Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
The fugitive slave, abolitionist lecturer, best-selling author, newspaper publisher, prolific editorial writer, and internationally acclaimed orator and statesman, was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In 1838, he masterfully engineered an ingenious escape to freedom. Within a few short years, Douglass emerged on the lecture circuit and in print as one of the most powerful voices in the United States and Great Britain for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights, social justice, and equality.
In May 1843, before becoming nationally known, Douglass came to Hartford, Connecticut, for the first time and challenged a conservative city to sever its ties to slavery. His message initially fell on unwelcome ears, but he returned during the Civil War in 1862 and then again in 1883 to speak out forcibly for the full rights of Black Americans in the wake of the rollback of Reconstruction and the dreadful resurgence of white supremacy throughout the South.
Despite his legendary dame and the abun dance of scholarship about his life and career, scholars have only recently realized that Douglass was among the first to recognize the revolutionary power of photography, an invention announced to the world by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) in Paris in 1839. Douglass would become the most photographed person in the United States in his lifetime.
More tellingly, Douglass wrote four deeply insightful essays on photography, at least three of which he delivered, astonishingly, amid the chaos and daunting challenges of the Civil War (1861–1865). In doing so, Frederick Douglass must be remembered as one of the earliest and most original theorists about this new technology in America and the world. It is to honor his seminal role in the history of photography that we have mounted this exhibition in a city that, after a difficult initial encounter, would warmly welcome him as he struggled to restore the gains Black Americans were granted during Reconstruction (1866–1877).
For Douglass, photography embodied the potential to allow, for the first time, a person to be seen as they desired to be seen, especially members of the working class, the socially marginalized, women, and most certainly, African Americans. More particularly, the photographic image could play a vital role in expanding political and economic equality and social justice by allowing Black men and women of all classes to define themselves on their own terms, outside of and against the racist representations of “Blackness.“
I Am Seen, Therefore I Am… brings together unseen early photographs of African Americans from the 1840s and 1850s from the collection of Greg French, and the works of pioneering African American photographers of the same period.
It juxtaposes them with Sir Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour, a contemporary meditation on the life and legacy of Douglass and the power of images. Together, these striking images stage a dialogue between the local and the global, between Douglass’s encounters with Hartford and their relation to his larger national and international interventions in his unfinished quest for social justice for African Americans.
Douglass in Hartford, CT
1843
In 1843, Douglass began a speaking tour of a hundred cities throughout New England, New York, and the Midwest on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He reached Hartford on Sunday, May 14, and spoke at Gilman’s Hall on Main Street that same evening. There, Douglass boldly denounced Hartford’s Christian churches for condoning slavery. An unsympathetic audience hissed at his message. Slavery persisted in Connecticut and would remain legal until 1848, when an abolition bill finally passed the state legislature. After hearing Douglass speak, James Gilman canceled the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society’s booking of the hall for the next two days saying “he could not allow his property to be used for the dissemination of such principles as were advanced by Douglass.
On Monday, May 15, Doulass and the Society roamed Hartford looking for another meeting place. No one would give them room, so they met in the narrow alley along the north wall of the Center Church. Douglass recalled: “We determined to hold our meetings under the open sky, which we did in a little court under the eaves of the ‘sanctuary‘ ministered unto by the Rev. Dr. Hawes, with much satisfaction to ourselves, and I think great advantage to our cause.“ Onlookers heckled them; some threw stones. The alleyway is gone, but the site where Douglass stood on a box for a makeshift rostrum is now the entrance to Hartford’s Ancient Burying Ground.
1864
Douglass returned to Hartford twice during the Civil War. He spoke both times in Allyn Hall, the city’s premier assembly hall, on March 28 and April 16. His first speech was titled “The Lessons of War.“ His second, “The National Crisis,“ focused on the rights of Black soldiers fighting for the Union.
Although Connecticut did not secede, it had its fair share of Confederacy sympathizers including the “Copperheads,” Northern Democrats wanting immediate peace with the Confederacy.
The Hartford Courant reported that Douglass’s audience in March included “many of the leading advocates of slavery in this city, members of the copperhead party, and it is hoped they were given some new ideas upon what colored men may do when left free to think and act.“ It stated that his second speech was confined “mainly to the position of colored men in this war, and their rights under the government now and hereafter,“ but characterized these as “extreme views.”
1883
Douglass made his final visit to Hartford in 1883 as the Summer Union League Club guest speaker. He spoke about the life of his friend, the radical abolitionist and Connecticut native John Brown (1800–1859).
In 1859, Brown led a doomed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to seize weapons stored there, arm enslaved men, and foment an antislavery insurrection. He was captured and later executed. Douglass’s close connection to Brown put him under immediate suspicion following the aborted raid, but Douglass remained devoted to Brown’s memory.
A version of his moving tribute was first given in 1881 at Harpers Ferry during the unraveling of the promise of Reconstruction, which was ended in 1877 with the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes. Douglass summed up Brown’s achievement in his speech: “If Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.“
The Speech
In 1861, shortly after the outbreak of the American Civil War, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Boston’s Tremont Temple on a most unlikely subject: photography.
Entitled “Pictures and Progress,“ Douglass carefully considered the critical role that photographs could play in achieving the promise of American democracy, despite the signal role that slavery and racial inequality had played since the nation’s founding. Douglass redrafted the speech three different times over the course of his life, and taken together, these statements offer one of the earliest articulations of the power of the visual arts for the transformation of both racial and class relations in American public life.
As one of the first theorists of photography, Douglass presciently understood that then revolutionary potential of this new medium involved both representation and perception. In the antebellum period, images had become weapons in the war of interpretation of the roles of slavery and race in American society. Pictures could elevate or denigrate. Harnessing the power of image, Douglass argued, could be a great boon to the achievement of representational justice. Douglass clearly was captivated by images, including his own: he was the most photographed American in the entire 19th century.
This picture-making faculty is flung out into the world like all others, capable of being harnessed to the car of truth or error: It is a vast power to whatever cause it is coupled.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, FROM “PICTURES AND PROGRESS,“ 1864–1865