Articles and Book Reviews by Fergus M. Bordewich
Snapshots That Changed Minds
The sudden popularity of photography led abolitionists to cannily use images of light-skinned children born into slavery, like 7-year-old Mary Mildred Williams, to stoke outrage and gain sympathy for their cause.
[Book review] Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America by Matthew Fox-Amato
[Book review] Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement by Jessie Morgan-Owens
[Book review] Double Exposure: Pictures with Purpose by John Reeves
Reviewed By Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal, March 2019.
PHOTOGRAPHY, in the form of daguerreotyping, arrived in the United States from France in 1839. Americans instantly fell in love with it. By 1860, there were no fewer than 3,154 photographers in the country as studios sprouted in cities and towns, and itinerant practitioners tramped the backcountry and traveled the rivers in specially fitted-out steamboats. Not only wealthy and middle-class white Americans posed for portraits. As the cost of image-making plummeted so did increasing numbers of African Americans, both free and enslaved.
Sometimes masters had pictures made of favored slaves, most often nurses with the children they tended, but a surprising number also sat for the camera by choice. Slaves deeply prized photographic mementos of their family members, just as white Americans did, but there was a crucial difference. Slaves were liable to be torn from their loved ones at any time and sold, often without warning, never to see them again, except in a prized daguerreotype. Slaves were not all penniless: many earned money from their market gardens or from hiring out their labor after hours, with their masters' permission. No laws prevented slaves or free blacks from having themselves photographed, but it could at least occasionally by risky for the photographers, especially on the cusp of the Civil War as sectional tempers boiled over. In 1859, an Alabama photographer was publicly flogged for taking pictures of black subjects, and he was probably not the only one.
Mr. Fox-Amato, a historian of photography at the University of Idaho, persuasively argues that photography changed Americans' perception of both slavery and blacks' humanity, at least up to a point. As early as 1861, Frederick Douglass, who may have been the most photographed American of the 19th century, had no doubt about its potential impact, declaring it a "powerful, though silent, influence upon future generations." Writes Mr. Fox-Amato, "photography powerfully influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested," in ways both deliberate and unintentionally subversive. Even images made at the behest of masters tacitly showed slaves to be distinct and dignified human beings rather than mere commodities. At the same time, Mr. Fox-Amato rightly cautions, "[S]lave photographs erased as much as they made visible: the sexual coercion enslaved women faced, the slave trade they feared, the physical violence used by masters and mistresses."
In "Exposing Slavery", Mr. Fox-Amato ranges both widely and brilliantly through the multifarious ways in which photography represented both enslaved and free African Americans, South and North, in peacetime and war, and in the changed nation that took shape after the Civil War. No one who reads this book will ever see antebellum and Civil War-era photographs of black Americans in the same way again. Quite apart from the author's thoroughgoing research and tight prose, the many accompanying photographs are superlatively reproduced on high-quality paper which renders them seemingly as crisp as the day they were made.
While southerners may have imagined that family-style portraits that included slaves might demonstrate the supposed gentleness of slavery, antislavery activists recognized photography's propagandistic potential early on. "The camera has hardly begun its work as an anti-slavery agent," the abolitionist Theodore Tilton remarked. "There are unexplored fields of abominations and cruelties which, if worked, might produce a public sentiment forever intolerant of human bondage." Images of scourged slaves, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and other antislavery luminaries were distributed wherever antislavery societies existed. The lecturer and former slave Sojourner Truth sold photographs of herself at her lectures for one dollar apiece; on them was printed "I sell the shadow to support the substance."
Added to the movement's hortatory appeals to conscience, photographs had a "radically immediate" effect, as Jessie Morgan-Owens, a scholar and photographer based in New Orleans, puts it in "Girl in Black and White", a fascinating investigation into the long-forgotten origins of one of the most famous antislavery pictures of the antebellum era.
The image in question was promoted under the rubric of "Little Ida May", invoking the title character of an immensely popular antislavery novel which told the tragic story of a fictional white girl who was kidnapped from her Pennsylvania home and sold into slavery in the South. The girl in the photograph, whose real name was Mary Mildred Williams, appeared to be an ordinary white child, but she had in fact been born into the world of slavery and was extricated from it only after a herculean legal effort by abolitionists, led by the crusading Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, in 1855.
Williams's story is a long and intricate one, ably untangled by Ms. Morgan-Owens, who spent years researching her confused legal status in antebellum records. Williams was the heir to several generations of racial mixing in a Virginia family that was actually owned by a free black man living in Washington who allowed them to be hired out on his behalf by a white agent who may have been Williams's father. (Yes, there were black slave owners, although they were never numerous or politically potent.) The family was in immediate danger of being sold when they were brought to Sumner's attention.
