The daguerreotype mentioned in the following letter is a portrait of one of the family referred to, a most beautiful white girl, with high forehead, straight hair, intellectual appearance, and decidedly attractive features. It may be seen for a few days at the State House, in the hands of the Clerk of the House of Representatives.
—Boston Telegraph, February 27, 18552
This article and Sumner’s letter of February 19 (page 103) were reprinted in dozens of newspapers up and down the East Coast.3 After the story broke in Boston, Andrew wrote to Sumner that “people are constantly asking for [Mary’s daguerreotype]. I must have some copies made of it when I can.” He thanked Sumner for “the picture of little Mary,” but “I wish I had a group of the three—from which to multiply copies to distribute.”4 He did not understand why Sumner had sent only the daguerreotype of the middle child, Mary, when subscribers had raised the funds to free all three. Andrew had never met nor seen the family. He still saw a child where Sumner saw an icon.
Andrew crossed Boston Common to visit the copyist Taber & Co., located at Winter and Washington streets (at what is now the Macy’s department store across from Downtown Crossing). Mary’s daguerreotype was copied an unknown number of times at the cost of twenty-five cents each, into smaller ninth-plate daguerreotypes. An advertisement for Taber & Co., affixed to the back of the plate, claims “600 Daily, Beware of Imitators,” which suggests a hot trade in the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of a photocopy.
Daguerreotypes were unique, but they could be rephotographed. The result was a reversed image, with some quality loss in the detail and shadow, but the subject, in this case Mary, was still clearly visible. Andrew gifted copies to influential Bostonians, subscribers to their fugitives’ fund, and Massachusetts legislators, so that they could personally connect to Mary’s story by holding her image in their hands. Some of these recipients penciled small notes—for example, “Mulatto raised by Charles Sumner”—and affixed them to the brocade daguerreotype case, so that future viewers would know who the child was. The prevailing idea was that her portrait, with such captions, comprised a self-evident argument about slavery and race, wrapped in a convenient brocade case; all that was needed was a sympathetic viewer. Objects such as Mary’s portrait were assumed to evoke a script—a proper response—that could lead to antislavery conversation and conversion, doing reform work “more effectively than any speech I could make,” as Sumner said.5
Mary Mildred Williams, copy daguerreotype, produced by Taber & Co., 1855.
Upon receiving a copy of the daguerreotype, one correspondent, A. L. Russell, wrote Sumner, “I know that good Anti-Slavery cause is gaining daily and this beautiful girl I know will be the means, under Providence, of great good to the cause of freedom.”6
One of the copy daguerreotypes made at Taber & Co. ended up in the home of Massachusetts state senator Daniel Wells Alvord, in the northwestern mill town of Greenfield. Alvord was an acquaintance of Senator Sumner, with a daughter the same age as Mary.
Senator Alvord had brought it home so he could tell his children Caroline and Henry the story of “Little Ida May.” Alvord was bringing them up alone, as their mother had died in childbirth. (He would not remarry until they were in their teens and had developed a habit of independence.)
The Alvords were a family dedicated to public service and the antislavery movement. After the Civil War began, Henry Elijah Alvord, who had called upon his father’s connection with Senator Sumner in an unsuccessful attempt to land a cadetship at West Point, enlisted in the Second Massachusetts Cavalry and served with honors.7 After the war, at twenty-one, he and his nineteen-year-old sister Caroline both moved to Fairfax County, Virginia, to work with the Freedmen’s Bureau. They set off “with a noble goal” of educating the newly emancipated. On the journey south, Caroline brought Mary’s daguerreotype along with her in her trunk.
Caroline taught in a Freedmen’s school and boarded at the nearby Ash Grove plantation (in what is now Tysons Corner, a suburb of Washington, D.C.). The house had been built in 1740 by Lord Fairfax, owner of the vast surrounding estate, as a hunting lodge for his son. Though the estate was reduced after the Revolutionary War, the house remained in the possession of the Fairfax family. In the 1840s it was owned by the last Lord Fairfax, Henry, whose wife ran a boarding school there for young Washington women. Henry Fairfax was said to refuse to own slaves and to free any people who came into his possession.8
Henry Fairfax died in the Mexican War in 1847: three years later his survivors sold Ash Grove to two young men from New York City, James Sherman and Isaac Besley, who also would never own or hire slaves. They created, in effect, a small antislavery enclave in rural Virginia. During the Civil War, James’s son, Franklin Sherman, served with the Tenth Michigan Cavalry in the Union Army. At one time he escaped a prisoner of war camp in his native Virginia. After his service, he returned to Ash Grove, where his parents had taken in that boarder from Massachusetts, Caroline Alvord.
