The Seven-Year-Old "Poster Child" of Slavery

On March 12, W. W.  Norton published "Girl in Black and White", subtitled "The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement",  by Jessie Morgan-Owens, a professional photographer, scholar, Phd. and the dean of studies at Bard Early College in New Orleans. In the book, Jessie mentions how she and I met in Worcester in 2013, while she was in residence at the American Antiquarian Society researching Mary's life, so that she could see my daguerreotype of the little girl who became the face of the Abolition movement.  In 1855, Mary was displayed on stage, taken to newspaper offices and her photograph was circulated to politicians and VIPs by Senator Charles Sumner--after Sumner and her escaped father and abolitionists in Massachusetts, including Longfellow and Thoreau, raised enough money to buy freedom for Mary and the rest of her family.

 The reason Sumner was eager to display the girl was because she appeared to be white, but was born into slavery.  Jessie, in her book, decided to call the girl "Mary Mildred Williams" because "Williams" was the alias the girl's father chose when he escaped from Virginia and his daughter adopted it when she grew up.  I call her "Mary Botts"--her slave name--in the essay below, because that's the name I first discovered ten years ago, while researching the identity of the girl in my dag.  Many abolitionists and reporters called her "Little Ida May"--the name of a fictitious child in a hugely best-selling novel, published in 1854, about a white girl who is kidnapped, beaten and sold into slavery, suffering much until her father  saves her.

When I began collecting antique photographs about thirty years ago, I started out buying everything I could find. Then I began to specialize, gravitating toward early images of children, twins (which I wrote about in a April 29, 2010 blog post: “Diane Arbus and Spooky Twins”) and photographs reflecting attitudes toward race and slavery.  (For example, I wrote about the image of “The Scarred Back of a Slave Named Gordon” in a post dated Oct. 2, 2009.  My information about that image was also printed in the New York Times book review of Oct. 4, 2009).  This image was also widely circulated by abolitionists.  My copy of it, below, is a hand-colored glass negative of the original black and white photo, probably meant to be projected in a "magic lantern.")

 While collecting slave photographs, I became fascinated with the “white slave children of Louisiana” as I call the series of CDV (carte-de-visite) photos of freed children from New Orleans who appear to be completely white. These small, cardboard-mounted photos were sold in great quantities by abolitionists during the Civil War.  On the back of each photo was printed: “The nett [sic] proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the Department of the Gulf, now under the command of Maj. Gen. Banks.”

I had so many questions about these CDVs.  First, why did the abolitionists go down to the schools of freed slaves in New Orleans and pull out only those who appeared to be white, then send the children up to New York and Philadelphia to be dressed in fine clothes and posed in sentimental scenes for photos to sell?  Why did black-appearing children not get chosen for this? And how did these former slave children feel about being taken away from their mothers, paraded up north for the media like zoo animals and then sent back down South?  (They even got kicked out of their hotel in Philadelphia when the owner discovered they weren’t “really” white.)

Through research, I’ve learned the answers to some of these questions about the Louisiana CDVs, but today I’m only focusing on one photograph that was made, in 1855, about nine years before the Civil War CDVs.  It’s a ninth-plate daguerreotype that I bought on E-Bay in 2000 of a little girl in a plaid dress . 

The seller, from Tennessee, included with this cased image information on where it was found. “This…photograph was purchased at Headley’s Auction in Winchester VA, July 1997.  It came…out of the “Ashgrove” estate in Vienna, VA. The house originated as a hunting lodge in 1740 …and was  sold to James Sherman in 1850, who would never  own or hire a slave.  He died in 1865 and passed it to his son, Capt. Franklin Sherman, Tenth Mich. Cavalry.  Capt Sherman’s wife Caroline (Alvord, a native of Mass.) came to the country in 1865 to teach the children of the newly freed slaves.”

The most intriguing thing about this daguerreotype, of course, was the faded inch-square piece of paper glued to the back of the case upon which someone has printed  “Mulatto raised by Charles Sumner”.  I put this image aside in 2000 along with the papers the buyer had sent me about the Ashford plantation, and forgot all about them.

