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13. Charlotte L. Forten Grimké, entry for July 5, 1857, The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stephenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 235.
14. “An Act to Emancipate Jerry, a slave,” ratified in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, January 8, 1855, Public and Private Laws of North Carolina 1854–55, chap. 109, pp. 89–90. Reported in the National Era, January 18, 1855.
10. Richard Hildreth, Boston, March 1855
1. John A. Andrew to Charles Sumner, February 23, 1855, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
2. Richard Hildreth, “Another Ida May,” Boston Telegraph, February 27, 1855.
3. Hildreth’s article about Sumner’s February 19 letter was reprinted in the Albany Evening Journal on February 28, the New-York Daily Times on March 1, the Washington Sentinel on March 2, Frederick Douglass’s Paper in Rochester on March 9, the National Anti-slavery Standard in New York on March 17, the Anti-Slavery Bugle in New Lisbon, Ohio, on March 24, the Liberator on March 30, 1855, and doubtless elsewhere.
4. Andrew to Sumner, February 23, 1855.
5. The images of Mary were what literary historian Robin Bernstein has called “scriptive things”—objects that compel their owners to perform a certain repertoire of actions. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011).
6. A. L. Russell to Charles Sumner, March 13, 1855, Charles Sumner Papers, also quoted in Mitchell, “The Real Ida May: A Fugitive Tale in the Archives,” Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013): 73.
7. Henry E. Alvord to Charles Sumner, July 9, 1861, Houghton Library, Harvard University. In this letter Henry Alvord, enrolled at Norwich University, requests Sumner’s endorsement for West Point. He tells Sumner he has been following a motto Sumner had given to his older cousin, when Sumner visited the Alvord home in Greenfield in 1851: “Study! Study!! Study!!! And don’t marry till you’re thirty!”
8. “Ash Grove,” Fairfax Herald, October 4, 1907.
9. Henry married Martha Scott Swink when he was twenty-two.
10. Harvard women’s historian Nancy Cott attended my talk about Mary at Wellesley College. She later sent me a link to Joan Gage’s website, where I found her article about the copy daguerreotype of Mary. Joan Gage, “A White Slave Girl ‘Mulatto Raised by Charles Sumner,’ ” Rolling Crone, March 12, 2011, http://arollingcrone.blogspot.com/2011/03/white-slave-girl-mulatto-raised-by.html. Gage’s article was also published in Daguerreian Annual (2011). In May 2013, I met with Joan Gage to view the daguerreotype. I was in residence at the American Antiquarian Society, near her home in North Grafton. Our meeting was heightened by coincidence, for this was the second time photography had brought Joan and me together. Joan, her husband Nicolas Gage, and her daughter Eleni Gage are all writers, and in 2008 my photography team Morgan & Owens shared a byline with Eleni Gage in the magazine Travel + Leisure. We photographed a story Eleni was writing about her father’s home in Epiros, Greece. We met Eleni for lunch at the Aristo Mountain Lodge, perched high above the Vikos Gorge. Over tapenade and toast, we hammered out a plan for capturing the remaining items on the shoot list. Her mother, Joan, came along for that trip. Five years later, at the Armsby Abbey in Worcester, Joan pulled her copy of Mary’s daguerreotype from her bag and handed it to me. I treasured the opportunity to hold her daguerreotype in my hands, in a tavern lit by the street-side window, rather than in the bright, silent archive.
11. American Broadsides and Ephemera collection, American Antiquarian Society, digitized by Readex. Andrew had to write to Sumner for a description of Oscar. He had not yet met Elizabeth or the children when he composed this clear recitation of their story. I first downloaded this broadsheet on Thanksgiving break 2007. I also had not yet seen their photograph, and I didn’t know what Mary and Oscar looked like either. It would be four months before I saw Mary and six months before I traveled to Greece and met the Gages. I wrote in my notebook in November 2007, “I have not been able to find anything about this missing photograph. I don’t know why I continue to assume it’s out there.”
