Ten years after Mary met Julian Vannerson, he would achieve lasting fame when he was called upon to make a photograph of Robert E. Lee on the day of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Of the many statues commissioned of Lee in the years to follow, the one most faithfully based on Vannerson’s portrait stands in Montgomery, Alabama, in front of a majority black high school named Robert E. Lee.
When he met Mary, Vannerson may have assumed that he was photographing a relative, as this was precisely the sort of photograph one would have made of a senator’s niece. He may have never looked at the photograph again. Though no statues exist to commemorate her, as yet, the portrait of the little girl that Vannerson made that day marked a turning point in the history of photography and persuasion.
After a long wait in the lobby with her family, the receptionist ushered Mary into the sunlit rooms. The men spoke comfortably and confidentially around her. It was a blessing that the day was bright enough for Julian Vannerson to set aside the brace that he used to keep his subjects still on cloudier days. His subjects were usually taller. When photographing children, to keep them still, he rested the right arm on a pedestal covered in itchy carpet. He set a notebook alongside Mary’s arm for scale, pushed back far enough beyond the depth of field for its title card to be illegible.
The photographer moved quickly, his black hair falling forward as he brought the box camera down to focus the brass squarely at Mary’s heart. He pulled the dark cloth over his head for focusing and reemerged with a satisfied look. He leaned down to check the focal length, his hands pressing into the lens tube to still a slight tremor from his decade of working with hot mercury. In the adjacent room, the plates had been buffed, iodized, and then preloaded in the yellow half-light of the darkroom. His assistant brought two wooden film loaders with two sensitized, silver-coated plates inside, and affixed them to the back of the camera box. The client, Senator Sumner, had asked to have two copies made.
Vannerson smiled at his subject as he set her shoulders, a secret grin softening his sharp goatee. Mary nodded very slightly, fastened her eyes on the lens, and held her breath. He removed the cap from the brass and pulled the metal sheet covering the plates. The moment of exposure lasted a length of time that Vannerson found by instinct rather than by pocket watch. He noted that her composure was perfect, if a little solemn for a seven-year-old. He replaced the cap, slid the sheet back into place, and walked the plates back to his darkroom. The daguerreotype would be ready within an hour.
1. THE DAGUERREOTYPE—A silver-plated sheet of copper is re-silvered by electro-plating, and perfectly polished. It is then exposed in a glass box to the vapor of iodine until its surface turns to a golden yellow. Then it is exposed in another box to the fumes of the bromide of lime until it becomes a blood-red tint. Then it is exposed once more, for a few seconds, to the vapor of iodine. The plate is now sensitive to light, and is of course kept from it, until, having been placed in the darkened camera, the screen is withdrawn and the camera-picture falls upon it. In strong light, and with the best instruments, three seconds’ exposure is enough,—but the time varies with circumstances. The plate is now withdrawn and exposed to the vapor of mercury at 212 degrees. Where the daylight was strongest, the sensitive coating of the plate has undergone such a chemical change, that the mercury penetrates readily to the silver, producing a minute white granular deposit upon it, like a very thin fall of snow, drifted by the wind. The strong lights are little heaps of these granules, the middle lights thinner sheets of them; the shades are formed by the dark silver itself thinly sprinkled only, as the earth shows with a few scattered snow-flakes on its surface. The precise chemical nature of these granules we care less for than their palpable presence, which may be perfectly made out by a microscope magnifying fifty diameters or even less.
The picture thus formed would soon fade under the action of light, in consequence of further changes in the chemical elements of the film of which it consists. Some of these elements are therefore removed by washing it with a solution of hyposulphite of soda, after which it is rinsed with pure water. It is now permanent in the light, but a touch wipes off the picture as it does the bloom from a plum. To fix it, a solution of hyposulphite of soda containing chloride of gold is poured on the plate while this is held over a spirit-lamp. It is then again rinsed with pure water, and is ready for its frame.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, June 18597
Witnesses to the first photographic era did not know what profound changes would come once representation mirrored the visual field with mechanical precision. That photography changed the way people write, think, observe, and argue has become a commonplace; it is easy to forget, however, the potency that these new images must have had on the fresh eyes of an antebellum audience. At the age of seventy-five, Ralph Waldo Emerson would name photography as one of the five miracles of his lifetime in a sermon that began, “It is not possible to extricate yourself from the questions in which your age is involved. Let the good citizen perform the duties put on him here and now.”8
Media theorist Vilém Flusser, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, argues that the invention of photography was an “apocalyptic event” as decisive in human history as the invention of writing, ushering in a revolution in human consciousness. Whole theories of mind have been ascribed to the advent of moving pictures and the cinema; to war photography, the mugshot, and the aerial photograph; to reproductions of art, art as photograph, and Photoshop; to the postcard, the rise of social media, and the selfie; to the birth of advertising, the supermodel body-image, and the paparazzi; to the ubiquity of the image, geo-tagging, and big data. This technology, which brought endless opportunities for new information and new modes of dissemination, inaugurated “a massive reorganization of knowledge and social practices” in the nineteenth century, according to theorist Jonathan Crary.9
The camera presupposes an observer and eyewitness: both the justice system and public opinion accept its testimony as persuasive proof. Photography offered abolitionists the crucial ability to witness the conditions of slavery. The activist and editor of the New York Independent during the Civil War, Theodore Tilton, wrote, “The camera has hardly begun its work as an anti-slavery agent. There are unexplored fields of abominations and cruelties which, if worked, might produce a public sentiment forever intolerant of human bondage.”
