fitzgibbons eventually tried to break through the blockade but was caught.
27
Though
their survival rates differed, southern photographers slowly succumbed to supply
limitations and decreased regional purchasing power.
By 1862, major trade publications (all published in the North) were openly
lamenting how the war had severed ties to the southern profession. “In the Southern
states of the Union, photography like most other artistic and industrial pursuits, for lack
of materials wherewith to work, and for lack of patrons, is well nigh a lost art,” the
American Journal of Photography wrote in October of 1861. “The people of the South,
eminent for boasting and perhaps for fighting, are yet not progressed far enough to have
the cunning for manufacturing daguerreotype cases, glass, paper, or photographic
chemicals.”
28
In February of 1862, Humphrey’s Journal expressed hope for a united
photographic community: “In a few months more we expect to see peace established, and
our Southern Photographic friends will then be ‘let out of jail,’ as it were. They must be

26
Harvey Teal, Partners with the Sun: South Carolina Photographers, 1840-1940 (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 85, 120.
27
Editorial, American Journal of Photography, Sept 16, 1863.
28
“Editorial Miscellany,” American Journal of Photography, October 15, 1861, 240.
167

all out of stock and materials, and our dealers here will then have their hands full of
business.”
29
The dismay from northern photographic journals was partially genuine – the
American Journal of Photography reported that it lost one-third of its subscribers after
Sumter – but the circumstances also gave northerners the opportunity to celebrate their
superior industrial progress.
30

Southern photography did not entirely vanish after the blockade, as select artists
in Charleston and Richmond bucked the broader trend. George Smith Cook continued to
operate until March 1864. The American Journal of Photography suspected that the
British were keeping Cook in operation: “By favor of our British cousins who run the
blockade with powder and guns, our friend Cook of Charleston, has still a precarious
stock of photographic materials and still makes a business in the shadows of the
people.”
31
Meanwhile, in Richmond, galleries also stayed open well into the war. In
May of 1864, a northern correspondent for the American Journal of Photography
described how he “visited two of the principal galleries and found them busy. There
seemed to be more done in ambrotypes than in photographs. The pictures are taken on
plain glass, and put up in a common case for twenty dollars each; photographs, for a
single copy, fifteen dollars, or four for twenty-five dollars. I was under guard, I was not
permitted to ask any questions, but came to the conclusion that they were short of
stock.”
32
The artist’s emphasis on ambrotypes implicitly suggested to the broader
photographic community that the South lacked the paper necessary to make the mass-

29
“Day Breaking,” Humphrey’s Journal, February 15, 1862, 320.
30
Editorial, American Journal of Photography, April 15, 1865, 479.
31
Editorial, American Journal of Photography, Sept 16, 1863.
32
“Our Art in Rebeldom – The Latest News from Dixie,” American Journal of Photography,
May 1, 1864, 507.
168

reproducible photographs – cartes de visite, stereographs and albumen prints – that had
grown immensely popular for northern artists.
If they had had the industrial connections, southerners might have transformed
their antebellum culture of unique slave photographs into a wartime culture of mass-
reproducible images, and we might be left with a large archive of stereographs presenting
slavery as a benevolent institution during the war. This was not an unimaginable cultural
proposition, for Osborn and Durbec had begun doing so in the summer and fall of 1860.
As The Charleston Mercury had reported in October of 1860, the artists were “steadily
engaged in obtaining the most accurate stereoscopic views of places in and around
Charleston. Among these we may mention the Charleston Hotel, Mills House, Pavilion
Hotel, Sullivan’s Island, and a number of plantation scenes, including the negro quarters,
cotton picking, etc.”
33

Fig. 4.6. Rockville, S.C., half-stereograph, 1860
34

33
Quoted in Teal, Partners with the Sun, 55.
34
Courtesy of the collections of Robin Stanford.
169

At least ten of Osborn and Durbec’s Charleston-area plantation views have survived.
These scenes of black and white subjects offered an idealized visual tour of the plantation
that stopped at various places, including the master’s house (Figure 4.6), plantation dock,
slave chapel, and slave quarters. They sold their views until at least May of 1861,
advertising them alongside images of Fort Sumter in the newspaper: “THE VIEWS OF
FORT SUMTER COMPRISE THE whole interior in twenty sections for the Stereoscope,
and six large Photographs for framing. Also on hand, one hundred different
STEREOSCOPIC VIEWS IN CHARLESTON, AND VICINITY, VIEWS OF
PLANTATIONS IN THE STATE, etc.”
35
Many southerners must have made the
immediate connection between images of slavery and images of the first battle to
preserve the institution. But like many other firms, Osborn and Durbec closed up shop
by 1862, and with it they ended their sale and circulation of slave stereographs.
36
Though
Osborn, Durbec, and other Charleston artists began the war with a flourish, they
ultimately made a minor contribution to the proslavery Confederacy. Due in large part to
the economic structures of American photography and the economic downturn of the
American South, northern antislavery photography would dominate the war. Southern
photography dwindled and was dwarfed by northern photographic output.

At the start of the war, however, antislavery proponents did not convey any clear
strategy for how they might use the medium to turn the conflict into a moral battle over
the peculiar institution, rather than a military campaign to destroy the rebels. In a sense
this is not surprising: abolitionists had never attempted to photograph the South in the

35
The Charleston Mercury, May 6, 1861. Accessible Archives: The Civil War Collection.
36
Teal, Partners With the Sun, 94.
170

1840s and 1850s. They were far more concerned with using photographs to build up
their own movement in the North. If anyone had envisioned a wartime photographic
campaign, it would have been Frederick Douglass. In December of 1861, Douglass
actually gave a lecture titled “Pictures and Progress.”
37
In a wide-ranging oration,
Douglass hailed the invention of photography, signaling out Daguerre for praise:
“Daguerre by the simple but all abounding sunlight has converted the planet into a picture
gallery.” In keeping with abolitionists’ pre-war conception, Douglass articulated a vision
of human rights photography as a representation of selfhood, not of suffering. “I have
said that man is a picture making and a picture appreciating animal and have pointed out
that fact as an important line of distinction between man and all other animals,” Douglass
asserted.
38
If anything, he wanted slaves to show their humanity by picturing themselves,
just as he had done.
Not until the spring of 1863 did abolitionists begin circulating their first major
propaganda photograph, an image obtained by appropriating the work of wartime
photographers. It took two contingencies of the war to produce it: the massive flight of
fugitive slaves, and the push to enlist black soldiers (including slaves) in the Union army,
a strategy promoted by the Emancipation Proclamation. In Louisiana, the enlistment
process – which included physical inspections of slaves’ bodies – allowed officers and
surgeons to see firsthand the physical aftermath of the persistent abuse of slaves. One

37
On Douglass’s lectures about photography, see Laura Wexler, “’A More Perfect Likeness’:
Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation” and Ginger Hill, “’Rightly Viewed’:
Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Pictures” in Pictures and Progress:
Early Photography and The Making of African American Identity, eds. Maurice O. Wallace and
Shawn Michelle Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
38
Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts,
On 3 December 1861,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and
Interviews; Volume 3: 1855-63, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985), 453, 460.
171

officer told the National Antislavery Standard that surgeons often described how “not one
in fifteen is free from marks of severe lashing. More than one-half are rejected because
of disability arising from lashing of whips and the biting of dogs on their calves and
thighs. It is frightful. Hundreds of them have welts on their backs as large as one of your
largest fingers.”
39
In April of 1863, one such fugitive entered Union lines near Baton
Rouge. Most written and verbal commentaries called him Gordon, and described how he
escaped from a plantation in Mississippi.
40
A less prominent narrative told of how he
came from central Louisiana, and identified him as Peter – not Gordon.
41
Either way, he
soon sat sideways in a chair and presented his back to the camera of McPherson and
Oliver, two southern photographers who began catering to Union troops after the fall of
New Orleans (Figure 4.7).