12. Sally Pierce et al., Whipple and Black: Commercial Photographers in Boston (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1987), p. 19.
13. “Affairs in and Outside the City,” Daily Atlas (Boston), March 5, 1855. Notice that Ludwell is here referred to as a “little boy,” whereas in the broadsheet he is seventeen or eighteen years old. Born in 1833, Ludwell was twenty-two in 1855.
14. William Cooper Nell to Amy Kirby Post, April 24, 1853, in William Cooper Nell, Selected Writings 1832–1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002).
15. American Anti-slavery Cash Book for 1852–1863, in Sydney Howard Gay Papers, New York Public Library.
16. Oliver Wendell Holmes quoted in Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889 (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 143. Taft reports that around 1860, “the introduction of the card photograph and the album effected a revolution in the photographic business; any tendency toward a revival of daguerreotypes was completely obliterated by the new fashion.”
17. See, for example, Sojourner Truth’s cartes de visite from 1864 held by the Library of Congress.
18. Douglass delivered “Lecture on Pictures” at Boston’s Tremont Temple on December 3, 1861. It was published as “Pictures and Progress: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 3 December 1861,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 3, 1855–1863, ed. John Blassingame (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 452–73.
19. On May 22, 2013, while in residence in the archives at the American Antiquarian Society, I called up the nineteenth-century editions of Hildreth’s books from the stacks. I had already read all the extant copies of his newspaper, the Boston Telegraph. Archivist Ashley Cataldo set the small books on the velvet, along with a pair of foam risers for support. I opened the first copy, and tucked in the front cover, where the frontispiece should be, was the crystalotype of Mary. I had no expectation of finding her photograph. To the other researchers’ surprise, I stood up and knocked my wooden chair back with a dull thud onto the carpet. The catalog made no reference to images; no one knew it was there. Until now, I had assumed no crystalotypes of Mary survived. I alerted Lauren Hewes, the curator of graphic arts, to the discovery. She confirmed that the archive has more than five thousand paper and card photographs in its care, and now here was its first crystalotype.
20. “Pictures of Ida May,” Worcester Spy, March 29, 1855.
21. Richard Hildreth, The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive (Boston: Tappan & Whittemore, 1852), p. 19.
11. Charles Sumner, Washington, March 1855
1. “Eventually the Senator was requested to purchase the uncles and aunts of the Botts children and draw on Boston for the amount needed, whatever it might be. This he did after much negotiation, it being known in each case, however, that his object in buying these people was to give them their freedom and send them North. While these negotiations were pending, Mr. Sumner tried to keep the matter as quiet as possible in Washington, for obvious reasons; but it got into the papers, and excited some comment.” Arnold Burges Johnson, “Charles Sumner.—III,” Cosmopolitan 4 (1888), p. 147.
2. Washington Reporter (Pennsylvania), March 14, 1855.
3. Sumner to James M. Stone, editor of the Boston Commonwealth, December 23, 1853, in Sumner, Selected Letters, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), pp. 1:397–98.
4. Beverley Tucker, “Senator Sumner—Young Negroes and Daguerreotypes!” Washington Sentinel, March 2, 1855.
5. The lithograph is unsigned. The Library of Congress uses two contemporary pieces of similar draftsmanship to name Dominique C. Fabronius as its likely illustrator. The printer was George W. Cottrell of Boston.
6. Hugh McCulloch,
Men and Measures of Half a Century: Sketches and Comments (New York: Scribner’s, 1889).
7. Sumner to William Bates and James W. Stone, August 12, 1850, in Sumner, Selected Letters, 1:308.
8. Sumner to John Greenleaf Whittier, May 4, 1851, in Sumner, Selected Letters, 1:333.
9. Sumner to Howe, April 5, 1852, in Sumner, Selected Letters 1:356.
10. Sumner to George Sumner, June 17 and 24, 1851, in Sumner, Selected Letters, 1:336, note 3. He refers to the Liberator of May 23, 1851.
