Rare photograph of children slaves found in attic

Source: Associated Press

THURSDAY Jun 10, 2010 16:22 ET

Rare photograph of children slaves found in attic
By NICOLE NORFLEET, Associated Press

Art experts say a rare photo of two slave children that could have been taken almost 150 years has been found in a North Carolina attic.

The photo was found at a moving sale in Charlotte in April accompanied by a slave document detailing the sale of one of the boys pictured, identified as "John."

New York collector Keya Morgan says he paid $30,000 for the photo and an additional $20,000 for the document.

The picture depicts two black children in ragged clothing sitting on a barrel in a field. Art historians say that the picture was taken in the early 1860s, during the Civil War by a photographer from the studio of famed 19th-century photographer Mathew Brady.

Read more: http://www.salon.com/wires/allwires/2010/06/10/D9G8KI0G1_us_slavery_photo/index.html

The place doesn't look identifiable in any way, and unless the exact history of the possession of that picture can be traced, there's no way of saying even where it was probably taken. Besides, nobody alive today would remember what they looked like to possibly identify them.

It was more of a rhetorical question. :)

Because there was a bill of sale accompanying the photo, which would give us the name of the slaveholder, just as a starting point. Such records can be VERY difficult to trace, but I've done it before. Takes a lot of patience, research and luck.

Here's a site dedicated to such research:
http://www.africanaheritage.com/

those people were and what their lives had been like.

Jeez...

Is it Friday yet?

You can almost sense the helplessness in it, they don't look like they have any hope at all. When I think of my kids, always smiling, and then look at this it makes me realize how lucky they are.

had been sold, his pain and anger are palpable.

I wonder if the owner had this photo taken to give to them so they'd remember each other and if, in fact, this was a kindness or a curse.

I hope they survived the war and found each other again.

Damn slavery, wherever and however it occurs.

to take the picture. he was responsible for most of our awareness of the civil war. matthew brady

As far as I know he was at the First Battle of Bull Run and a few others, and didn't get as far south as South Carolina; he employed assistants to take most of the photos that bear his name--those he took personally are mostly studio portraits. (Mathew Brady is my distant great-uncle; his wife was my great-great-great-grandfather's sister. So I have some third-hand knowledge from older family members.)

after the war and the pictures fading. :(

them frightened and wary of the strange contraption pointed at them, with the photographer constantly lifting the drape and getting under it, sticking his head out, then going in again. A puff of smoke might accompany the photo. The children might have been wondering what on earth was going to happen. And those beautiful faces had no doubt seen so much already . . .

I don't think any owner would spend that amount of money as a kindness to someone he only saw as a piece of property.

That made me cry.

They look kind of angry, like they know they deserve better than to be treated as poorly as they were, as well as tired and hopeless.

In most photos of children taken at that time their expressions are similar. These children had probably never seen a camera before, and had been instructed to remain completely still for the relatively long exposure.

The sadness, the ragged close and the despair on those kids face is worth a million words.

its palpable

but I get your point.

But I get your point.

:shrug:

So in a way, the birth of the US as a nation was marked by slavery in the very founding document. That is why I said "original sin". The murder of Indians was still nominally illegal under the Constitution, even though it was going on officially as part of military campaigns, but slavery? It's right in there, in the Constitution. I hope this explains my thinking. I do not want to belittle the plight of original Americans in any way.

and taken into the fields from day one.

What it comes down to is if the owner says it was consensual (contractual) it's OK. If the slave says it's not consensual, it's his word against the slave owner, and then the owner could say he/she is trying to back out of a legal contract. Who would the court believe, the rich man or the poor man?

this year while doing the Civil War


The kids found him fascinating

Thanks for posting.

:thumbsup:

they probably wouldn't care...

And to think there are a few of them on DU. :grr:

these photos always fascinate me. it gets me wondering about what happened and just what it was in those days. we know about history and what happened to most peoplein general. but to see individuals like this is interesting.

i wonder what happened to the boys also.

Here you go:

http://www.sonofthesouth.net/slavery/slavery-photographs.htm

in the dress towards the left side looking down.

I am a white male born and raised in the South, and I would never referred to anyone as a slave, even in a history discussion, if the time was after the Civil War. When I was growing up, a couple of my elderly neighbors were former slaves. The last one died when I was 10 or 12.