Fig. 4.7. Matthew Brady, “Gordon,” albumen silver print, 1863
42

39
“The Cruelties of Slavery,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 4, 1863, 2.
40
“A Typical Negro,” Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863. Accessed through HarpWeek.
41
An article in the New-York Daily Tribune testified to this version of the story. See “The
Realities of Slavery: ‘Poor Peter,’” New-York Daily Tribune, December 3, 1864, 4, ProQuest
Historical Newspapers.
42
Collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
172

Multiple Union surgeons from Baton Rouge sent the image of Gordon/Peter northwards,
and the idea that he had experienced typical treatment suffused their correspondence.
43
A
black surgeon with the First Louisiana regiment wrote to his brother, “I send you the
picture of a slave as he appears after a whipping. I have seen, during the period I have
been inspecting men for my own and other regiments, hundred of such sights — so they
are not new to me; but it may be now to you. If you know of any one who talks about the
manner in which the slaves are treated, pl [sic] show them this pl[sic]. It is a lecture in
itself.”
44
The image entered northern culture as a sensational medical photograph.
The Scourged Back resonated so broadly not because it told viewers something
new about slavery, but because it did the opposite: it punctuated so many longstanding
antislavery narratives about bondage, which had fixated on the subjugated bodies of
slaves. Not surprisingly, commentaries focused on the man’s pain, finding multiple ways
to convey the look of his scars for their readers. For the New York Independent the “back
looks like a plate of iron, eaten by acids and corroded by rust; or like a walnut-table
honey-combed by worms.” It further reported how, “[f]rom the shoulders to the waist,
great welts and furrows and ridges, raised or gouged by the lash, run crosswise and
lengthwise, mingling in the middle in one awful mass of scab. Bits as big as the hand

43
On medical photography, see Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 116-118.
44
“The Dumb Witness,” The Liberator, June 12, 1863. Accessible Archives: The Liberator.
Another surgeon stressed how he had “found a large number of four hundred contrabands
examined by me to be as badly lacerated as the specimen presented in the enclosed photograph.”
Louis P. Masur, “’Pictures Have Now Become a Necessity’: The Use of Images in American
History Textbooks,” The Journal of American History 84, no. 4 (1998), 1418. Photo-historian
Kathleen Collins cites a third surgeon, S.K. Towle, of the 30
th
Regiment, Massachusetts
Volunteers. See Kathleen Collins, “The Scourged Back,” History of Photography 9, no. 1 (Jan-
March, 1985).
173

seem to have been cut out of the flesh.”
45
Meanwhile, as The Liberator cried out, “Upon
that back, horrible to contemplate! is a testimony against slavery more eloquent than any
words. Scarred, gouged, gathered in great ridges, knotted, arrowed, the poor tortured
flesh stands out a hideous record of the slave-driver's lash.”
46
Even as the image of
Gordon/Peter had replaced the oral testimony of the fugitive on the lecture circuit, the
intricate and graphic nature of Gordon/Peter’s scars gave abolitionists a new stage to
reiterate their longstanding argument that slavery was cruel. In doing so, they countered
the proslavery insistence (which had strengthened in the past two decades) that it was
emancipation that was inhumane.
47

Since the image focused on the horrific scars, since it abstracted Gordon/Peter
from his individual biography and from a world of social relations, since it presented the
viewer with a side-profile susceptible to phrenological readings, and – perhaps most
importantly – since it refused to let the subject gaze back at the viewer, the image opened
up a variety of other interpretations beyond the basic notion of physical abuse. The scars
on his back, which suggested to mid-nineteenth-century viewers the suffering of Christ,
led to his identification as an enslaved martyr – a figure Harriet Beecher Stowe had
stitched into world literature a decade earlier with Uncle Tom, and one abolitionists had
infused into their internal radical fellowship with white-martyr photographs.
48
From
Gordon/Peter’s physiognomy, commentators also inferred his manliness: “The head is

45
“The Scourged Back,” New York Independent, May 28, 1863.
46
“The Dumb Witness,” The Liberator, June 12, 1863. Accessible Archives: The Liberator.
47
Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
48
As The Liberator maintained, months after “the martyrdom was undergone, and the wounds
here healed, but as long as the flesh lasts will this fearful impress remain. It is a touching picture,
an appeal to mute and powerful that none but hardened natures can look upon it unmoved.” “The
Dumb Witness,” The Liberator, June 12, 1863. Accessible Archives: The Liberator.
174

well placed, and the profile – not a profile of the extreme African type – is full of manly
energy. A strong short whisker and beard give power to the jaw which needs no such
evidence to show its manliness, for resolution and force are stamped on the whole
formation of the face.”
49
For the New York Independent, Gordon/Peter was also the noble
agricultural worker: “this humble man, this poor man, this untaught man, this down-
trodden man, this working man, this negro, represents the laboring class.” He was so
valuable because he was one “who eats little and toils much; a man who is nine-tenths
production, and only one-tenth consumption.”
50
In short, the image became an icon –
perhaps the first photographic icon in United States history – that stood in for a social
world of four million slaves.
51
As the image encapsulated so many antislavery
perceptions of bondage, it could be sold with a simple tagline: “THE ‘PECULIAR
INSTITUTION’ ILLUSTRATED.”
52

Though it told northerners little that abolitionists had not long claimed about
slavery, the image did offer new information about the capacity of photography as a
medium, which commentators were quick to locate within a broader narrative of
industrial progress. As the New York Independent proclaimed, “The poor slave shows his
wounds in New York, and ‘the instrument can’t lie.’ Deny the evidence of the sun, who
can?”
53
The Scourged Back “tells the story in a way that even Mrs. Stowe cannot
approach; because it tells the story to the eye. If seeing is believing – and it is in the
immense majority of cases – seeing this card would be equivalent to believing things of

49
“The Scourged Back,” New York Independent, May 28, 1863, 4.
50
“The Scourged Back,” New York Independent, May 28, 1863, 4.
51
On photographic icons, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed:
Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2007).
52
“The ‘Peculiar Institution’ Illustrated,” The National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 20, 1863, 3.
53
“The Scourged Back,” New York Independent, May 28, 1863, 4.
175

the slaves states which Northern men and women would move heaven and earth to
abolish!”
54
This seeming visual objectivity sparked reflection on photography’s
newfound role as an instrument of political mass-persuasion. The New York Daily
Tribune reached back to French inventors who gave birth to the first photographic
process, presenting this moment as the culmination of western technological innovation:
“Through the mysterious agencies of the camera obscura the most wonderful as well as
beautiful results have been obtained, and it is to the genius and perseverance of Daguerre
and M. Niepce that we of the nineteenth century today behold the outside view of the
moon and the inside view of Slavery.”
55
The image confirmed to its supporters the
seemingly inevitable connection between material progress and moral progress. But this
was a position they could easily adopt in 1863, because the military blockade – not some
inherent link between industrialization, mechanically reproducible image-making, and
justice – had undermined the competing force of southern proslavery photography.
In the North and in Britain, abolitionists quickly harnessed the image to prove
why the Emancipation Proclamation had not gone far enough.
56
While they initially
cheered the Proclamation, abolitionists criticized it for leaving almost 800,000 slaves (out
of the 3.9 million held in bondage) untouched, including all bondspeople in the border
states of Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland.
57
On June 13, 1863, The New
England Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston passed a series of resolutions calling for

54
“The Scourged Back,” New York Independent, May 28, 1863, 4.
55
“The Realities of Slavery: ‘Poor Peter,’” New-York Daily Tribune, December 3, 1864, 4,
ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
56
Abolitionists and Republicans began to push for a national amendment to abolish slavery – the
Thirteenth Amendment, which failed the first time, in April 1864. Many abolitionists supported
Lincoln’s presidential campaign in the fall of 1864, tying his victory to emancipation. Eric Foner,
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2010), 294, 300.
57
Foner, Fiery Trial, 241-242.
176

slavery’s “immediate abolition in such portions of the country as were exempted from the
operation of the proclamation of January 1
st
, 1863.” They demanded that there would be
“no possibility provided for future slaveholding concession and compromise.” At some
point in the convention, William Lloyd Garrison stood before the crowd at Tremont
Temple and applauded “a representation of the frightful scars caused by whipping on the
back of a Louisiana slave.”
58
Meanwhile, at a meeting of the Women’s Loyal League,
Susan B. Anthony held up the image alongside a photograph of Sojourner Truth to raise
money in support of abolition.
59
Lastly, British abolitionist George Thompson turned the
image into a massive placard and displayed it during wartime lectures in America in the
winter of 1864.
60
Abolitionists now located the evils of slavery along the ridges of
Gordon/Peter’s back rather than in the descriptions of slave narratives: more and more,
they made their culture of evidence visual and individual.
In the wake of the Scourged Back, antislavery proponents turned to mass-
marketed cartes de visite for propaganda and fundraising. They produced before-and-
after images of impoverished slave children, including “As We Found Them” and “As
They Are Now” (Figures 4.8-4.9).