Then, in November 2010, I had a visit from Greg Fried, a professor at  Suffolk University in Boston who wanted to scan some of my photographs for a new web site he was preparing called  “Mirror of Race” (www.mirrorofrace.org.) I showed him the Louisiana CDVs and the daguerreotype of the “Sumner-raised” child. After he left, I went on Google and typed in the words  “Charles Sumner” and “slave”.  I discovered a short article from the New York Times dated March 9, 1855, which read:

A WHITE SLAVE FROM VIRGINIA. We received a visit yesterday from an interesting little girl, — who, less than a month since, was a slave belonging to Judge NEAL, of Alexandria, Va. Our readers will remember that we lately published a letter, addressed by Hon. CHARLES SUMNER, to some friends in Boston, accompanying a daguerreotype which that gentleman had forwarded to his friends in this city, and which he described as the portrait of a real "Ida May," — a young female slave, so white as to defy the acutest judge to detect in her features, complexion, hair, or general appearance, the slightest trace of Negro blood. It was this child that visited our office, accompanied by CHARLES H. BRAINARD, in whose care she was placed by Mr. SUMNER, for transmission to Boston. Her history is briefly as follows: Her name is MARY MILDRED BOTTS; her father escaped from the estate of Judge NEAL, Alexandria, six years ago and took refuge in Boston. Two years since he purchased his freedom for $600, his wife and three children being still in bondage. The good feeling of his Boston friends induced them to subscribe for the purchase of his family, and three weeks since, through the agency of Hon. CHARLES SUMNER, the purchase was effected, $800 being paid for the family. They created quite a sensation in Washington, and were provided with a passage in the first class cars in their journey to this city, whence they took their way last evening by the Fall River route to Boston. The child was exhibited yesterday to many prominent individuals in the City, and the general sentiment, in which we fully concur, was one of astonishment that she should ever have been held a slave. She was one of the fairest and most indisputable white children that we have ever seen.

This discovery got my adrenaline going. I googled “Mary Mildred Botts” and learned that the white-appearing slave child who was  admired by The New York Times was discussed in a 2008 book called  “Raising Freedom’s Child—Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery,” written by a University of New Orleans professor, Mary Niall Mitchell, who (small world!) was someone I had communicated with six years before while trying to research the Louisiana CDV’s.  I immediately ordered the book from Amazon.

When it arrived, I was stunned to find on page 73 a photo of Mary Botts that was the mirror image of MY dag. (The one in the book--also on the cover of Jessie's book) is from the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.)  Prof. Mitchell gave more explanation about why this young girl was photographed and brought north by Charles Sumner.

“By the eve of the Civil War, abolitionists recognized the potential of white-looking children for stirring up antislavery sentiment…Although it was the image of a raggedy, motherless Topsy that viewers might have expected to see in a photograph of a slave girl, it was the “innocent”, “pure,” and “well-loved” white child who appeared, a child who needed the protection of the northern white public.

“The sponsors of seven-year-old Mary Mildred Botts, a freed child from Virginia, may have been the first to capitalize on these ideas, as early as 1855.  Her story also marks the beginning of efforts to use photography (in Mary Botts’s case, the daguerreotype, as the carte-de-visite format was not yet available) in the service of raising sentiment and support for the abolitionist cause.  (bold-facing mine.)

“…In his own characterization of Mary Botts,” Mitchell continues, “Sumner set a pattern that other abolitionists would follow.  In a letter printed in both the Boston Telegraph and the New York Daily Times, he compared Mary Botts to a fictional white girl who had been kidnapped and enslaved, the protagonist in Mary Hayden Pike’s antislavery novel Ida May:  ‘She is bright and intelligent—another Ida May,’ [Sumner wrote] ‘I think her presence among us (in Boston) will be more effective than any speech I can make.’”

This comparison of Mary Botts to the fictional kidnapped white girl worked well for Sumner and the Abolitionists and made the little freed slave quite a local celebrity.  Prof. Mitchell quotes the diary of a Quaker woman named Hannah Marsh Inman who saw Mary Botts at  a meeting house in Worcester, MA (which happens to be where I live now).  On March 1, 1855, Hannah wrote:  “Evening all went to the soiree at the Hall.  Little Ida May, the white slave was there from Boston.”