Once they had been bought out of slavery, Sumner built an entire publicity campaign around eight-year-old Mary. (Her siblings were more Negroid in appearance.) She was dressed like a typical middle-class girl, photographed, and her image publicized across the North. Then she was trundled around for weeks, essentially as a prop, by Sumner and other abolitionist lecturers. Williams was not the only former "white slave" on the abolition circuit, but she was the only child among them and the most electrifying, precisely because she looked so white and innocent. "Little 'Ida May'" proved the "inherent instability of categories of race and caught viewers off guard, writes Morgan-Owens in "Girl in White and Black". "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 the instinctive sense that Mary was just like themselves. In Mary—who had no opportunity to speak for herself—Northern whites saw their own children, endangered and vulnerable to the worst sort of abuse that staid antebellum Yankees cared to imagine. (Light-skinned female slaves were in some ways the most threatened of all, since they were the most likely to being sold into sexual servitude as concubines or prostitutes.)
Although black abolitionists admired Sumner, his use—or exploitation—of Mary Williams grated on Frederick Douglass precisely because it emphasized her whiteness. "The simple fact of color should not be the criterion by which to ascertain or fix the social station of any," wrote Douglass in an open letter. "Let every man, without regard to color, go wherever his character and abilities naturally carry him." Douglass, sadly, was far in advance of public opinion. It would be generations before a majority of Americans agreed with him, even in principle.
Born "black" according to Virginia law, Mary Williams went on to live her adult life passing as a white woman. She worked for many years as a secretary in the Registry of Deeds in Boston, later moved to New York and died in 1921. Her transformation into a white American was virtually effortless. For the vast majority of black Americans that was not an option.
Photography could not, of course, erase the prejudice that saturated American society any more than the war's terrible toll of dead soldiers could. During the war, black volunteers flocked to enlist in the Union army, some 170,000 of them in all. Many of them posed for photographs holding their rifles, pistols, and bayonets. White soldiers did the same. But for black men to brandish weapons at all was a bold demonstration of newly-achieved manhood and self-defense in a country which until then had allowed them neither. They had every right to expect that the nation would honor their sacrifice. Hundreds of thousands more African Americans worked for white troops as personal servants, cooks, washer men and women, laborers, and in other menial roles. In one of his book's most acute sections, Mr. Fox-Amato points out that the vast majority of Union soldiers saw no contradiction in supporting emancipation while still harboring indelible white supremacist beliefs. Photographs once again are deeply revealing. Countless group portraits of regimental officers almost without exception show blacks in deliberately servile poses at the feet of seated or standing soldiers. Writes Mr. Fox-Amato, "Northern white soldiers adopted photography as a quiet habit of domination, by which they communicated anti-black racism and asserted racial hierarchy."
Such images pointed the way toward the realities of the post-war world. In a remarkable lecture on photography, in 1861, Douglass—reputedly the most photographed man of the 19th century—said of photography, "All subjective ideas become more distinct, palpable, and strong, by the habit of rendering them objective," and warned that it was a "power that can be potent in the hands of the bigot and fanatic, or in the hands of the liberal and enlightened." It was a prophecy that was fulfilled all too brutally in the early 20th century when lynch mobs posed smiling next to the corpses of the men they murdered while photographers took pictures that they later sold as postcards.
Nevertheless, through generations of Jim Crow oppression African Americans continued to use photography to give themselves dignity seen in the face of relentless attacks on their character, aspirations, and physical safety. This quiet self-assertion may vividly be seen in "Double Exposure: Pictures with Purpose," a slender but masterfully composed volume published by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which offers a panoramic photographic gallery of African Americans of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
There are a few disturbing but necessary images: an antebellum slave dealer's establishment, the aftermath of a race riot, a lynching. But the great majority present mostly ordinary men and women as they wished to be seen. Many are riveting: an extraordinarily handsome anonymous female college graduate at the turn of the 20th century, black nuns in what appears to have bee be a segregated convent, an elderly Frederick Douglass posed with his violin-playing grandson, a classical string quartet, a stylish young man wearing a rakishly cocked derby, members of a well-dressed family posed meaningfully with a book and guitar in hand—signifiers of middle-class cultivation—and the magnificent, almost lordly, image of Harvard's African-American gym coach in the 1860s, Aaron Molyneax, amidst a daunting array of Indian clubs and medicine balls. Taken together, they are proof of worthy lives lived in a world whose dangers and incessant humiliations are difficult to fully imagine today. They are, in short, men and women who know who they are, even if the larger world in which they must survive does not.