Volume 154, Number 1
A daguerreotype made between 1847 and 1853 of an anonymous young man is the work of Augustus Washington, who, for a short time, was the foremost photographer in Hartford, Conn.
Born in 1820 in Trenton, N.J., Washington’s father had once been enslaved in Virginia, while his mother he described as South Asian in descent. In 1843, he was the only African-American student to enter Dartmouth College. Money was in short supply, so he took up the new trade of making daguerreotypes, a photography technique popular in the 1840s and 1850s that directly exposed an image onto a silver-plated copper plate. Though fairly successful, he wasn’t able to cover his tuition and had to leave school.
In Hartford, Washington found a thriving African-American and abolitionist community, and he established his photography studio there in 1846. He advertised in antislavery newspapers, which was likely where radical abolitionist John Brown learned of his business. Sometime between 1846 and 1847, a clean-shaven Brown posed for a photograph in Washington’s studio, a flag in one hand, the other raised at the elbow as if taking an oath. This daguerreotype, now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, is one of the most well-known images of Brown.
Though Washington was skeptical of the motives of the American Colonization Society—a group that formed to support the migration of free African-Americans to Africa but was later denounced as a harbor for racists wanting to rid the United States of African-Americans—eventually he and his wife, Cordelia, decided that Liberia might be the “last refuge of the oppressed colored man.” In 1853, they sailed with their two children for Africa. His camera helped him gain a foothold in his new country. Over the next two decades Washington became a successful businessman and served in both houses of the Liberian Congress.
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