Franklin and Caroline married, and using Caroline’s grandfather’s inheritance, they purchased the entire estate from Franklin’s brothers and sisters. They raised eleven children there, including six daughters, none of whom married: all became career women (including the first female librarian at a university in North Carolina); their sons became researchers and professors and did marry. Caroline’s brother Henry also married a Fairfax County local, Martha, from a nearby estate, Spring Hill, and together they explored the West.9
Caroline’s copy of Mary’s daguerreotype would stay in Tysons Corner at Ash Grove for 132 years. Tysons Corner is about thirty miles from Dumfries, where Prue was enslaved, and about thirty miles from Brentsville, where the image’s subject, Mary, was likely born.
Caroline’s copy of Mary’s daguerreotype surfaced in July 1997 at Headley’s auction in Winchester, Virginia, where a woman in Tennessee bought it. In 2000 it was offered for sale on eBay, where it was purchased by Joan Gage, a private collector in North Grafton, Massachusetts.10 North Grafton is sixty-five miles from Greenfield—the copy daguerreotype had almost come full circle.
To publicize Mary’s story in Boston, John Andrew composed a broadsheet, “History of Ida May,” which was offered for sale in portrait galleries, bookstores, and stationery shops. An editor who went by the initials S.P.H. wrote an introduction, saying that John Andrew had modestly asked to keep his own role of benefactor anonymous. For authenticity, the stationers pressed an embossed stamp into the broadsheet, which suggests that they assumed pirated copies might be made, such was Mary’s popularity. Andrew writes that he hopes to secure the $300 needed to purchase Ludwell’s freedom from the sales of “Little Ida May’s” picture.
This sum, it is hoped, will be raised by the profits on the sale of little Ida May’s picture, whose youth, beauty and innocence, rescued from all the horrible contingencies of the bond-woman’s lot, have touched many hearts and moistened many eyes.
I ought to add that much the larger part of all the money raised, has been obtained by the personal exertions of Seth himself; and this is only a just recognition of his constancy and zeal for his household, and of the good impression he has been enabled to make on the many gentlemen to whom he has become known in Boston.
J. A. Andrew BOSTON, March 3, 1855.11
The broadsheet, printed at J. S. Potter & Co., a printer sympathetic to the slave’s cause, was wrapped around a crystalotype copy of Mary’s daguerreotype made by Whipple & Black. The paper-photograph technology of the crystalotype was patented in Boston in 1850, made available to the public in late 1852, and exhibited to acclaim in 1853. The inventor, John Adams Whipple, had been working since 1844 to overcome the daguerreotype’s irreproducible quality, and he was the first to produce glass negatives in the United States. His crystalotype patent called for the image to be directed through the lens to a glass plate coated with albumen (egg whites) and honey taken directly from the comb (so as not to be clouded). This recipe binds light-sensitive chemicals to a “crysta
l-clear” glass plate. As the photographs were captured on transparent glass, rather than mirrored silver-plated copper, they could be used as negatives. As negatives, one exposure could be reproduced, and sold countless times.
“History of Ida May,” broadsheet by John Andrew, printed at J. S. Potter & Co., March 1855. This broadsheet was accompanied by the crystalotype picture of Mary Mildred Williams.
Whipple, with his partner James Wallace Black, kept a studio in busy Washington Street, at number 96, the heart of commerce in Boston.12 Their rooms were on the top floor, with a shop at street level selling copies of their portraits. Upstairs, dozens of contact prints could be seen exposing under the natural light from skylights overhead. Charles Henry Brainard used Whipple to supply some of the portraits in his collection of Grozlier’s lithographs: the former senator from Massachusetts, Daniel Webster, and the current one, Henry Wilson, both sat for Whipple & Black, as did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. For a hundred dollars, Whipple & Black offered training in the glass negative process. They taught Oliver Wendell Holmes to make photographs. They photographed the moon.