Sumner realized that he was on to a good thing and circulated  daguerreotypes of the child to prove her whiteness to those who might doubt.  (Keep in mind—the daguerreotype process was the first one ever made available—by Daguerre in 1839-- and the images “written by the sun” on the silvered copper plate were considered undeniable scientific proof of the sitter’s appearance.)  

Sumner passed a daguerreotype of Mary Botts around the Massachusetts State Legislature “as an illustration of slavery” and sent one to John. A. Andrews, the governor of Massachusetts.(And Jessie, in her book, on page 133, traces the journey of MY dag from the home of an Abolitionist Massachusetts state senator to his daughter, who moved to Virginia to teach newly emancipated slaves.  My dag stayed in the Ash Grove estate for 132 years until a woman from Tennessee bought it at auction, then offered it for sale in  2000, and it came to me in North Grafton, MA, coming full circle back to where it started.)

Only a year after parading Mary Botts through New York, Boston and Worcester and dubbing her “The real Ida May”,  Charles Sumner’s devout abolitionist views led him to a crippling disaster, when, in 1856, he was so badly beaten on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks,  who broke a cane over his head, that it would take years of therapy before Sumner could return to the Senate.

As soon as I realized in 2010 that my dag of Mary Botts was one of the images used by Sumner himself to advance the abolitionist cause, I got into an excited e-mail correspondence with Professor Mitchell, and  Prof. Greg Fried, who pointed out something I’d forgotten: an advertising card on the back of my image showed that it was “Taken with the Double Camera For 25 Cents by Taber &; Co., successors to Tyler &; Co. Cor. Winter &; Washington Sts. Boston”, while the mirror image belonging to the  Massachusetts Historical Society was taken by Julian Vannerson, probably in Richmond,  Virginia, and seems sharper than mine, so mine must be a copy dag. (The only way to copy a daguerreotype is to take a new daguerreotype of it.  Each daguerreotype is one of a kind.  Taber’s price of 25 cents sounds affordable, but at the time, the average working man made only about a dollar a day.)

 On March 7, Maurice Berger, who writes the Lens column for The New York Times, discussed "Girl in Black And White", calling it "groundbreaking."  He quoted Jessie Morgan Owens as saying, "Mary's daguerreotype was one of the first images of photographic propaganda and one of the first portraits made solely to prove a political point."

Personally, I'm very grateful to Jessie Morgan-Owens for her decades of work and research, which put flesh and blood into my daguerreotype. I'm thrilled to know that this image, taken in 1855, that is part of my collection, may represent one of the first efforts EVER to use the  discovery of photography to touch people’s emotions and change their minds.  This small image of a seven-year-old girl may be an example of the first time photography was used for propaganda, but it was certainly not the last.

The Shocking Story Behind Harvard's Slave Photos and White Slave Photographs

Antique photographs of American slaves have been much in the news lately.  Three days ago, on March 21, the front page of The New York Times featured an article and a large image of a black slave named Renty, naked from the waist up--one of seven slaves who in 1850 were forced by Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz to be stripped and photographed as documentation for his theory that blacks and whites were descended from different origins and that black people were inferior.  The Times ran the article because a woman who believes she is descended from Renty has filed suit against Harvard, demanding that two of the 15 large daguerreotypes are rightfully hers.    Today, March 23, The Times ran a follow-up article debating the question: who owns the rights to a photograph and to artifacts of African American history?

 Earlier, on March 7, New York Times reporter  Maurice Berger reviewed the book "Girl in Black and White" by Jessie Morgan-Owens, about a seven-year-old slave girl named Mary who appeared to be so white that Abolitionists in Massachusetts, led by Charles Sumner, bought her freedom, brought her up north and had her photographed in 1855, so that Sumner could circulate to important politicians and newspapers her image, intended to shock them that such a white-appearing child could be a slave.

From its very beginnings in 1839, photography has proved to be a potent propaganda weapon, used by both abolitionists and white supremacists to touch peoples' emotions and win support for their cause. I've been collecting vintage, historic photographs for some 40 years and writing about them on this blog since 2009, often discussing images that have to do with race.   Today I'm re-posting an essay from March 7, 2012, in which I discuss the background of the Harvard dags.  In my next post I will talk about my daguerreotype of  the  little white-appearing slave girl who was photographed by Sumner and became the "poster girl" of the abolitionist cause.