11. “Important Debate in the Senate, Washington February 23, 1855,” reprinted in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, March 3, 1855.
12. The transcript of the debate can be found in Congressional Globe, 33rd Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 211–46.
13. Unsigned letter dated February 26, Boston Telegraph, February 28, 1855.
14. As reported in the Antislavery Standard, February 1855.
15. As reported in the Massachusetts Spy, March 7, 1855.
16. Steven Taylor, “Progressive Nativism: The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 28, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 167–84.
17. As reported in the Massachusetts Spy, March 14, 1855.
18. Congressional Globe, p. 246. Also reported in Worcester Spy, March 21, 1855.
19. Sumner to Chase, March 2, 1855, note passed in the Senate Chamber, Boston Public Library.
20. “F.W.B.,” Massachusetts Spy, March 7, 1855.
21. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, journal entry for April 29, 1858, in Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence, ed. Samuel Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), p. 355.
22. Walter Stahr, Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013); and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).
23. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: Jewett, 1852), chap. 9.
24. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 97.
25. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 87–99. For context on the illustrations, see Jo-Ann Morgan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2009).
12. “A White Slave from Virginia,” New York, March 1855
1. P. T. Barnum to editor of New York Tribune, May 4, 1855, Lost Museum Archive, https://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/letters-about-the-baby-shows-to-the-new-york.
2. Barnum to Tribune, May 4, 1855.
3. “A White Slave from Virginia,” New-York Daily Times, March 9, 1855, reprinted in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, March 16, 1855.
4. “A Good Repartee,” Connecticut Courant, February 3, 1855.
5. Announcements for Purdy’s National Theater, New York Times, August 28 and 30, 1856, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive, University of Virginia.
6. Edward J. Stearns, Notes on Uncle Tom’s Cabin . . . (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1853), p. 145.
7. Beverley Tucker, “Senator Sumner, ‘Ida May,’ and the Solid Men of Boston,” Washington Sentinel, March 14, 1855.
8. “Encouraging,” New-York Daily Times, March 16, 1855.
13. The Williams Family, Boston, March 7, 1855
1. George Foster, Splendor Sailed the Sound: The New Haven Railroad and the Fall River Line (San Mateo, Calif.: Potentials Group, 1989), p. 9.
2. “The Late Storm and Its Effects,” Boston Courier, March 15, 1855.
3. “A Family United,” Boston Recorder, March 15, 1855.
4. “Arrival of Senator Sumner’s Protégés,” Boston Courier, March 12, 1855.
5. This letter gives the impression that Prue and Evelina did not travel with Elizabeth and children but came to Boston separately. John Andrew to Charles Sumner, March 10, 1855, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
6. James A. Cutting, Improvements in the Preparation of Collodion for Photographic Pictures, U.S. Patent 11213, July 4, 1854; U.S. Patent 11266, July 11, 1854; U.S. Patent 11267, July 11, 1854.
7. “Boston Correspondence,” St. Albans Messenger, March 22, 1855.
8. Boston Evening Transcript, May 4, 1855.
9. In the summer of 2014, Melissa Howell, the great-great-great-grandaughter of Solomon Northup, reached out to me to determine if a photograph of Mary Williams and Solomon Northup had been found. So far there are no extant photographs of Northup. In November 2014, with a group of students, I joined her family in Marksville, Louisiana, on their first visit to Louisiana, to celebrate the opening of the Solomon Northup Trail and experience firsthand sites Northup described in such detail in Twelve Years a Slave. The organizers attempted to bring together descendants from both sides for reconciliation, but the Epps family did not attend. As teenagers, Melissa Howell and her cousins learned that they were descendants of a famous and formerly enslaved person; two generations of the descendants of Solomon’s son, Alonzo Northup, had lived apart from the larger family, as white people.