58
“The New England Anti-Slavery Convention,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 13, 1863,
2.
59
Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1996), 187.
60
He also revealed how he used it as propaganda to stem British support of the Confederacy.
According to The Liberator, Thompson told one American lecture audience that, in Britain,
“immense placards were displayed in the principal towns and cities calling public attention to the
meetings held on American affairs, and comprehensively unfolding the successive deceits of the
secessionists.” The Liberator, February 19, 1864. Accessible Archives: The Liberator. For a
British reproduction, see a pro-Union meeting poster from 1863 in R.J.M. Blackett, Divided
Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2001), 121.
177

Left, Fig. 4.8. “As We Found Them,” carte de visite, c. 1864
61

Right, Fig. 4.9. “As They Are Now,” carte de visite, c. 1864
62

Left, Fig. 4.10. M. H. Kimball, “Rebecca, an Emancipated Slave, from New Orleans,” carte de visite, c.
1863
63

61
Museum collections, Virginia Historical Society.
62
Museum collections, Virginia Historical Society. These images only hinted at violence. The
caption of “As They are Now” described how “The Mother of these children was beaten, branded
and sold at auction because she was kind to Union Soldiers. As she left for Richmond, Va., Feb
1864, bound down in a cart, she prayed ‘O! God send the Yankees to take my children away.”
178

Right, Fig. 4.11. “Wilson Chinn, a Branded Slave from Louisiana” carte de visite, 1863
64

Meanwhile, in the winter of 1863-1864, military personnel along with the American
Missionary Association and the National Freedman’s Relief Association marketed a wide
variety of portraits showing white slave children including Rebecca as well as Wilson
Chinn, who posed multiple times with the torture implements from his past. These
images were meant to raise funds for freedpeople schools in Louisiana (Figures 4.10-
4.11).
65
In various ways, antislavery cartes de visite drew upon and broadened a key
element of the Scourged Back: they evoked the cruelty of slavery through bodily markers
– scars, clothing, whiteness, torture implements, or brands – on the bodies of specific
individuals.
These images combined older abolitionist attacks against slavery with a
heightened sense of an individual’s experience of pain. On one hand, such suffering
photographs conveyed nothing abolitionists had not already harped upon for decades: the
institution impoverished and abused slaves; it separated them from their mothers (as in
the case of the children with tattered clothing); it entailed the raping of black women that
produced white offspring (such as Rebecca), whom masters gladly sold whenever
necessary. In slavery, slaveholders branded their slaves to mark them as property; they

63
Kimball, M.H., photographer. “Rebecca, an emancipated slave, from New
Orleans/photographed by Kimball, 477 Broadway, N.Y.” 1 photographic print on carte de visite
mount: albumen. New York, c. 1863. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Online Catalog, Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010647847/
64
Hancock Papers, Manuscripts Division, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.
65
Mary Niall Mitchell offers a helpful discussion of the white-children cartes de visite. Mary
Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery
(New York: New York University Press, 2008); Kathleen Collins, “Portraits of Slave Children,”
History of Photography 9, no. 3 (July–Sept. 1985): 187–88.
179

used various devices – from plantation patrols to dogs to iron collars (like the one Chinn
wore) – to curb slaves’ mobility.
On the other hand, these photographs began transforming the longstanding
antislavery practice of oral witnessing into one of visual witnessing. It is no surprise that
commentaries about Gordon/Peter mentioned that his image constituted “a lecture in
itself.”
66
Fugitive testimony now came as a marketable visual commodity. Drawing
upon strategies developed during the sale of John Brown’s images, abolitionists
advertised the Scourged Back in newspapers and sent copies to consumers through the
mail. Beginning in June, subscribers to The Liberator and the National Antislavery
Standard could purchase one copy for fifteen cents, seven copies for one dollar, and one
dozen copies for $1.50.
67
The Scourged Back reached the English market by August of
1863.
68
Sales were so brisk that, at one point in July, The National Anti-Slavery Standard
related how its “supply of this photograph is exhausted, with several orders unsupplied.
We expect more in a few days, when the orders shall be attended to.”
69
Commercial
photographers such as Mathew Brady and McAllister & Brothers of Philadelphia also
sold the image. Likewise, northerners could buy images of Wilson Chinn and the white
slave children at the “rooms of the National Freedman's Relief Association, No. 1 Mercer
Street, New York” or in the mail for 25 cents.
70
In addition, the Quakers sold the before-
and-after children images to promote the education of freedpeople at an orphanage in

66
“The Dumb Witness,” The Liberator, June 12, 1863. Accessible Archives.
67
“The ‘Peculiar Institution’ Illustrated, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 20, 1863, 3.
68
“The Scarred Back,” New York Independent, August 13, 1863, 4; We know little about how the
image was circulated through the South, and can only wonder how many slaveholders and slaves
saw it.
69
“The ‘Scarred Back’ Photograph,” July 25, 1863, The National Antislavery Standard, 3.
70
“White and Colored Slaves, Harper’s Weekly, January 30, 1864. Accessed through HarpWeek.
180

Philadelphia. In this way, abolitionists turned human commodities into cultural
commodities.
Antislavery proponents began expressing their benevolence through these
commodified visions of ex-slaves. For instance, in an August 1863 article in the National
Antislavery Standard, a commentator described, “Have you ever seen the card
photograph of a slave’s back? Scarred, wilted with marks of the lash, it makes every
nerve in one’s body shrink to look at the thing, taken from life, and in a civilized land.
The patient expression of the slave’s face makes his condition seem more pitiful. Spite of
friendly remonstrance, I keep it in my photograph book among saints and Madonnas, and
force myself to look at it.”
71
The materiality of the carte de visite and the popularity of
the carte de visite album enabled such consumers to consecrate the image – to turn it into
a sacred object – by ordering it amongst saints and Madonnas in a narrative of enslaved
Christian suffering.
72
Fitting easily into the martyrdom culture of northern antislavery
and the commodity culture of the 1860s, the image of Gordon/Peter heightened pity
towards slaves as it forged a new visual and social way for northerners to convey their
own sympathetic disposition and public commitment to abolition. The same was true of
Wilson Chinn’s image. In mid-November of 1863, Abolitionist Cornelia Hancock
described in a private letter how she had met a slave from Louisiana while working at a
Contraband Hospital in Washington, D.C. She told of how he “had his master’s name
branded on his forehead, and with him he brought all the instruments of torture that he
wore” which included “an iron collar with 3 prongs standing up so he could not lay down
his head” and “a contrivance to render one leg entirely stiff and a chain clanking behind

71
“Mostly About A Slave’s Back,” National Antislavery Standard, August 22, 1863, 4.
72
On the consecration of images, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the
History and Theory of Response (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 89.
181

him with a bar weighing 50 lbs.” As Hancock promised, “I will try to send you a
Photograph of him….”
73
It is not entirely clear whether Hancock actually met Chinn.
Whether she did or not, the photograph allowed her to relate to enslaved victimhood in a
way that was more personal than before. In short, Hancock and others created a culture
of visual proof that was at once evidentiary and sentimental: as the proof of slavery lay in
the visual depictions, the proof of abolitionist benevolence lay in the display and
exchange of the images. Photographic images and image-practices deepened antislavery
resolve across the North and solidified northern belief that slavery had passed into history
as a relic of barbarism.
The vast majority of slaves who posed for pictures during the war, however, did
not end up as symbols of southern cruelty in the burgeoning market for antislavery cartes
de visite. They posed in Union army camps, with northern soldiers and officers, for
numerous commercial photographers (Figures 4.12-4.13).

Fig. 4.12. “Gen’l. John W. Geary and staff – taken at Harper’s Ferry,” albumen print on carte de visite
mount, c. 1860s
74

73
Henrietta Stratton Jaquette, ed., Letters of a Civil War Nurse, Cornelia Hancock, 1863-1865
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 32.
74
“Gen’l John W. Geary and Staff – taken at Harper’s Ferry.” 1 photographic print on carte de
visite mount: albumen. C. 1860s. From the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online
182

Fig. 4.13. Mathew Brady, “Officers of Co. G. R.I.V.,” albumen print on carte de visite mount, c.1862-
1865
75

Little-known photographers as well as luminaries such as Alexander Gardner and
Timothy O’Sullivan made such interracial images. Dozens of these images sit in the
collections of the Library Congress, as well as in various other photograph archives. Yet
historians and photo-historians have never seriously studied them – perhaps because of a
longstanding emphasis on post-war photo-books such as Gardner’s 1866 Sketch Book, or
because the image titles in photographers’ catalogs rarely mention the presence of black
subjects.
76
In addition, it is much harder to make sense of photographs that depict slaves
in limbo: someplace between slavery and freedom. A mass of interracial photographs
awaits interpretation.
These images were born out of a complicated interplay between soldiers,
fugitives, and photographers. Assessing this interplay asks that we re-conceptualize the
relation between artists and non-artists during the war. In scale and subject matter, as is
well known by scholars, northern photographers turned the Civil War into a historic
cultural moment alongside its political and social import. By the war’s end, an estimated
3,000 artists had taken pictures related to the war – and most of these were northern
artists; around 300 photographers alone attached themselves to the Army of the

Catalog, Civil War, Miscellaneous Items in High Demand.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98506791/
75
The “R.I.V.” stands for Rhode Island Volunteers. Brady, Matthew, photographer. “Officers of
Co. G. R.I.V./Brady, Washington.” 1 Photographic print on carte de visite mount: albumen.
Washington, c. 1862-1865. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online
Catalog, Civil War, Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010647922/
76
Anthony Lee and Elizabeth Young discuss Gardner’s Sketch Book images of African
Americans, but not the broader landscape. See Lee and Young, On Alexander Gardner’s
Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War.
183

Potomac.
77
Scholars estimate that these cameramen made tens of thousands of images.
78