But like observation itself, photography was never neutral. Antislavery photographs exposed a problematic tension inherent in the perceived neutrality of photography. Tilton found that pictures “appeal to a sense whose potency over the convictions is well expressed in the proverb—‘seeing is believing.’ ” He felt that any viewer who could deny the injustice recorded in the photographs of “white slaves” that emerged during the Civil War, “may as well undertake to deny the existence of the sun which tells the story in black and white.” These photographs were visual arguments, which Tilton described as “resistless.”10
Sumner had two daguerreotypes made of Mary at Julian Vannerson’s studio in Washington, both expressly made to influence public sentiment. He directed his agents to distribute one of the images among the members of the Massachusetts state legislature “as an illustration of Slavery. Let a hard-hearted Hunker look at it and be softened.” Sumner believed that even his hard-hearted colleagues would not be able to resist this powerful weapon aimed at the intersection of identity and sympathy.
Antislavery and photography have overlapping histories; their growing influence, innovative technologies, and sway over the public mind advanced apace during the 1840s and 1850s. Looking back, in his 1860 annual message to Congress, President James Buchanan blamed abolitionist agitation for both disunion and the Republican ascendancy. “It cannot be denied,” he declaimed, “that for five and twenty years the agitation at the North against slavery has been incessant.” Buchanan’s culprit? The “pictorial handbills and inflammatory appeals” on the “never-ending subject” of abolition.11
Twenty-three years earlier, the 17
5 women gathered in New York City for the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women took up Southern abolitionist Sarah Grimké’s resolution to harness the power of printed images to their cause: “Resolved, We regard anti-slavery prints as powerful auxiliaries in the cause of emancipation, and recommend that these ‘pictorial representations’ be multiplied a hundred fold; so that the speechless agony of the fettered slave may unceasingly appeal to the heart of the patriotic, the philanthropic, and the Christian.”12
Three illustrations of suffering and appeal dominated American abolitionism in the years before photography. All three came from the eighteenth-century British abolition movement: the 1789 representation of the cross section of a slave ship, which objectifies black bodies into commodities; the 1790s image of a undressed woman being whipped in the West Indies, which uses violence and sex in its appeal; and especially, the 1787 image of a chained, kneeling enslaved man, captioned “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” This last icon of a strong black man pleading for aid from an implied white captor or savior first circulated as a fashionable cameo worn by the well-heeled supporters of the sugar boycotts. A female version of the supplicant slave appeared under the tagline “Am I not a Woman and a Sister?” in the May 1830 issue of the antislavery periodical Genius of Universal Emancipation. In 1832 William Lloyd Garrison adopted the icon with its motto as a running head for the “Ladies Department” of the Liberator. John A. Andrew kept a carved glass medallion of the slogan.
The daguerreotype of Mary, when considered against these predecessors, seems understated by comparison. Even so, it subtly recalls these prior antislavery illustrations. In her daguerreotype she is a supplicant, for though her hands are not chained or clasped in prayer, her plea is for white funds and votes. Though the image does not show a young woman stripped and whipped, it nevertheless offers proof of the violence and sexual exploitation in the slave system. And the image would be traded as a commodity, as Mary herself had once been, to raise funds.
The absence of visible racial cues and props in Mary’s daguerreotype could be read as purposeful; it was intended to disarm audiences. The recognition that this is not a portrait of a middle-class white child but a political image of a former slave unsettles the viewer’s certitude and familiarity at first sight of Mary’s photograph. White viewers assumed this solemn little girl was white, which attracted their selective sympathy for her. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called this habit of mind “totalization,” or the act of reducing our expectations for others—people with whom we have come into contact but do not know—according to racial, social, gender, and other categories. This photograph temporarily turned these assumptions on their head, by catching viewers off guard.
Early photographs, printed as they were on metal, have handily survived the century and a half that separates them from us. These photographs were not made for us, but we are still subject to their power, because we still read this portrait in the same reductive way. Infallibly, Mary’s daguerreotype elicits the same surprise upon learning that this child was born a slave. Nineteenth-century racial codes and categories are still legible and still in play in America.
Photography offers a longer and more perfect transcript of the visual world than our human memories can hold. The photographic record of history can be manipulated, falsified, and omitted, but it cannot be unseen. We now expect to see an image of everything of consequence around the world, the moment after it happens. The camera, which mimicked and then surpassed the human eye in accuracy and impartiality, has taught us how to see, how to remember, and what to forget.