10. William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (London: William Tweedie, 1860), pp. 1–3.
11. William Lloyd Garrison, “Today,” Liberator, January 1, 1831.
12. My use of the name Mary Mildred Williams goes against the scant scholarship extant about Mary Mildred Botts, including my own prior article and papers, but I hope this book will correct the record.
13. William Knight to Charles Sumner, February 28, 1855, John A. Andrew Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
14. Douglass, My Bondage, chap. 6.
14. “Features, Skin, and Hair,” Boston, March 1855
1. John A. Andrew to Charles Sumner, February 16, 1855, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
2. The bill to remove Loring passed the state legislature, though Governor Henry Gardner would block his removal. It would take two further bills and the election of a Republican governor before Loring lost his judgeship.
3. “Redeemed Slaves in the House,” Worchester Daily Spy, March 12, 1855. The last two sentences in the article mark the only place in the archives where a journalist has recorded Mary’s response to her experience. I was so intrigued by this lone indication that Mary was an observing subject that I took an afternoon off to visit the Boston State House, to see the codfish for myself. I found it much smaller than expected. It is made of gold.
4. Notice in Boston Courier, reprinted in Portland Advertiser, March 20, 1855.
5. “Boston Correspondence,” St. Albans Messenger, March 22, 1855.
6. W. C. Nell, “From our Boston Correspondent,” Frederick Douglass’s Paper, March 16, 1855.
7. William Cooper Nell to Amy Kirby Post, March 11, 1855, in William Cooper Nell, Selected Writings 1832-1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002), entry #303.
8. Cindy Weinstein notices that this framing of Mary and Solomon “brings together the story of a real black adult male and a fictional white young girl, but also links the protagonist of a slave narrative and the heroine of a sentimental novel.” Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 95–125.
9. Boston Telegraph, February 27, 1855, emphasis added.
10. “Local and Other Items,” Portland Advertiser, March 20, 1855, emphasis added.
11. Mary Hayden Green Pike, Ida May, ed. Jessie Morgan-Owens (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2017), p. 93, emphasis added.
12. Carol Wilson, The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
13. Boston Atlas, quoted in Liberator, December 1854, emphasis added.
14. Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana
(1859), in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin Classics, 1997), p. 467, emphasis added.
15. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Worcester, Massachusetts, March 27, 1855
1. Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973). For tenets of pacifism across abolitionism, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017).
2. Worcester Spy, March 31, 1855.
3. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), p. 131.
4. Hannah Marsh Inman, diary entry for March 23, 1955, Manuscript Collection, Worcester Historical Museum. Transcription by Holly V. Izard for the Worcester Women’s History Project.
5. “The White Slave,” Worcester Spy, March 29, 1855.
6. In 1856 in Brooklyn, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher staged mock auctions of white enslaved women and girls for his congregation at Plymouth Church. These hysterical events theatrically raised funds to emancipate and support these young women and their families. He continued this practice until the end of the Civil War.
7. Higginson’s copy is in the archive of his correspondence at Houghton Library at Harvard.
8. This daguerreotype of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, laughing as Mary sat upon his knee, has not yet turned up in the archives.
9. In 1855, at forty-seven, Longfellow had retired from teaching at Harvard, thanks to his royalties. Years earlier, at Sumner’s request, Longfellow wrote seven poems for the Anti-Slavery tract society to distribute. He composed his Poems on Slavery at sea, on a stormy return voyage from Europe in 1842. Jill Lepore says of these poems: “Longfellow had no appetite for combat and no interest in attacking slaveholders (that was for Sumner to do); instead, he wrote, mournful—modern readers would say mawkishly—about the plight of slaves.” Lepore, “Longfellow’s Ride,” The Story of America: Essays on Origins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 226. One poem, “The Quadroon Girl,” dwells on betrayal at a Louisiana plantation, when a father sells his enslaved daughter into the sex trade.