In my previous post, I discussed the recently-in-the-news photos of the “White Slave Children of New Orleans” which portrayed only white-appearing slave children, not black ones.  I explained how this apparently wrong-minded and politically incorrect practice of the Abolitionists had originated nearly a decade earlier with a daguerreotype of a white-skinned little girl named Mary Botts.  She was purchased and brought north by her father (an escaped slave) with the help of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts who paraded her (and circulated her photographic image) around New England making her a celebrity described in The New York Times and other media.

In 1855, Sumner may have been the first to focus on white-appearing slaves to raise indignation against the practice of slavery.  It worked so well that, after Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, Northerners and Abolitionists who wanted to support schools for former slaves went to New Orleans looking for white slave children to bring up north and  photograph.  According to Celia Caust-Ellenbogen of Swarthmore College, “Keeping these schools up and running would require ongoing financial support. Toward this end, the National Freedman’s Association, in collaboration with the American Missionary Association and interested officers of the Union Army launched a new propaganda campaign.  Five children and three adults, all former slaves from New Orleans, were sent to the North on a publicity tour.

A full page of Harper’s Weekly’s Jan. 30, 1864 issue was devoted to this engraving, which was based on a large-format photograph taken of the group.   Explaining the picture was a letter written by  C.C. Leigh introducing the stars of the new propaganda campaign.  Pay attention to how he keeps emphasizing the intelligence of the children.

“To the Editor of Harper’s Weekly:

The group of emancipated slaves whose portraits I send you were brought by Colonel Hanks and Mr. Philip Bacon from New Orleans, where they were set free by General Butler…REBECCA HUGER is eleven years old, and was a slave in her father’s house, the special attendant of a girl a little older than herself.  To all appearance she is perfectly white.  Her complexion, hair and features show not the slightest trace of Negro blood.  In the few months during which she has been at school she has learned to read well, and writes as neatly as most children of her age.  Her mother and grandmother live in New Orleans, where they support themselves comfortably by their own labor…ROSINA DOWNS is not quite seven years old.  She is a fair child, with blonde complexion and silky hair.  Her father is in the rebel army.  She has one sister as white as herself and three brothers who are darker.  Her mother, a bright mulatto, lives in New Orleans in a poor hut, and has hard work to support her family.  CHARLES TAYLOR is eight years old.  His complexion is very fair, his hair light and silky.  Three out of five boys in any school in New York are darker than he.  Yet this white boy, with his mother, as he declares, has been twice sold as a slave.  First by his father and “owner”,  Alexander Wethers, of Lewis County, Virginia, to a slave trader named Harrison, who sold them to Mr.Thornhill of New Orleans.  This man fled at the approach of our army and his slaves were liberated by General Butler. The boy is decidedly intelligent, and though he has been at school less than a year, he reads and writes very well. …”

The letter goes on to describe the adults in the group—two of them chosen, evidently, because they had physical scars from their masters’ mistreatment.  Wilson Chinn, on the left, was branded on his forehead by Volsey B Marmillion, who branded all his 210 slaves, and Mary Johnson carried the scars of 50 cuts on her arms and back –given by her master because one morning she was “half an hour behind time in bringing up his five o’clock cup of coffee”.

The little girl on the left next to Charley was described  as AUGUSTA BROUJEY, nine years old. “Her mother, who is almost white, was owned by her half-brother, named Solamon, who still retains two of her children. ISAAC WHITE is a black boy of eight years; but none the less intelligent than his whiter companions. He has been in school about seven months, and I venture to say that not one boy in fifty would have made as much improvement in that space of time.”

The man on the far right is  “the Reverend Mr. Whitehead” who managed to earn enough as a house and ship painter to buy his freedom and is described thus: “The reverend gentleman can read and write well and is a very stirring speaker.  Just now he belongs to the church militant, having enlisted in the United States Army.”