Whipple has for sale crystalotype copies of the likeness of the white slave girl, belonging to the family lately freed though the instrumentality of Hon. Charles Sumner. The proceeds of the sale will be appropriated to the purchase of a little boy, the youngest member of the family, now in bondage. The whole family will accompany Mr. Sumner to Boston this week.
—Daily Atlas, March 5, 185513
The accepted history is that reform movements began using photography strategically in the 1880s, with the advent of social documentary, when the halftone process made reproduction in newsprint possible. But abolitionists, who already recognized the power of the image as a social document and had distribution networks in place, took to photography far earlier.
For example, in April 1853, the black activist and entrepreneur William Cooper Nell set out to engage in a new “business operation,” of “getting out some anti slavery portraits” on paper.
I have already intimated a business operation in which I am engaged = getting out some anti slavery portraits = transferred from the Daguerreotype to the new invented Christallotype [sic] = Should I secure money enough to successfully start it = good sales and profits are absolutely certain = This if my health recruits will send me to several places. This matter was embarked before the Fair but has from unavoidable causes fragged its length slowly along to the present you know having an accurate likeness of Mr. Garrison as He is = is much desired by the friends = and I hope to succeed in my effort. = You see = I have not yet abandoned—All Hope -
—William Cooper Nell, April 24, 185314
William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-slavery Society agreed to copy portraits suitable for mailing—investing $16.50 from their publications budget in 1856 to “William C. Nell, for portraits”—for use in propaganda and for profit.15 Selling portraits of celebrities was good business and good fundraising. Families collected, alongside personal portraits, albums of the “visiting cards,” or cartes de visite, of public figures. Images printed on paper and card can be distributed as printed matter, mailed, traded, propped up on mantelpieces, tucked into albums, or used as bookmarks. Oliver Wendell Holmes called cartes de visite “a social currency, the sentimental greenbacks of society.”16 Sojourner Truth’s cartes de visite were priced at one dollar, which she printed with the slogan, “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”17
Frederick Douglass realized that the “great cheapness and universality of pictures” exerted a “powerful though silent influence” on the minds of this, and likely future, generations. “This picture-making faculty,” he noted, “is flung out into the world—like all others—subject to a wild scramble between contending interests and forces. It is a mighty power—and the side to which it goes has achieved a wondrous conquest.”18
In the archives at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, in a copy of Richard Hildreth’s The White Slave, tucked in the front cover where the frontispiece should be, was a crystalotype of Mary. I found it by accident, while reading the works of Hildreth in pursuit of an understanding of how antislavery fiction perpetuated selective sympathy. The previous reader of the novel, in this second edition printed in Boston in 1852, associated the white enslaved hero of Hildreth’s story, Archy Moore, with Mary. For over one hundred years, this paper photograph was hidden from both ruin and preservationists alike, in this fictional narrative of “white slavery.”19
According to an advertisement in the local paper, the “beautiful crystalotype picture of the little white slave girl—Ida May” had been available for sale at Spauldings, a bookshop in Worcester, so that seemed the likely provenance for this copy of the book and the photograph.20 The reader had penciled a caption on the crystalotype, written across the back of the card: “White Slave liberated by Charles Sumner.” A single page of the novel, nineteen, was dog-eared, where the hero explains what it was like to be a “white slave.” Although these lines offer only a facsimile of a slave’s interiority, as imagined by Richard Hildreth, a white abolitionist, they suggest that a fascination with white slavery occupied a reader, one who thought Mary’s picture could serve as illustration for his or her imaginings.
My mind seemed to be filled with indefinite anxieties, of which I could divine neither the causes nor the cure. There was, as it were, a heavy weight upon my bosom, an unsatisfied craving for something, I knew not what, a longing which I could do nothing to satisfy, because I could not tell its object. I would be often lost in thought, but my mind did not seem to fix itself to any certain aim, and after hours of apparently the deepest meditation, I should have been very much at a loss to tell about what I had been thinking.