They visualized and publicized the faces and happenings of political and military leaders,
circulating now-famous images such as Alexander Gardner’s view of Lincoln and
McClellan at Antietam. Gardner and James Gibson photographed the first dead bodies
on a wartime battlefield in United States history.
79
Documenting the many facets of the
war, northern artists made it impossible for their contemporaries and later generations to
think of the war without thinking of images of the war.
But too often we have missed the more immediate influence of these artists: as
they made documentary images that would shape future views of the past, they also
created a performative culture that shaped the everyday experience of the war. When
photographers arrived in camps, soldiers often noted their presence in diaries and letters.
Soon, army men tracked these artists down to buy portraits so distant family members
could see them in their finest military garb. Soldiers also enjoyed a strikingly new
experience: they found that they were valuable as representable subjects in their own
right. For instance, John P. Reynolds of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia described
how one embedded photographer “came up to us and invited us to ‘sit’ by way of
experiment.” Reynolds and the rest of his “pony squad” agreed and “adjourned to his
establishment where after one or two trials” the artist “succeeded in getting a fine picture
of us in the position of ready, in load and fire kneeling.” The image was “so life-like that
we agreed to take a copy each.”
80
From 1861 onwards, northern artists made Union army

77
The 1860 census counted 3154 American photographers. On the total number of
photographers, see Davis, The Origins of American Photography, 173. On statistics for the Army
of the Potomac, see Davis, “’A Terrible Distinctness’: Photography of the Civil War Era,” 144.
78
Keith Davis, “’A Terrible Distinctness’: Photography of the Civil War Era,” 133.
79
Frassanito, Antietam, 17.
80
John P. Reynolds Journal, pg 43, William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan.
184

camps densely represented places – probably the most visually mediated place ever
experienced by the Americans who served in combat.
Many soldiers welcomed this visual stage. When artist Henry P. Moore arrived in
Port Royal, S.C., in February of 1862, one member of the Third New Hampshire
Volunteer Regiment wrote, “He comes with the intention of taking views of the camps
and plantations…. He is just the man we want, for it has been impossible to obtain
pictures of any kind worth having, or durable enough to retain their color even a
month.”
81
Some officers and soldiers even helped artists build temporary studios. Henry
Rogers Smith, a little-known photographic assistant, wrote that he and artist Charles
Marcellus Pierce could not find a decently priced room in Poolesville, Maryland.
Accordingly, they built their own 8ft x 16ft “shanty” with the manpower of three soldiers,
whom the local Colonel designated to help.
82
A month later, the same Colonel stopped
by Pierce’s and Smith’s saloon – unannounced – to see the image the artists had taken of
camp headquarters.
83
From the beginning of the war, soldiers learned that the camera
proved a close and ready tool for individual and group expression.
As cameramen followed Union troops in search of profits, art, and adventure,
fugitive slaves entered Union lines in search of freedom. While Lincoln’s election helped
slaves to imagine the president’s support, thousands did not wait for him to secure

81
Quoted in W. Jeffrey Bolster and Hilary Anderson, Soldiers, Sailors, Slaves, and Ships: The
Civil War Photographs of Henry P. Moore (Concord: The New Hampshire Historical Society,
1999), 15.
82
Henry Rogers Smith to parents and sister, January 17, 1862; Henry Rogers Smith to “Dear
Sister,” February 2, 1862. Henry Rogers Smith Papers, Folders 1-2, Manuscript Collections,
American Antiquarian Society.
83
Henry Rogers Smith to “Father Mother Sister and all,” February 16, 1862, Folder 2, Henry
Rogers Smith Papers, Manuscript Collections, American Antiquarian Society.
185

emancipation.
84
As in the Revolutionary War and in the War of 1812, slaves seized the
chance, amidst great social disruption and danger, to break for freedom.
85
As historian
James Oakes writes, “it did not take long before slaves realized that Union military
installations in the Confederate states represented a kind of counter-state within the
southern states, an alternative government inside the South but beyond the reach of the
police powers of southern slave society.”
86
Fugitive slaves often made dramatic arrivals
into Union camps, movements even witnessed by photographers. In Poolesville,
Maryland, photographic assistant Henry Rogers Smith detailed a stunning moment in his
private correspondence from February of 1862: “Four contrabands came across the river
the other day, from Leesburg, they stole two horses of the Rebels and swam them across,
two riding each horse. One of them said he left his wife because she belonged to a Union
man.”
87
By horse, wagon, and foot, an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 slaves had escaped
and effectively turned federal forts into the new maroon colonies by 1864.
88

The massive flood of fugitives immediately raised questions about their status –
especially whether the Union army could put ex-slaves into service or needed to give
them back to their owners. In May of 1861, three fugitives fled to Fort Monroe – in the
Hampton Roads area of Virginia – and offered their services to the Union. Commanding

84
Steven Hahn, “But What Did the Slaves Think of Lincoln?” in Lincoln’s Proclamation:
Emancipation Reconsidered, eds. William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Other works that deal with slaves’ wartime
experiences include Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the
Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2003); and Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of
Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2005).
85
Foner, The Fiery Trial, 167.
86
James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 89.
87
Henry Rogers Smith to “Father Mother Sister and all,” February 16, 1862, Folder 2, Henry
Rogers Smith Papers, Manuscript Collections, American Antiquarian Society.
88
McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 8.
186

Union General Benjamin F. Butler saw these men as additional labor; calling them
“contraband of war,” he put them to work. Only two months later, 850 contrabands had
arrived at Fort Monroe. While the ex-slaves called Fort Monroe the “freedom fort,” their
legal and social position was unclear to many. As Butler asked in a letter to Secretary of
War Cameron, “Are these men, women, and children slaves? Are they free? Is their
condition that of men, women, and children, or of property, or is it a mixed relation?”
89

From the spring of 1861 until the late summer of 1862, the status of
“contrabands” remained contested and uncertain. Secretary Cameron told General Butler
the ex-slaves could work, but did little to decide their fate. In August of 1861, Congress
issued the First Confiscation Act, stipulating that the Union could take all property that
helped the Confederacy, including its slaves. Yet, as historian Eric Foner notes, the law
resolved little: “They no longer owed labor to their owners, but the act did not explicitly
emancipate them.”
90
Not until the Second Confiscation Act, in July of 1862, did the
government declare fugitives who made it to Union lines “forever free of their
servitude.”
91

On the ground, the incoming stream of fugitives helped turn many moderate
northerners into antislavery advocates. They saw fugitives entering army lines, and
witnessed the masters and slave catchers who came afterwards, looking for their human
property. Soldiers were particularly disgusted when they saw how slavery tore black
families apart, separating mothers from their children, and sending teenage girls to the

89
Harper’s Weekly, August 17, 1861. Accessed through HarpWeek.
90
Foner, Fiery Trial, 175.
91
Foner, Fiery Trial, 215.
187

“fancy market.”
92
Of course, such antislavery sentiment was hardly universal. Yet in
October of 1861, as one soldier told the Wisconsin State Journal, “the rebellion is
abolitionizing the whole army.”
93

As the influx of fugitives altered the politics of slavery, it also brought about a
social transformation within the army. It haphazardly created biracial communities at the
geographical boundaries of the Union and the Confederacy. By the summer of 1862,
fugitives served the Union in a variety of ways: “as guides, spies, teamsters, laborers,
cooks, laundresses, and hospital attendants. They performed all manner of work, from
preparing camps to constructing fortifications.”
94
This interracial workforce was
accompanied by unequal pay and racially segregated living arrangements, which came in
the form of hastily constructed contraband camps where thousands of fugitives lived. As
historian Leon Litwack notes, these camps “became overcrowded, disease took a heavy
toll, the promised wages were often not paid, and many slaves came to feel they had been
defrauded.”
95
Indeed, there was nothing romantic about the interracial nature of Union
life. But highlighting this interracial nature brings to the fore how many white northern
soldiers were regularly interacting with African Americans on a daily basis for the first
time in their lives.
These social interactions – as well as the passage of the Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1, 1863 – brought into sharp relief an even more controversial

92
Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and The Civil War (New
York: Vintage Books, 2007), 49.
93
Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 45.
94
Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black military
Experience in the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 87. On fugitive
slaves as Union scouts, see Oakes, Freedom National, 168.
95
Quoted in Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 133.
188

issue for many soldiers than the question of slavery’s morality: racial equality. Though
surprising from a contemporary standpoint, most Union soldiers saw no contradiction in
supporting slave emancipation while also harboring deep-seated white supremacist
beliefs. For example, while David Nichol lauded the Emancipation Proclamation for
getting “at the root of the Evil,” he told his parents he was “no nigger worshiper.”
96

Likewise, Leigh Webber, a longtime proponent of abolition, still asserted that “[t]his talk
about ‘putting ourselves on an equality with niggers,’ is to me, the boldest nonsense or
rather an insult to me as one of the Saxon race.” For Webber, the “natural superiority” of
the white race made a level playing field between blacks and whites an “absurdity.”
97