The letter in Harper’s ends by telling where the small CDVs of the individuals can be bought for 25 cents each or the large photo of the whole group for one dollar.  This would have been a very good investment, for today the individual CDV’s can cost several hundred dollars or more, and the only copy of the large group photo that I have ever seen was in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

Three photographers took photos of the white slave children: Charles Paxson and M. H. Kimball  in New York, and J.E. McClees in Philadelphia (where they were kicked out of their hotel when the manager learned they were not “really” white.) The children were dressed in elegant clothing and posed with props—the American flag, an ornate mirror, books which they were studying—to appeal to the sentimentality of Victorian audiences.  (See my previous post.)  Kimball produced the most “shocking” photo (to Victorian eyes) of dark-skinned Isaac and white-skinned Rosa arm in arm .  (Augusta was in only 2 of the 22 photos on record and Isaac in three, but Rosa and Rebecca are pictured in most of them.) 

The most photographed and most popular of the “white slave children” was Rebecca, 11 years old, posed in ever more stylish outfits.  Prof. Mary Niall Mitchell suggests in an essay “Rosebloom and Pure White” in American Quarterly, Sept. 2002, that Rebecca fascinated the Victorians because she was closest to becoming an adult woman and the thought of her  sexual vulnerability —a white slave girl who could be bought and sold and raped—fascinated and horrified the Northerners.  Clearly the white children were the result of masters raping the slave women who were their property. Professor  Mitchell repeats the famous quip of southern diarist Mary Chestnut: “Every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.”

Professor Mitchell writes in the same essay: “In the images of Rosa and Rebecca, a notion about white little girls as pure and precious things may have been employed to redeem those viewers who had yet to rally around the antislavery cause and encourage them to act on the girls’ behalf.”

Finally, the Abolitionists photographing the “white slave children” were using the new and undeniably “scientific”  medium of photography to battle the beliefs of the leading scientist of the day—Louis Agassiz—famous Harvard natural scientist.  He claimed and tried very hard to prove “scientifically” that the Black race was an inferior and separate biological species.  According to Kathleen Collins in “Portraits of Slave Children” in “History of Photography”, July- September 1985,   “The anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould recently reconstructed Agassiz’ life and thought from his unexpurgated letters in the Harvard University Collection.  Gould concluded that behind Agassiz’ separate creation theories was an initial, visceral reaction to contact with blacks, which left him with an intense revulsion against the notion of miscegenation.”

Agassiz himself tried to use the science of photography to promote his theories that blacks were a different species from whites.  Long before the civil war, he toured Southern plantations and had the owners bring forth the most “African” looking slaves.  In 1850 Agassiz arranged for J. T. Zealy, a daguerrotypist in Columbia, South Carolina, to take photographs of African-born slaves from plantations Agassiz had visited.  

The slaves were stripped and photographed and these haunting daguerreotypes were sent to Agassiz at Harvard.  In 1976 they were found in a storage cabinet at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. (To see these dags and read a brilliant discussion of Agassiz’s racism and his use of the camera to debase his subjects, go to http://usslave.blogspot.com/2011/10/black-bodies-white-science-louis.html. ) Here are two of the captions:

The Zealy pictures reveal the social convention which ranks blacks as inferior beings, which violates civilized decorum, which strips men and women of the right to cover their genitalia. And yet the pictures shatter that mold by allowing the eyes of Delia and the others to speak directly to ours, in an appeal to a shared humanity.

Agassiz commissioned these images to use as scientific visual evidence to prove the physical difference between white Europeans and black Africans. The primary goal was to prove the racial superiority of the white race. The photographs were also meant to serve as evidence for his theory of “separate creation,” which contends that each race originated as a separate species.

So the Abolitionists who photographed the white (mulatto) children of New Orleans, arm in arm with a black slave child, and who emphasized at every turn the intelligence and good behavior of these children, were fighting fire with fire—using the new science of photography to refute visually the beliefs of the country’s most famous scientist and other racists who insisted that the two races should not and could not be mixed.

The Stories Behind Two Infamous Photos Documenting the Evils of Slavery

Today the New York Times on line--The Opinionator--published another essay of mine about  Civil War photography--this one telling the stories behind two iconic photographs of horribly abused slaves.  These photographs were reproduced and sold by Abolitionists to arouse public opposition to the institution of slavery.  (My previous essay for The Times "Disunion" section was about Elizabeth Keckley, the dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln, who bought freedom from slavery for herself and her son.)  If you would like to read the complete story behind these photographs, here is the link:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/icons-of-cruelty/?_r=0

Icons of Cruelty

By JOAN PAULSON GAGE

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

CIVIL WAR (US) (1861-65),PHOTOGRAPHY, SLAVERY

Two iconic photographs of former slaves documenting the torture inflicted on them by their owners were widely circulated during the Civil War as anti-slavery propaganda, and both appear in the current exhibit “Photography and the American Civil War” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although the images were extensively reproduced and helped to turn public opinion against slavery, the stories of the two men in these shocking photographs are little known today.