BTW I would have addressed them using the Mister/Miss firstname or Mister/Miss lastname forms showing respect for my elders, black and white.
Probably would have followed my parent's example, probably the M/M firstname. Just remembered a couple of cases where the name I remember is in the M/M first last form.

and photographs of still-living former slaves on their website (I think this was circa 1940)...excellent trove of history...

Can't remember now if it was WPA or what, but it was one of those programs.

What the US could be doing now, except that the President and Congress chose to give the money to the corporations instead.

it's probably still on the site somewhere...

Made me that much more grateful for FDR! Great foresight to do these interviews!

worth 40 times the value of the child.

Slaves were not cheap in the South, and $1,100 was a huge amount of money in 1854. You could buy a home with a couple acres of land for that kind of money. $1100 was still a bit low for a healthy slave, probably because he was a child. A healthy male slave in his late teens or early 20's, without behavioral "problems", could go for double that amount. The "value" of a slave was calculated by figuring out the amount of work he could do, and then subtracting the costs of keeping him alive. Children had a high work "potential", but they cost a lot of money to feed and raise before they could achieve that potential.

Human value was reduced to a mere profit/cost ratio. It was capitalism at its worst.

For example, when Home Depot was sued for injury (and I think death, but don't remember) because they knew they were safety problems in the store, but figured a law suit was cheaper than fixing the problems.

Or Ford.

Or.... many corporations do these kinds of calculations.

why the picture was taken? Who took it? What were the circumstances of the photo shoot?

Within 10-15 years, these children, (if still alive) would be adults and freedmen. I wonder if they ever found each other again, were able to escape the long arm of the law, (who often arrested unemployed "loiterers" and put them to work in state sponsored private prison plantations, - the second type of "legal" slavery after the war, ""Black Codes").

http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/

It is unlikely they ever saw each other again. Their lifetime probably was less than 50 years. They probably ALWAYS lived in poverty, even after emancipation.

I'm sorry not to be too positive about this, but 1863 was only the start of yet another chapter for black people in the USA.

It's important this isn't forgotten, or swept under the rug.

I wonder if I'm alone in this. I find the language of referring to human beings as slaves troubling. I tend to use an adjective instead of a noun, such as enslaved or captured, to describe that horrible condition people were subjected to. It seems that summing up a human being's life by such a wretched word - as if that's all they were - does a great disservice to people's ancestors.

Or maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way?

it's not like it was a few years of their life where they were having hard times.

it's a wretched word because that's what slavery is. and their lives were wretched because of it

I'm not trying to minimize or sanitize those facts by thinking about the language.

And yet their lives were still more than just that. Some people were born into that condition, others had lives and histories before they were kidnapped. As wretched as that condition was, still people had parents, siblings, loves - they were more than just their condition. The word, imo, reduces a human being to an object. I know the institution of slavery endeavored to do just that, yet in truth it was not so. That's why I prefer to use an adjective - to describe the condition the person was in and not reduce their whole being to that one thing.

Ugh.

i don't really see anything wrong with that.

I can't.

(Appearances can be deceiving, etc.)

I could care less is he's got every race there is. Granted at the very top of the elite they check out a rich white guy's pedigree just to make extra super sure there's no brown in the mix, but for pretty much everyone else it's pure outside appearance that brings the white man's privilege.

Just creates more racism.

Poor beautiful babies. Makes my heart bleed.

The technology and look of the photo combined with the apparent age of the boys seems unlikely to match with John described in the document. I have need to research a lot more to really know, starting with the document.

I have emptied several of these NC attics myself, one stuffed with trunks no one had openned in nearly a century, with hundreds of photos from the 1800's including some early ones, and several thousand letters, journals, and other documents - most related to the family of my grandmother, born in 1869.

I just thought of one situation where the sales document and the photo might be at least possible. In NC, when the laws were changed making it harder to free slaves within the state, a loophole was used by anti-slavery Methodists, Moravians, and particularly the Quakers whereby the slave might be "sold" to the Quakers who then used the various quirks of laws in other states to eventually free the slave. The price seems unlikely for that, so I really need to see document text.