Nichol and Webber expressed intense anxiety over the nature of white freedom in a world
without black slavery.
Recently, historian Chandra Manning has done important work in scouring the
private letters and diaries of soldiers to illuminate their perceptions of slavery and
emancipation.
98
Treating northern soldiers as photographic practitioners extends this
attention to the role that non-elites played in the war while revealing how these men also
played a crucial role in enacting a visual transformation. As the constant presence of
photographers in Union army camps enabled artists and soldiers to express pride and
camaraderie, and to send surrogates of themselves to their loved ones back North, it also
helped them to pictorially enact an interracial society. Most soldiers did not produce
articulate written visions of how they might live and work with black people after slavery
– nor about questions of black education, labor, and rights. Through photography,

96
Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 92.
97
Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 92-93.
98
Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 94.
189

however, these soldiers took active roles in constructing concrete and lasting visions of
black freedom. Amidst social instability, photography helped resettle the racial order.
The letters of Charles F. Tew of the 25
th
Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry offer a
window into this history of Union image-making.
99
Tew spent much of the war in North
Carolina and Virginia, and in letters to his wife and children he often commented about
the fugitive slaves in the camp. “I make them wash my cloath and wait on me you can
believe,” Tew wrote. In the spring of 1862, Tew described how the fugitives “think we
are going to set them all free,” a sentiment that he felt was “nonsense,” for “they are
better off here for they don’t know any thing.”
100
Instead of emancipation, Tew
facetiously opined for mastery on more than one occasion: “a southern home for me is
just the thing give me a plantation and lots of nigs and my family and I will stop South as
my home….”
101

Like many southern masters, Tew, at least by the later years of the war, expressed
the sense that African Americans were loyal to him. He wrote of one African American
named George, describing how “that same boy of mine goes into every Fight with me just
as far as I will let him go….” Tew equated George’s loyalty to that of a dog: “he is the
Laziest Nig you ever saw at other times but should I ever get hurt I know he would take
care of me and save my things for you at home or fight for me as long as he lived for I
have tried him many times he is like a big dog that you might have for a pet.” Tew could
not quite understand where this devotion originated: “he is no fool he is with me every

99
Finding Aid, Charles F. Tew Papers, William L. Clements Library, The University of
Michigan.
100
Charles F. Tew to “My Dear Wife + Children,” March 27, 1862, Charles F. Tew Papers,
William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan.
101
Charles F. Tew to “My Dear Wife and family,” June 15, 1862, Charles F. Tew Papers,
William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan.
190

step I take and I know he will fight for I have seen him do so when I came here and he
will fight for one to the death I don’t know what makes him like me but he does, He
sayes Leiut I shall stay with you as long as you live and I doesn’t believes do Rebs cans
kills you for why doyent dey do it dey has plenty as chances whenze you is on Picket in
Front of Trenches.”
102

Only a few days after comparing George to “a big dog that you might have for a
pet,” Tew posed with George for a portrait photograph. Though the image does not
survive, Tew described its production to his family: “Right in our camp is a picture
saloon and to prove that I am all right, I send you my miniature and my boy, George, on
the same plate. I went out of the tent in my shirt sleeves, called George, did not tell him
what I wanted of him, but told him to set down at my feet. How his eyes stuck out to see
what was going on. It pleased him very much to think he was take [sic] with
lieutenant.”
103
For Tew to order George to sit at his feet suggests how clearly the broader
photographic culture influenced how he conceived of his relation to fugitive slaves – or at
least how he wanted others to see this relationship.
Tew’s letters hint at a primary reason why the sitting-slave pose proved such a
popular formula in Union photography: it recalled the supplicant depiction of prayer and
liberation from abolitionist culture (the kneeling slave) as it also resembled the
conventions for picturing dogs in contemporary photographic culture (Figures 4.14-4.16).

102
Charles F. Tew to wife and family, August 5, 1864, Charles F. Tew Papers, William L.
Clements Library, The University of Michigan.
103
Charles F. Tew to wife and family, August 15, 1864, Charles F. Tew Papers, William L.
Clements Library, The University of Michigan.
191

Left, Fig. 4.14. “Portrait of Brig. Gen. Napoleon B. McLaughlin, officer of the federal Army, and staff,
vicinity of Washington, D.C.,” negative, August 1865
104

Center, Fig. 4.15. “Am I Not A Man A Brother?” woodcut, 1837
105

Right, Fig. 4.16. “The Peninsula, VA. Lt. George A. Custer with dog,” negative, 1862
106

Written evidence suggests the visual equation of African Americans and dogs actually
reflected the widespread racial perceptions that northern whites held. Indeed, Charles F.
Tew was hardly alone in comparing the ex-slave George to “a big dog that you might
have for a pet.” For instance, in Louisiana, a Union soldier commented that “a negroes
life is little more regarded than that of a dog” after another soldier shot an African
American and went unpunished.
107
Likewise, Union soldiers described how “they would
as quickly shoot a negro as a dog.”
108
Ironically, this reduction of blacks to animality
could sometimes give some soldiers the intellectual framework to argue for black rights:

104
“Portrait of Brig. Gen. Napoleon B. McLaughlin, officer of the federal Army, and staff,
vicinity of Washington, D.C.” 1 negative: glass, wet collodion. August 1865. From Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints,
Civil War, and Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003000349/PP/
105
“Am I not a man and a brother?” 1 print: woodcut on wove paper. 1837. From Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, American Cartoon Prints, Miscellaneous Items
in High Demand. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661312/
106
“The Peninsula, Va. Lt. George A. Custer with dog.” 1 negative (2 plates): glass, stereograph,
wet collodion. 1862. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Civil
War Glass Negatives and Related Prints, Civil War, and Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-
1865. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003000100/PP/
107
Quoted in Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 121-122.
108
Quoted in Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshhold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War
Georgia rev. ed. (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 94.
192

as Frank Pettit noted, “a Negro has rights as a dog has rights and [we] think his rights
should be respected.”
109
Such letters suggest that we do not need to choose between the
sitting-slave images as liberation and submission: clearly, soldiers would have seen both.
Through sitting-slave portraits, soldiers acted out the role of emancipator even as they
subordinated slaves to the status of pet-like inferior.
Perhaps it should not surprise us that soldiers and northern photographers would
enact and imagine racial power relations through domestic categories (including visions
of a master-dog relationship). As historian Megan Kate Nelson has recently shown,
soldiers spent a great deal of time and energy in constructing wooden shelters, building
furniture to keep in those cabins, and even planting trees and flowers to beautify these
temporary homes away from home.
110
Alongside the construction of the built
environment, creating a sense of home entailed a search for power relations. Charles F.
Tew, for instance, continuously described how fugitive slaves made his bed, unpacked
his trunk, and cooked for him. As he wrote to his wife, “A nig is a good thing oute here
as you have no wife to look after youre things.”
111
In one sense, soldiers such as Tew
turned the gendered power they left in the North into racial power when they came South.
Photographic scenes in homo-social domestic settings fused racial hierarchy with
a sense of place and white privilege. Artists such as Gardner, O’Sullivan, William
Morris Smith, and George Barnard often showed blacks with pitchers and glasses in their
hands, ready to serve, standing behind lounging soldiers or crouching beneath them
(Figures 4.17-4.18).

109
Quoted in Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 92.
110
Nelson, Ruin Nation, 121-135.
111
Tew to wife, July 25, 1863, Charles F. Tew Papers, William L. Clements Library, The
University of Michigan.
193

Left, Fig. 4.17. Timothy H. O’Sullivan, “Brandy Station, Va. Dinner party outside Tent, Army of the
Potomac headquarters,” negative, April 1864
112

Right, Fig. 4.18. George Barnard, “Group portrait of soldiers in front of a tent, possible at Camp Cameron,
Washington, D.C.,” albumen print on carte de visite mount, 1861-1865
113

These images must have reflected the perceptions of many soldiers and photographers,
who commented in public and private about the seemingly unexpected – and welcome –
experience of black servitude at mealtime. A story in Harper’s Weekly, for example,
described the “reliable contrabands” who cleaned up after soldiers had eaten.
114
Other
northerners encountered black servitude in southern towns that neighbored army camps.
Photographic assistant Henry Rogers Smith described to his family how, in Maryland, he
had “succeeded last Tuesday night in getting a place to board and lodge. It is one of the

112
O’Sullivan, Timothy H., photographer. “Brandy Station, Va. Dinner party outside Tent,
Army of the Potomac headquarters.” 1 negative: glass, stereograph, wet collodion. April 1864.
From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War Glass Negatives
and Related Prints, Civil War, and Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003000459/PP/
113
Barnard, George, photographer. “Group portrait of soldiers in front of a tent, possible at Camp
Cameron, Washington, D.C.” 1 photographic print on carte de visite mount: albumen. New
York: E. Anthony, 1861-1865. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online
Catalog, Civil War, Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010647920/
114
“A Night with the New Jersey Cavalry,” Harper’s Weekly, May 9, 1863. Accessed through
HarpWeek.
194

best places in town though they are Rebels at heart. We use silver forks and have a black
servant to wait on the table.”
115
The novelty of a black server seemed a symbol of
refinement to some whites – one they visually concretized during the fleeting moments of
war.
What is striking is how much the visual elements in Union domestic scenes
shared the conventions of proslavery paintings and photographs.