International Center of Photography“Gordon, a Runaway Mississippi Slave, or ‘The Scourged Back,’” 1863, attributed to McPherson & Oliver.

Private Collection, Courtesy William L. Schaeffer“Wilson. Branded Slave from New Orleans,” 1863, taken by Charles Praxson.

The Scourged Back-- A Famous Photo of a Beaten Runaway Slave, Revisited

Yesterday (Thursday May 2, 2013) I came home at night and saw that my blog had received nearly 700 hits in a few hours, most of them for a post I wrote over four years ago called "The Scarred Back of a Slave Named Gordon".  I couldn't figure out where the interest in this famous and grisly photograph was coming from until my sharp-eyed sister-in-law, Robin Paulson, alerted me to an on-line essay in The New York Times' Opinionator blog in the  "Disunion" section, titled "A photo taken 150 years ago of a runaway slave changed the way Americans saw the Civil War".  The essay by Ted Widmer discussed this watershed image,  which dramatized, through the still-new science of photography, the brutality of some slave owners and served as an effective tool for the abolitionist cause.  Widmer went on to discuss other photographs currently on view in the exhibit "Photography and the American Civil War" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I think that readers wanted to know more about the story of this particular slave, and that's why they searched out my original blog post.  I've had a number of comments since it was first published in October of 2009 and I'm re-posting it below along with the comments and also with an additional image of Gordon and his scarred back, which I added to the post only about a week ago.

On page 14 of the Sept. 20, [2009] Book Review, The New York Times published a shocking photograph of a slave with a horribly scarred back to illustrate a review of “Deliver Us from Evil”.

Because I collect antique photos and have many dealing with slavery and the life of black people in the 1800's, I wrote to the Times the back story behind this photo, and the letter, somewhat abbreviated, is in the book review section this Sunday--Oct. 4, 2009.

I wrote: This famous photograph, usually titled “The Scourged Back”, was widely circulated by abolitionists and is one of the earliest examples of photography used as propaganda. A contemporary newspaper, The New York Independent, commented: “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by the 100,000 and scattered over the states. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. (Harriet Beecher) Stowe cannot approach, because it tells the story to the eye.”

As photo historian Kathleen Collins explained in The History of Photography Vol. 9 Number 1, January, 1985—it shows a slave named Gordon who escaped his master in Mississippi by rubbing himself with onions to throw off the bloodhounds. He took refuge with the Union Army at Baton Rouge and, in 1863, three engraved portraits of him were printed in Harper’s Weekly, showing the man “as he underwent the surgical examination previous to being mustered into the service—his back furrowed and scarred with the traces of a whipping administered on Christmas Day last.”

The actual photographs of the escaped slave, taken by McPherson and Oliver of New Orleans, were widely circulated as carte-de-visite photos. On the verso of the mount were the comments of S. K. Towle, Surgeon, 30th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers: “…Few sensation writers ever depicted worse punishments than this man must have received, though nothing in his appearance indicates any unusual viciousness—but on the contrary, he seems intelligent and well-behaved.”

I have a colored glass slide of the same photograph (above) in my collection, undoubtedly used in anti-slavery lectures. Abolitionists exploited the new medium of photography, circulating, in addition to "the Scourged Back", CDV’s of a slave named Wilson who was branded on the forehead, and selling thousands of the series of emancipated “white”-appearing slave children from New Orleans, posed patriotically, including wrapped in the American flag. On the back was printed: “The nett [sic] proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the department of the Gulf now under the command of Maj. Gen. Banks.”