But sometimes my reflections would take a more definite shape. I would begin to consider what I was and what I had to anticipate. The son of a freeman, yet born a slave! Endowed by nature with abilities, which I should never be permitted to exercise; possessed of knowledge, which already, I found it expedient to conceal! The slave of my own father, the servant of my own brother, a bounded, limited, confined, and captive creature, who did not dare to go out of sight of his master’s house without a written permission to do so! Destined to be the sport, of I knew not whose caprices; forbidden in anything to act for myself, or to consult my own happiness; compelled to labor all my life at another’s bidding; and liable every hour and instant, to oppressions the most outrageous, and degradations the most humiliating!
—Richard Hildreth, The White Slave (1852)21
Fiction and photograph converge to give a story to one and the sheen of truth to the other. How many copies of Mary’s image found their way into strangers’ hands? Who gazed upon her face, in admiration or disbelief?
11
Charles Sumner
Washington, March 1855
In Washington, Senator Charles Sumner tried to keep his dealings with fugitives quiet, both for his protection and for theirs, but it did not take long for the press to catch on that he was negotiating in slaves.1 Apparently when he was not arguing at the Capitol against slavery, Sumner was using his H Street address to liberate Washington-area slaves, one family at a time.
PURCHASE OF SLAVES.
Senator Sumner, of Mass., sometimes since purchased three slaves in Virginia, and brought them to Washington with the view of sending them North, where they would of course be free. Recently, he purchased two boys, and is said to be negotiating for others, one of whom owned in Alexandria, and worth about $1000. Several citizens of Boston, it is said, have directed Mr. S. to draw on them of the necessary funds. They are all the relatives of a colored man named John [sic] Botts, who ran away from his master several years ago, went to Boston, and subsequently purchased his own freedom.
—Washington Reporter (Pennsylvania), March 14, 18552
The editor of the pro-slavery newspaper Washington Sentinel relished the news that Sumner, a forty-four-year-old bachelor and “the pride of Massa
chusetts,” had taken an interest in three young slaves and their mother. The Sentinel was committed to advancing states rights and Southern interests by ridiculing contrary positions, so its sardonic editor Beverley Tucker saw his opportunity to roast Sumner, and he did so in his next issue.
Tucker’s animosity toward Sumner went beyond politics. In 1853, in the Sentinel’s early days of circulation, Tucker had put in a bid to become printer for the Senate, competing against the pro-slavery editor of the Washington Daily Union. Senator Sumner had written in the Boston Commonwealth that he would vote for neither man and asked for a third printer to come forward as a candidate.3 Tucker was elected to the post, but he had a long memory for slights.
Three days after the news of “Another Ida May” broke in Boston, the Washington Sentinel printed an article that gossiped about Sumner’s personal life in codes that queer him: “Senator Sumner has a weakness. It is for young negroes.”
SENATOR SUMNER—YOUNG NEGROES AND DAGUERREOTYPES!
The greatest philosophers, the mightiest conquerors, and the most eminent statesmen are all at last but men. They have their foibles and their vices, their special “vanities,” and their particular indulgences. Some have petted spiders, some have, grotesquely enough, fancied calves, others wolves. Some have spent their leisure moments in killing flies, contrary to Uncle Toby’s benevolent injunction, while others have taken a malicious delight in teazing children.
There is a grave statesman, an august Senator, who not exempt from the frailties and weaknesses that attach to man, has recently furnished to the country, particularly to the refined and enlightened and scholastic State of Massachusetts, which he in part represents, and to Boston, the “Athens of America,” the evidence that he has in his composition, as well something of earth, as of heaven. Senator Sumner has a weakness. It is for young negroes. When this Senator is relieved from the fatigues of legislation, he occupies and adorns his leisure moments with the agreeable and elegant amusement of studying the features and the forms of young Ethiopians which, committed to canvass, or more faithfully represented by the process of Daguerre, he transmits to his valued friends in Massachusetts. When these pictures, sent by mail, reach their place of destination, they are shown to the polished scholars and grave legislators of that enlightened State, who are expected instantly to become convulsed with ecstasy, and absorbed with delight. We would not do injustice to the scholars and statesmen and legislators of his State, or to the refined and cultivated philanthropists of the godly city of Boston. But Senator Sumner has recently written a letter published in the Boston Telegraph, which distinctly shows his weakness for young negroes, and his admiration for Daguerreotypes. That letter, written, no doubt, at a moment snatched from grave debate, is as follows:
Girl in Black and White Page 13