Left, Fig. 4.19. Timothy H. O’Sullivan, “Beaufort, South Carolina, ‘Our Mess,’” negative, April 1862
116

Right, Fig. 4.20. William Morris Smith, “Maj. H.H. Humphrey and others,” photographic print, June
1865
117

115
Henry Rogers Smith to brother, February 7, 1862, Henry Rogers Smith Papers, Manuscript
Collections, American Antiquarian Society.
116
O’Sullivan, Timothy H., photographer. “Beaufort, South Carolina. ‘Our Mess.’” 1 negative
(2 plates): glass, stereograph, wet collodion. April 1862. From Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints Collection, Civil
War. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003004677/PP/
117
Smith, William Morris, photographer. “Maj. H.H. Humphrey and others.” Photographic print.
June 1865. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War Glass
Negatives and Related Prints, Civil War. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002712119/
195

Fig. 4.21. Moses, carte de visite, 1857
118
Fig. 4.22. M.E.D. Brown, “Washington Family,”
lithograph, c. 1833
119

In similar fashion to the slave in George Washington’s immensely popular painting-
turned-lithograph, O’Sullivan’s “Beaufort, South Carolina, ‘Our Mess’” and Smith’s
“Maj. H.H. Humphrey and Others” presented blacks as both subjects and objects – as
people ready to serve and as a racial markers of white privilege (Figures 4.19-4.20, 4.22).
In similar fashion to the bulwark of proslavery photography – which presented well-
dressed slaves such as Moses (Figure 4.21) – such Union photographs erased the tattered
garments of fugitives. Northerners were often shocked when they saw the extreme
disrepair of fugitive clothing. As John Eaton wrote in 1864, “You saw them, of both
sexes, of all ages, in every stage of health, disease, and decrepitude, often nearly naked
their flesh torn in escaping.”
120
For fugitives, the Freedmen’s Record reported, “Clothing
is their most pressing need, especially for women and children, who cannot wear the cast-

118
Louis Manigault Family Record Book, Vol. III, Louis Manigault Papers, 177.01.01.02, South
Carolina Historical Society.
119
Brown, Mannevillette, Elihu Dearing, lithographer. “Washington Family. George
Washington, his Lady, & her two grandchildren by the name of Custus.” Lithograph.
Philadelphia: Wm. F. Geddes, c. 1833. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online
Catalog, Popular Graphic Arts Collection. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012645531/
120
Jim Downs, Sick From Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil
War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22.
196

off garments of soldiers.”
121
Union interracial photography operated through, in part, the
logic of erasure to convey a sense of white domestic luxury.
It would be a mistake, though, to simply view such scenes as an extension of
southern practices. Instead, we might best understand these photographs as a fusion of
southern photography and the northern racism which most Union soldiers had grown up
with and brought southwards. The popular culture of the antebellum North was replete
with anti-black racism – which manifested itself in minstrel shows as well as in the
imagery of broadsides and lithographs (such as Edward W. Clay’s popular “Life in
Philadelphia” series).
122
Many northerners’ impressions of slaves drew upon such
popular black caricatures. Remarking upon an “irresistibly comical” quality to the look
of slaves, one soldier described how “they are so black, and their teeth are of such
dazzling whiteness, their eyes so laughing and rolling, their clothes so fantastic, and their
whole appearance so peculiar.”
123

Such racial perceptions underwrote whites’ many acts of cruelty in camp settings.
As historian Leon Litwack writes, “[t]o belittle the slave’s character, dress, language,
name, and demeanor, to make him the butt of their humor, to ridicule his aspirations, to
mock his religious worship, to exploit his illiteracy were ways of passing the duller
moments of camp life and military occupations.”
124
Racist insults and jokes mingled
with a coerced culture of black performance, as soldiers forced fugitives to dance and
sing. One soldier from New England happily proclaimed of “Negro concerts free of

121
Downs, Sick From Freedom, 24.
122
On minstrel shows, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and The American
Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
123
Quoted in Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 126.
124
Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 128.
197

expense” in Virginia.
125
For many slaves, such interactions with northern soldiers would
have recalled the very same degradations they had experienced in slavery. Former-slave-
turned-abolitionist Henry Bibb, for instance, described how, when slaveholders seek
amusement, they go “among the slaves, to see them dance, ‘pat juber,’ sing and play on
banjo.”
126
In Union camps, slaves found that the white impulse to mix cruelty and
merrymaking was a national phenomenon.
Domesticating photographs, then, reflected and fueled northern dreams of racial
superiority. On occasion, such images eschewed black figures as props, rendering them
instead as subjects in more personal relationships of power with white superiors – most
famously so in Alexander Gardner’s “What do I want? John Henry!” (Figure 4.23).

Fig. 4.23. Alexander Gardner, “What do I want? John Henry!” Sketch Book, 1866
127

125
Quoted in Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 128.
126
Quoted in Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slaver, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 47.
127
Gardner, Alexander, photographer. “What Do I want, John Henry?” 1 photographic print:
albumen. Illus. in: Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War. Washington, D.C.: Philip &
Solomons, 1866. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War
198

Gardner circulated this image from at least the fall of 1863 onwards – as a 7 inch by 9
inch paper print, a stereograph, and a carte de visite.
128
In 1866, Gardner labeled the
sitting man “John’s master,” and described John, the black subject, as an “affectionate
creature.”
129
As literary critic Elizabeth Young notes, the effect of the image title
“dramatizes the authority of the white man through hyperbole; not only must John Henry
serve the white man, but he must also magically anticipate the man’s desires.”
130
In
“What do I want, John Henry!” white racial authority walked hand-in-hand with a
seemingly preternatural black obedience.
Domestic servitude proved so powerful a lens for concretizing the abstraction of
an interracial and hierarchical society that military personnel and photographers even
used domestic props in industrial settings. Perhaps no image did so more clearly than
Alexander Gardner’s “Aquia Creek Landing, VA. Clerks of the Commissary Depot by
railroad car and packing cases,” taken in February 1863, a month after the passage of the
Emancipation Proclamation, and circulated during the war as a stereograph and carte de
visite (Figure 4.24).
131

Collection, Miscellaneous Items in High Demand Collection.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/89706345/
128
Alexander Gardner, “Catalogue of Photographic Incidents of the War from the Gallery of
Alexander Gardner” (Washington: H. Polkinhorn, 1863), Microfilm, Woodbridge, CT: Research
Publications, 1981. 1 reel; 35mm (History of photography; Reel 76, no. 811).
129
Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (New York: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1959).
130
Lee and Young, On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, 80.
131
Alexander Gardner, “Catalogue of Photographic Incidents of the War from the Gallery of
Alexander Gardner” (Washington: H. Polkinhorn, 1863), Microfilm, Woodbridge, CT: Research
Publications, 1981. 1 reel; 35mm (History of photography; Reel 76, no. 811).
199

Figure 4.24. Alexander Gardner, “Aquia Creek Landing, Va. Clerks of the Commissary Depot by railroad
car and packing cases,” negative, February 1863
132

Even in the rail yard, a black man kneels with a teacup and saucer, presenting a drink to a
white subject. Though difficult to tell for certain, embedded in the center of the image
could be a self-portrait of Alexander Gardner, the bearded man receiving the drink. His
potential presence raises questions about the active role photographers played in such
assertions of white masculinity. But this much is clear: by importing a pose of domestic
servility into a decidedly un-domestic setting of transportation technology and war
preparation, the clerks made evident how they and others had turned image-making into a

132
Gardner, Alexander, photographer. “Aquia Creek Landing, Va. Clerks of the Commissary
Depot by railroad car and packing cases.” 1 negative: glass, wet collodion. February 1863.
From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War Glass Negatives and
Related Prints, Civil War, and Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003000170/PP/
200

game of racial domination. The conspicuous artificiality of the scene projected a callous
indifference to black humanity.
How, one wonders, did the African Americans subjects understand these images?
While no written sources tell us their perceptions, at least two meanings seem plausible.
They likely understood such photographic practices as one part of the humiliation – the
verbal and physical abuse – rendered at the hands of an army they had earlier seen as a
liberatory force. A change in geography and social status had done little to alter their
social power, as one Norfolk slave encapsulated when she described, “I reckon I’m
Massa Lincoln’s slave now.”
133
It is equally possible that many slaves who posed for
pictures detected an advantage in catering to white men’s fantasies of control. Take, for
instance, a fugitive named Henry, who had traveled with Charles Tew from New Bern,
North Carolina to Newport News, Virginia. In one letter to his wife and children, Tew
noted, “While I am writing this letter my Nig comes in, takes off his hat. [H]e is
watching me now. I wish you could see him grin how his eyes glisten and his teeth
shines. [H]e wants something of me.” Tew transcribed a subsequent conversation
initiated by Henry:
[I]se got a brother down Souf and I wants youse to gives me a writing to him. well
tomorrow come in Henry. Tankey Lieut Charles has yous got a postage thing. yes
I will see to it.
134