April 24, 2013--Because of questions I've received about this famous image, I am now adding below one of the original CDVs of Gordon's back showing him with his head tilted farther back to show his beard.  I do not own this image, but I've always been aware of it. I always assumed that both these poses of Gordon were taken at the same time, but when I study them together I don't know.  Another question--I always assumed that "my" image up at the top was  reversed--something that could easily happen with a glass negative.  (All daguerreotypes and ambrotypes are reversed mirror images of the actual subject, so if the subject is holding a newspaper, for example, the headlines will be reversed mirror-image writing.)  Now, looking at these two photos of Gordon together, I can't tell if the images show him turned to face opposite sides, or is one of them reversed and he's looking over his left shoulder in both of them?  Or do you think they were taken at two different photo sessions, separated by time?  Opinions? 

The Shocking Story Behind the White Slave Photographs

In my previous post, I discussed the recently-in-the-news photos of the “White Slave Children of New Orleans” which portrayed only white-appearing slave children, not black ones.  I explained how this apparently wrong-minded and politically incorrect practice of the Abolitionists had originated nearly a decade earlier with a daguerreotype of a white-skinned little girl named Mary Botts.  She was purchased and brought north by her father (an escaped slave) with the help of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts who paraded her (and circulated her photographic image) around New England making her a celebrity described in The New York Times and other media.

In 1855, Sumner may have been the first to focus on white-appearing slaves to raise indignation against the practice of slavery.  It worked so well that, after Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, Northerners and Abolitionists who wanted to support schools for former slaves went to New Orleans looking for white slave children to bring up north and  photograph.  According to Celia Caust-Ellenbogen of Swarthmore College, “Keeping these schools up and running would require ongoing financial support. Toward this end, the National Freedman’s Association, in collaboration with the American Missionary Association and interested officers of the Union Army launched a new propaganda campaign.  Five children and three adults, all former slaves from New Orleans, were sent to the North on a publicity tour.

A full page of Harper’s Weekly’s Jan. 30, 1864 issue was devoted to this engraving, which was based on a large-format photograph taken of the group.   Explaining the picture was a letter written by  C.C. Leigh introducing the stars of the new propaganda campaign.  Pay attention to how he keeps emphasizing the intelligence of the children.

“To the Editor of Harper’s Weekly:

The group of emancipated slaves whose portraits I send you were brought by Colonel Hanks and Mr. Philip Bacon from New Orleans, where they were set free by General Butler…REBECCA HUGER is eleven years old, and was a slave in her father’s house, the special attendant of a girl a little older than herself.  To all appearance she is perfectly white.  Her complexion, hair and features show not the slightest trace of Negro blood.  In the few months during which she has been at school she has learned to read well, and writes as neatly as most children of her age.  Her mother and grandmother live in New Orleans, where they support themselves comfortably by their own labor…ROSINA DOWNS is not quite seven years old.  She is a fair child, with blonde complexion and silky hair.  Her father is in the rebel army.  She has one sister as white as herself and three brothers who are darker.  Her mother, a bright mulatto, lives in New Orleans in a poor hut, and has hard work to support her family.  CHARLES TAYLOR is eight years old.  His complexion is very fair, his hair light and silky.  Three out of five boys in any school in New York are darker than he.  Yet this white boy, with his mother, as he declares, has been twice sold as a slave.  First by his father and “owner”,  Alexander Wethers, of Lewis County, Virginia, to a slave trader named Harrison, who sold them to Mr.Thornhill of New Orleans.  This man fled at the approach of our army and his slaves were liberated by General Butler. The boy is decidedly intelligent, and though he has been at school less than a year, he reads and writes very well. …”

The letter goes on to describe the adults in the group—two of them chosen, evidently, because they had physical scars from their masters’ mistreatment.  Wilson Chinn, on the left, was branded on his forehead by Volsey B Marmillion, who branded all his 210 slaves, and Mary Johnson carried the scars of 50 cuts on her arms and back –given by her master because one morning she was “half an hour behind time in bringing up his five o’clock cup of coffee”.

The little girl on the left next to Charley was described  as AUGUSTA BROUJEY, nine years old. “Her mother, who is almost white, was owned by her half-brother, named Solamon, who still retains two of her children. ISAAC WHITE is a black boy of eight years; but none the less intelligent than his whiter companions. He has been in school about seven months, and I venture to say that not one boy in fifty would have made as much improvement in that space of time.”