Today, most daguerreotypes are artifacts from a distant past, and we use photography to write history. But, in the 1850s, any photograph would have shown an image of the present time, since the technology had existed for only a dozen or so years. In 1855 a photograph indicted the viewer’s present, made of a modern, contemporary world. This present-ness of photography once inspired a counter argument against gradualism, or the progressive appeal to “wait out” slavery, or to scale it down over several, educationally enriched generations. The photograph is radically immediate; it best suited William Lloyd Garrison’s call for immediate emancipation.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes wrote that one could describe photography with three verbs: “to do, to undergo, to look.” A portrait has three available stances—the photographer, the subject, and/or the audience—and three available actions—to take a photograph, to pose for one, and to view one. The lives of the photographer, Vannerson, and his subject, Mary, converged for this one afternoon. What of the third group, the audience, whose job it was “to look”?
The day after the Fourth of July 1857, Charlotte Forten Grimké, a member of Salem’s black abolitionist community (and sister-in-law of Angelina and Sarah Grimké), had a portrait made at Broadbent’s daguerreotype studio in Philadelphia. While she was there, a friend, “Miss J,” showed her a daguerreotype of a fugitive girl. That evening this antislavery woman wrote in her journal about viewing an image of a “heroic girl.”
At last, at last after hiding for a whole week the sun deigns to show us his face again. Right glad are we to see him. This is truly a perfect day. Mr. C[hew] came, and insisted upon taking me to Broadbent’s where I had an excellent likeness taken. Miss J was there, and showed me a daguerreotype of a young slave girl who escaped in a box. . . .
My heart was full as I gazed at it; full of admiration for the heroic girl, who risked all for freedom; full of bitter 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!
—Charlotte L. Forten Grimké, July 5, 185713
Grimké felt sympathy and admiration for the young woman in the daguerreotype, as well as indignation for “these Americans,” with whom she did not identify either herself or the fugitive girl in the daguerreotype. She gave no indication in the journal of what the girl looked like—for her, she was a symbol of resistance. Grimké wrote of softened hearts in language that is strikingly similar to Charles Sumner’s February 19 letter to Dr. Stone (page 103), but her exclamation, “How long, Oh! How long will this continue!” did not mean the same thing as Sumner’s question, “Should such things be allowed to continue . . . ?”
In January 1855, D. M. Barringer, a diplomat and a lawyer in North Carolina, wished to set his enslaved man Jerry Bethel free. In Barringer’s opinion, Jerry Bethel was “one of the best colored men living.” Bethel had had ample opportunity to escape, his master reported, while in New York and Europe, but Bethel desired to return to North Carolina to be “set free legally in his own State.” Only the North Carolina legislature could manumit him.
To that end, Barringer “handed around” a daguerreotype of Jerry Bethel to the state assemblymen so that they might get to know him.14 Assemblyman Zebulon B. Vance so admired the daguerreotype that he called himself “a friend of Jerry’s” and recommended that the daguerreotype be sent to the state senate “with a proposition to print!” Surely, he assumed, North Carolinans who saw Jerry’s portrait would make a positive assessment of his character and consider him deserving of freedom. What did being deserving of freedom look like? Jerry Bethel’s daguerreotype is lost to us today, but even if we could see it, it would not answer this question.
Some members of the assembly argued against emancipating Bethel, as it would establish a precedent. Assemblyman Jordan denounced the “nuisance” of freed persons in the state, “who were not made happy by their emancipation; but were, in his opinion, more miserable than slaves.” He would vote for emancipation only with “a provision to send them out of the country altogether.” But Jordan and his allies did not carry the day. On January 8, 1855, the North Carolina legislature manumitted Jerry Bethel at his owner’s request, 94 to 17. The daguerreot
ype had done its work.
10
Richard Hildreth
Boston, March 1855
When Mary’s daguerreotype arrived in Boston on February 23, Andrew showed it to Henry Williams during his daily visit to Andrew’s law offices. “Her father was very pleased at the sight of the likeness. He is very anxious to have them here—Very indeed.”1 But Andrew did not give Mary’s daguerreotype to Williams, because it had work to do first.
Dr. James Stone placed his copy of the daguerreotype on view at the Boston State House, located in the heart of Beacon Hill across from Boston Common. That way, those whose interest was roused by hearing Mary’s story could seek out her image.
Stone took Sumner’s February 19 letter to Richard Hildreth, editor of the Boston Telegraph and author of his own sentimental antislavery novel, The White Slave. No one had written more faithfully in support of Ida May than Hildreth. He recognized the connection that Sumner made between the heroine of that novel and the little girl in the daguerreotype, as he wrote in the paper:
ANOTHER IDA MAY.—Our readers will remember that several weeks since, some account was given of a family of white slaves in Virginia, in whom Mr. Sumner had taken much interest. Four of the six members of the family have been freed at a cost of eight hundred dollars, raised principally by John A. Andrew, Esq., of this city. This seems to be a much more judicious expenditure of money than the payment of nearly double that amount for the freedom of Anthony Burns, thereby serving the double purpose of parading the names of certain well known Fugitive Slave bill officials as subscribers to the Burns fund, and at the same time acting as a premium to slave catchers to visit our State to seize alleged fugitives for purposes of speculation.
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