If Tew’s dialogue expressed his own benevolence, it also indicated Henry’s use of Tew to
serve his own ends, which entailed maintaining contact with distant family. It appears
that Henry, like many such fugitives, was using Union territory as the staging ground to

133
Quoted in Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 131.
134
Charles F. Tew to “My Wife and Children,” December 14, 1863, Charles F. Tew Papers,
William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan.
201

reunite with loved ones lost during flight.
135
Although it is unclear whether Henry ever
posed with Tew for a portrait, it is easy to see how he and other slaves might have
accommodated the photographic desires of Union whites to achieve their own objectives.
On occasion, photographers did highlight the social ties of fugitives in their own
domestic scenes, as in David B. Woodbury’s “Arrival of the first Negro Family within
the lines, on 1
st
January, 1863,” based upon a negative held at the Library of Congress
(Figure 4.25). During the war, Gardner sold this image in his Catalogue Photographic
Incidents of the War as a stereograph and carte de visite.
136

Fig. 4.25. David B. Woodbury, “Arrival of Negro Family in Lines,” negative, Jan. 1, 1863
137

135
Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Slaves
No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 46.
136
Alexander Gardner, “Catalogue of Photographic Incidents of the War from the Gallery of
Alexander Gardner” (Washington: H. Polkinhorn, 1863), Microfilm, Woodbridge, CT: Research
Publications, 1981. 1 reel; 35mm (History of photography; Reel 76, no. 811).
137
Woodbury, David B, photographer. “Arrival of Negro Family in the lines.” 1 negative: glass,
wet collodion. Jan. 1, 1863. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog,
202

Fig. 4.26. A. R. Waud, “Contrabands Coming Into Camp in Consequence of the Proclamation,”
Harper’s Weekly, January 31, 1863
138

But when the photograph was translated onto the pages of Harper’s Weekly and the New
York Illustrated, the mass-presses removed the background soldiers and added one far
more pronounced white soldier, closer to the action (Figure 4.26). The transfer from
photograph to illustration injected a stronger sense of white authority in this scene of
black domesticity. Such a transition also turned a scene of emancipation into one of
white pity. In the article that accompanied his drawing in Harper’s Weekly, A.R. Waud
noted how, for him, there was “something very touching in seeing these poor people
coming into camp—giving up all the little ties that cluster about home, such as it is in

Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints, Civil War.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003005569/PP/
138
Waud, Alfred. R, artist. “Contrabands Coming Into Camp in Consequence of the
Proclamation.” Harper’s Weekly. 1 print: wood engraving. January 31, 1863. From Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War, Miscellaneous Items in High
Demand. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92501365/
203

slavery, and trustfully throwing themselves on the mercy of the Yankees, in the hope of
getting permission to own themselves and keep their children from the auction-block.”
139

Waud linked Woodbury’s news picture of emancipation to a sense of white paternalism.
As northerners domesticated black freedom within photographs and illustrations,
they also did so through the circulation of the images. Photographers such as Alexander
Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan were first and foremost entrepreneurs producing visual
commodities for sale through networks of production and distribution in the northern
marketplace, connecting through manufacturing and distribution magnate Edward T.
Anthony, the industrial hub of northern photography. Anthony’s photographic output
was unsurpassed in the 1860s. While he sold a modest 175 stereographs from his 1859
catalog, by 1864 he listed over 5,000 pictures.
140
Anthony’s carte de visite production
was equally massive, and wartime reports indicated that he was producing an astounding
3,600 of these small paper images per day.
141
Thus, many domestic-subordinate images
entered northern homes as stereograph amusements, which had only recently risen to
popularity after the introduction of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s cheap stereoscope, the
viewing mechanism for the images, in 1859.
142
When one looked at the two-dimensional
images of the stereograph through the binocular lenses of a stereoscope, one saw a three-
dimensional image. As Holmes wrote in The Atlantic, the “effect is so heightened as to
produce an appearance of reality which cheats the senses with its seeming truth.” He

139
“Contrabands Coming In,” Harper’s Weekly, January 31, 1863. Accessed through HarpWeek.
140
Davis, George N. Barnard, 48; and Weekly Vincennes Gazette, December 24, 1864.
Accessible Archives: The Civil War Part IV. A Midwestern Perspective.
141
Davis, “’A Terrible Distinctness’: Photography of the Civil War Era,” 137.
142
Laura Schiavo, “’A Collection of Endless Extent and Beauty’: Stereographs, Vision, Taste and
the American Middle Class, 1850-1880” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2003),
157-159; and David Jaffee, “Anthony’s Broadway on a Rainy Day,” Common-Place 10, no. 4
(2010).
204

called the stereograph “the card of introduction to make all mankind acquaintances.”
143

During the Civil War, many northerners began to encounter domesticated visions of
black freedom through such a device. Civil War photographers brought such visions of
emancipation and hierarchy, liberators and liberated, into northern parlors in three-
dimensional form.
Likewise, such images entered the North through private channels. It is difficult
to know how many other soldiers besides Charles F. Tew sent a photograph of a sitting-
slave home to their families. While the broader photographic landscape suggests this
practice likely became common, this much is clear: in sending a photograph of himself
and an escaped slave to his wife and children in Massachusetts, Tew had actually drawn
upon and extended the antebellum practices of slaveholders. He found in photography a
personalized way of conveying racialized power relations. In the letter home, he even
told his children they could kiss the portrait if they wanted.
144
As in the South,
photography had become a way of conveying authority through affection and
subordination. Strikingly, though, northern and southern photographic visions of the war
would ultimately differ greatly (Figures 4.27-4.28).

143
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” The Atlantic, June 1859.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-
stereograph/303361/
144
Charles F. Tew to wife and family, August 15, 1864, Charles F. Tew Papers, William L.
Clements Library, The University of Michigan.
205

Fig. 4.27. Burrell (slave) and John Wallace Comer
145
Fig. 4.28, Mathew Brady, “Officers of Co.
G. R.I.V.,” albumen print on carte de visite mount, c.1862-1865
146

Confederate body-servant images stood to maintain an old order, whereas northern
images stood to assert racial authority within a world of social tumult. Enslaved
resistance (i.e. fugitive escapes) actually helped expand the culture of such white-
supremacist photography to the North. As fugitives such as George took on new roles in
northern homes, both northerners and southerners ended the war with personalized
visions of racial power.
For northern photographers and white soldiers, photography proved a way of
resettling the social and racial disruptions of the Civil War. The logic of domestication
underwrote whites’ photographic attempts to navigate this moment, shaping scenes of

145
Photograph of John Wallace Comer in Civil War uniform with his slave, Burrell, Comer
Family Papers # 167-z, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
146
Brady, Matthew, photographer. “Officers of Co. G. R.I.V./Brady, Washington.” 1
Photographic print on carte de visite mount: albumen. Washington, 1862-1865. From the
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War, Gladstone Collection of
African American Photographs. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010647922/
206

fugitives sitting, kneeling, and serving. Such images emerged at the intersection of
longstanding iconographies of African Americans and on-the-ground experiences.
Ultimately, Union interracial photography helps us to understand that northern racism
thrived, in no small part, because soldiers adopted the very same disposition of racial
power that northerners believed was only possible or permitted in the South. Adopting
this disposition included engaging in a set of photographic practices that refashioned
southern proslavery photography. On the cusp of black freedom, photography enabled
northern whites to present themselves as liberators even as it helped them to shape
personalized visions of racial hierarchy through the categories of domesticity – visions
that would live on well after the Civil War.
207

Epilogue

In April of 1865, as the Civil War came to a close, Alexander Gardner stood on
the banks of a canal in the industrial section of Richmond. The Confederacy had fallen,
and in Richmond, as in Charleston and Columbia, actual buildings had fallen as well.
The image Gardner took – “View on Canal, near Crenshaw’s Mill, Richmond, Virginia”
– pictured one such urban casualty in Haxall’s Mill (Figure 5.1).

Fig. 5.1. Alexander Gardner, “View on Canal, near Crenshaw’s Mill, Richmond, Virginia,” April 1865,
illus. in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866)
1

1
Gardner, Alexander, photographer. “View on Canal, near Crenshaw’s Mill, Richmond,
Virginia.” 1 photographic print: albumen. Illus. in: Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the
Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Philip & Solomons, 1866. From Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War, Miscellaneous Items in High Demand.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2007685828/
208

This once-productive flower mill appeared little more than a crumbling piece of
honeycomb in the background of the image. Its looming presence marked the end of an
old world.
2

Only steps away from where he took this image, Gardner had made a very
different picture, perhaps on the same day, that marked the transition to a new world:
“Group of Negroes (‘Freedmen’) by canal” (Figure 5.2).