The man on the far right is  “the Reverend Mr. Whitehead” who managed to earn enough as a house and ship painter to buy his freedom and is described thus: “The reverend gentleman can read and write well and is a very stirring speaker.  Just now he belongs to the church militant, having enlisted in the United States Army.”

The letter in Harper’s ends by telling where the small CDVs of the individuals can be bought for 25 cents each or the large photo of the whole group for one dollar.  This would have been a very good investment, for today the individual CDV’s can cost several hundred dollars or more, and the only copy of the large group photo that I have ever seen was in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

Three photographers took photos of the white slave children: Charles Paxson and M. H. Kimball  in New York, and J.E. McClees in Philadelphia (where they were kicked out of their hotel when the manager learned they were not “really” white.) The children were dressed in elegant clothing and posed with props—the American flag, an ornate mirror, books which they were studying—to appeal to the sentimentality of Victorian audiences.  (See my previous post.)  Kimball produced the most “shocking” photo (to Victorian eyes) of dark-skinned Isaac and white-skinned Rosa arm in arm .  (Augusta was in only 2 of the 22 photos on record and Isaac in three, but Rosa and Rebecca are pictured in most of them.) 

The most photographed and most popular of the “white slave children” was Rebecca, 11 years old, posed in ever more stylish outfits.  Prof. Mary Niall Mitchell (who is writing a book about white slave Mary Botts, mentioned in my previous post) suggests in an essay “Rosebloom and Pure White” in American Quarterly, Sept. 2002, that Rebecca fascinated the Victorians because she was closest to becoming an adult woman and the thought of her  sexual vulnerability —a white slave girl who could be bought and sold and raped—fascinated and horrified the Northerners.  Clearly the white children were the result of masters raping the slave women who were their property. Professor  Mitchell repeats the famous quip of southern diarist Mary Chestnut: “Every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.”

Professor Mitchell writes in the same essay: “In the images of Rosa and Rebecca, a notion about white little girls as pure and precious things may have been employed to redeem those viewers who had yet to rally around the antislavery cause and encourage them to act on the girls’ behalf.”

Finally, the Abolitionists photographing the “white slave children” were using the new and undeniably “scientific”  medium of photography to battle the beliefs of the leading scientist of the day—Louis Agassiz—famous Harvard natural scientist.  He claimed and tried very hard to prove “scientifically” that the Black race was an inferior and separate biological species.  According to Kathleen Collins in “Portraits of Slave Children” in “History of Photography”, July- September 1985,   “The anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould recently reconstructed Agassiz’ life and thought from his unexpurgated letters in the Harvard University Collection.  Gould concluded that behind Agassiz’ separate creation theories was an initial, visceral reaction to contact with blacks, which left him with an intense revulsion against the notion of miscegenation.”

Agassiz himself tried to use the science of photography to promote his theories that blacks were a different species from whites.  Long before the civil war, he toured Southern plantations and had the owners bring forth the most “African” looking slaves.  In 1850 Agassiz arranged for J. T. Zealy, a daguerrotypist in Columbia, South Carolina, to take photographs of African-born slaves from plantations Agassiz had visited. 

The slaves were stripped and photographed and these haunting daguerreotypes were sent to Agassiz at Harvard.  In 1976 they were found in a storage cabinet at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. (To see these dags and read a brilliant discussion of Agassiz’s racism and his use of the camera to debase his subjects, go to http://usslave.blogspot.com/2011/10/black-bodies-white-science-louis.html. ) Here are two of the captions:

The Zealy pictures reveal the social convention which ranks blacks as inferior beings, which violates civilized decorum, which strips men and women of the right to cover their genitalia. And yet the pictures shatter that mold by allowing the eyes of Delia and the others to speak directly to ours, in an appeal to a shared humanity.

Agassiz commissioned these images to use as scientific visual evidence to prove the physical difference between white Europeans and black Africans. The primary goal was to prove the racial superiority of the white race. The photographs were also meant to serve as evidence for his theory of “separate creation,” which contends that each race originated as a separate species.

So the Abolitionists who photographed the white (mulatto) children of New Orleans, arm in arm with a black slave child, and who emphasized at every turn the intelligence and good behavior of these children, were fighting fire with fire—using the new science of photography to refute visually the beliefs of the country’s most famous scientist and other racists who insisted that the two races should not and could not be mixed.