Fig. 5.2. Alexander Gardner, “Richmond, Virginia. Group of Negroes (‘Freedmen’) by canal,” Richmond,
VA, negative, April 1865
3

Ten African Americans – adults, teenagers, even two impatient (and blurry) young
children – posed closely at the top of the embankment, while a few men looked on from
behind, some perched on fence-posts. Behind them, Haxall’s Mill crumbled, but, judging
from the way the central man proudly posed with his corn-cob pipe, this image likely
meant something closer to liberation than destruction to him and the others. Their image,

2
On ruins in nineteenth-century America, see Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and
the American Civil War (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012); and Nick Yablon,
Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2009).
3
Gardner, Alexander, photographer. “Richmond, Virginia. Group of Negroes (‘Freedmen’) by
canal.” 1 negative: glass, stereograph, wet collodion. April 1865. From Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints, Civil War,
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003005762/PP/
209

however, never made it into Gardner’s Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil
War (1866). For whatever reason, Gardner only published the canal view, which became
Plate 92.
Scholars have long seen the Sketch Book as a formal landmark in the history of
representations of war, and the capstone in the more specific history of Civil War
photography. There are good reasons why the Sketch Book has gained notoriety. In its
shear reliance on so many photographs – 100 in all, in two volumes – to tell a story, it
marked a turning point for the relation between photography and books. Moreover,
rather than a grand narrative, Gardner offered a series of disconnected “sketches” – a
combination of the photographs and extended written commentaries – that illuminated a
selective account of the people, events, and the built environment of wartime: ruins;
bridges; and fortifications; Confederate prisoners; Union troops posing near their tents;
dead soldiers at Gettysburg; a slave pen in Alexandria, Virginia. Lastly, Gardner’s
photographs of death – most notably A Harvest of Death and Home of a Rebel
Sharpshooter – have become iconic representations of the war that resonate to this day.
4

Photo-historian Anthony Lee has stressed the anti-narrative and anti-heroic qualities of
the book, which, as he suggests, signaled “what lay in store in the modern world.”
5
Other
scholars have noted how Gardner failed to explore emancipation in any depth.
6
But
whatever the interpretation, scholars have seen the Sketch Book as a distinctive endpoint
to the photographic documentation of the war and an important beginning to the
photographic construction of public memory of the war.

4
Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of
the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1.
5
Lee, On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, 50.
6
Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to
Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), Ch 2.
210

This dissertation helps us to identify the Sketch Book not only as a distinctive
work in Civil War photography but also as a representative work in the broader
photographic impulse to resettle white-black relations as slavery died. By including
“View on Canal, near Crenshaw’s Mill” and excluding “Group of Negroes (‘Freedmen’)
by Canal,” the Sketch Book offered an answer about the destruction of battle rather than a
series of questions – about issues ranging from black voting rights to the contours of a
new southern labor system – that came with the emancipation of four million people.
While the famous “What Do I Want, John Henry? set itself apart through its interrogative
title, it fell in line with the broader practice of subordinating African Americans in
domestic scenes – as did Scene in Pleasant Valley (Figure 5.3), the Sketch Book’s only
photograph with a black female subject.

Fig. 5.3. Alexander Gardner, Scene in Pleasant Valley, Maryland, October 1862, illus. in Gardner’s
Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866)
7

7
Gardner, Alexander, photographer. “Scene in Pleasant Valley, Maryland.” 1 photographic print:
albumen. Illus. in: Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. Washington, D.C.:
211

While the written commentary for Scene in Pleasant Valley described how the house
served as the “temporary home” for George McClellan’s wife (perhaps pictured) during
the war, and told of how the officers of McClellan’s staff “whiled away many a pleasant
October day” on the “vine-clad porch,” it made no mention of the black woman leaning
against the porch, clothed in a white apron and adorning a patterned headwrap.
8
In the
picture she served only as a distant prop that reaffirmed the sense of gendered comfort for
the northern white women who had come southwards.
The Sketch Book, then, engaged in a broader process of reaffirming racial
hierarchy during and after the Civil War; this process, however, was not without
contestation. Indeed, “Group of Negroes (‘Freedmen’) by Canal” actually hinted at how
African Americans had grasped photography as a crucial means of self-definition during
slavery. From the enslaved people who purchased daguerreotypes in Winchester,
Virginia to the many fugitives (such as John W. Jones and Frederick Douglass) who
posed for portraits once they reached the North, African Americans had harnessed the
power of image-making to attain public visibility as well as to promote private dignity
and community. African Americans entered freedom with the photographic practices to
forge a private and public counterarchive.
9
They used images to strengthen their own
social ties even as, in the case of Pleasant Valley and numerous other photographs, they
also served as markers of white identity.

Philip & Solomons, 1866. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog,
Civil War, Miscellaneous Items in High Demand. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006685377/
8
Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (New York: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1959).
9
On the notion of the “counterarchive,” see Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color
Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
212

This duality would continue to influence life after emancipation. On the one
hand, southern photographers during Reconstruction began mass-producing stereographs
of former slaves, primarily working in cotton fields and standing in front of dilapidated
cabins. In an even more conspicuous expression of domination, whites began making
and sharing photographs of their brutal lynchings of black men as souvenirs to document
white rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
10
On the other hand,
photography gave African Americans a new tool of self-definition as they entered the
post-war era. Take, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, who made photographs of middle-
class African American life a central component of his George Negro Exhibit at the Paris
Exposition of 1900. Displaying 363 photographs, many of which were studio portraits,
Du Bois contested the persistent stereotyping of black figures in popular visual culture as
he rendered African Americans a visible, dignified presence for an international
audience.
11
After slavery, photography continued to prove a common-ground in fierce
contests over social power and civil rights. It would stand at the center of a new terrain
of struggle.

10
Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
11
Smith, Photography on the Color Line.
213

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Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, GA
Telfair Family Papers
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Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD
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Louis Manigault Papers
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Waring Family Papers
South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
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Zelotus Lee Holmes Papers
Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at
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Manigault Family Papers
N. Russell Middleton Papers
William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Hancock Papers
Weld-Grimke Papers
John P. Reynolds Journal
Charles F. Tew Papers
W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL
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University of Virginia Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
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Isaac Jefferson Memoirs and Daguerreotype, Tracy M. McGregor Library
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214

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American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA
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Chester County Historical Society, West Chester, PA
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The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
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Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC
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American Cartoon Prints
British Cartoon Prints
Civil War
Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints
Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs
Miscellaneous Items in High Demand
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Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865
Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD
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Museum Department
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA
Daguerreotype Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Bequest of Charles Allen Munn
Gilman Collection
Rogers Fund
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington D.C.
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Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers.
Eutaw Alabama Whig
Harper’s Weekly. HarpWeek.
Humphrey’s Journal
The Liberator. Accessible Archives: The Liberator.
Louisville Courier
Louisville Daily Journal
The Macon Daily Telegraph. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
The National Era. Accessible Archives: African American Newspapers.
National Anti-Slavery Standard
New York Independent
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract My dissertation illuminates the earliest major episode in the continuing use of photography in struggles over social justice. While studies of early photography in the United States have amply shown that the new medium developed into a wildly popular visual practice that broadened the market for portraits, pictured the urban landscape, and visualized war, I show how it actually played a far more important role as a historical force: it reshaped how slavery and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested. More specifically, I assess how photography helped southerners to defend slavery, slaves to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen their movement, and soldiers to imagine and pictorially enact an interracial society during the Civil War. Central to my analysis are dozens of little-studied and unpublished photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, and abolitionists – which I use in concert with written materials ranging from slave narratives, newspapers, and photographic journals to the personal papers of slaveholders, abolitionists, soldiers, and photographers. Ultimately, I argue that slave owners, enslaved people, abolitionists, and soldiers transformed photography from a scientific curiosity (in the early 1840s) into a political tool (by the 1860s). I further argue that photography served as a crucial yet largely unrecognized catalyst of sectional antagonism. While this project sheds new light on conflicts over late American slavery, it also reveals a key moment in the much broader historical relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms of power and resistance.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Amato, Matthew (author)

Core Title Exposing humanity: slavery, antislavery, and early photography in America, 1839-1865

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Publication Date 07/29/2015

Defense Date 05/15/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag antislavery,Civil War,OAI-PMH Harvest,Photography,Slavery

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Fox, Richard W. (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Halttunen, Karen (committee member), Schwartz, Vanessa R. (committee member)

Creator Email amatom@usc.edu,mamato12@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-303887

Unique identifier UC11294820

Identifier etd-AmatoMatth-1871.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-303887 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-AmatoMatth-1871.pdf

Dmrecord 303887

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Amato, Matthew

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA