“A Gang of 101 Negroes! By John B. Habersham & Co. G.W. Wylly, Auctioneer.”

The auctions could have been any of the many I attend quite regularly now, but obviously this one was quite different because people were being sold, not items. The newsletter – called Black Memorabilia (2003) – offered this caption information about the broadsides (that’s what these posters were called): “Letterpress advertising broadside, 12×8.5 inches; Macon, GA (1863), $4,000 – $8,000.” These original broadsides were apparently scheduled to be sold at Swann Auction Galleries in New York.

Wooden statue and other artifacts from the Lest We Forget Slavery Museum.

The description stopped me, too, because the slave auction was held in a very familiar place – in front of the courthouse in Macon, GA, the current home of my family and the area where my distant relatives had lived before them.

Some of those 101 slaves could have been my ancestors. They were listed as field hands and house servants, and a few of the men were carpenters. They ranged in ages from 2 months to Old, as noted on the broadside, and all were listed by first names. Some were to be sold together as a family, and a few singles were to be sold separately. In the margins, someone had written in the prices that each one of them had fetched.

Copies of broadsides from the 19th century announcing slave auctions, one in my hometown of Macon, GA.

I was again reminded of the horrors of slavery at the 2012 Black History & Culture Showcase last weekend where an exhibit of slave neck shackles and other objects were on display. They were part of the Lest We Forget Slavery Museum in Philadelphia. The museum is the heart and soul of J. Justin & Gwen Ragsdale, who have been collecting artifacts for the past 45 years.

I have not traced my family history, but I do know that on my grandfather’s side his parents were born in slavery. I learned that information from the 1900 and 1910 census records when I was conducting a preliminary history for a family reunion newspaper some years ago. I know very little about any of my other ancestors. My great-grandfather Green Howard was born in 1852 and his wife Rebecca in 1855. Their son Alonzo, my grandfather, and his wife Annie Lee owned a farm outside Macon and lived there with their children. Later, family members moved to Macon.

Runaway slave collars from the Lest We Forget Slavery Museum.

The city of Macon during slavery was said to be one of the “principal marts for slaves in the South,” as Southern journalist Edward Alfred Pollard wrote in a letter. In his 1859 book “The Southern Spy: Or Curiosities of Negro Slavery in the South. Letters from a Southerner to a Northerner,” he wrote that “now, I can assure you that the inhuman horrors of the slave auction-block exist only in the imagination,” and went on to describe a slave auction in 1858. From his perspective, he saw a cheery slave who was oh-so-happy that his current “master” was able to purchase him rather than a stranger.

Slave auctions and trading were commonplace in Macon and other Southern town, and slave traders like G.W. Wylly seemed to flourish. In one book, he was described as a “long distance slave trader,” and I don’t believe he was based in Macon. Another site listed the names of several privately owned companies dealing in the slave trade, seven in Macon with businesses at locations I’m now very familiar with. One trader was Charles Collins, a member of one of the largest slave-trading families in the country, the DeWolfs.

The month of December, according to one site, was the most worrisome for slaves because it meant that the owner had to tidy up his finances, which could mean their being sold to pay off debts and other costs. Adam Goodheart writing in the New York Times opinion section in 2010 noted that New Year’s Day slave auctions were common. The year’s end also meant that the contracts of slaves who were rented out to work for others would expire and they could be sold off to slave-holders near or far. The 1863 auction in Macon was held on Dec. 15.

A wooden neck shackle from the Lest We Forget Slavery Museum.

One of the most fascinating slavery stories linked to Macon was the case of William and Ellen Craft, a couple who escaped slavery in a bold and daring plan in 1848. The light-skinned Ellen disguised herself as a white male slave owner traveling to the North with his servant. It was not a quick trip: train from Macon to Savannah, GA; steamship to Charleston, SC; steamer to Wilmington, NC; train to an area near Fredericksburg, VA; steamer to Washington, DC, and then a train to Baltimore and finally to Philadelphia. They arrived on Christmas Sunday, and soon moved to Boston.

The 101 people mentioned in the ad in the newspaper were not the largest group I came across in my research. One site noted that a sale of 400 Africans in Savannah in 1858 was the largest slave auction in the country’s history. It was conducted at a racetrack during a major rainstorm, and once the auction ended, the sun came out. It became known as “The Weeping Time.”

Shackles from the Lest We Forget Slavery Museum.

Related posts:

1. Man & woman anti-slavery tokens
2. An anti-slavery token with a personal history?
3. Wedgwood anti-slavery pin

It was an anti-slavery token or coin, and the image had been borrowed from a medallion created in 1787 by renowned English potter Josiah Wedgwood as a symbol for abolitionists fighting the slave trade in Britain. His was made of the material of his famous pottery -  Jasper (but in black and white) – and the human in bonds was a man and not a woman.

"Am I A Woman & A Sister" tokens (top) along with the "Am I A Man and A Brother" (bottom).

I had come across a photo of this token about two years ago when a 20th-century reproduction of the Wedgwood medallion came up at auction (it sold for $325). So I was happy to actually see one of the coins.

When I arrived at the auction house, I looked for the glass case with the token because I wanted to hold it in my hand, to look at it closely, to feel the history embedded in it. Imagine my surprise when I saw that there was not just one but two of the copper coins. Some of the tiny details had been rubbed out by so many other touching hands for nearly two centuries, but they were still in good condition.

Around the edge were the words: “Am I Not A Woman & A Sister. 1838.”

On the reverse side: “United States of America (The N was backwards). Liberty. 18 (the rest of date was partially rubbed out).”

One of them was in a small envelope with penciled writing that identified it as a slavery token, along with the date, description and “Low No. 54,” referring to, from what I could determine, the grade of the coin. It was priced at $15.

When the tokens came up for bids, the auctioneer pulled out another one lying inches away from the woman. Tucked in a small plastic pack was the male companion, its color a little darker, its image like that of Wedgwood’s. How had I overlooked it?

A 20th-century reproduction of Josiah Wedgwood's abolitionist pin.

It did have one difference: One wrist and one ankle were shackled. On the woman, one wrist was shackled and the other end of the chain lay in front of her feet. Inscribed in a half-circle around his edge: “Am I Not A Man and A Brother.” On the back: “May Slavery and Oppression Cease Throughout the World.” There was no date on it.

Now, I was very excited. When the auction got underway, though, I was not the only one interested. The bidding bounced back and forth between two of us buyers until it stopped at $30 each. That was the price printed on a tab of paper in the case with the male.

The two were “Hard Times” tokens manufactured in 1837 and 1838 when money was scarce and the economy was bad. Merchants bought them cheap and used them as one-cent change pieces. They sported ads for businesses, along with political slogans or causes. More of the female versions were apparently made than the male. Some of the male were said to be rare. There apparently were other grades of the female.

Up to 200 hard times tokens may have been minted, and they were widely circulated. The American Anti-Slavery Society issued the kneeling woman through its newspaper. The society enlisted a New Jersey company to strike the tokens, which were sold for $1 per 100. It announced that it would also sell the male tokens, but that apparently was never done. It did offer a version imported from Britain, according to one website.

The reverse side of the anti-slavery tokens.

Among the members of the society was an African American named Patrick H. Reason of New York, who in 1835 engraved a kneeling woman based on the Wedgwood figure. The society commissioned several pieces by him, but I could not determine if this was one of them. Some sites said the female image was derived from his engraving, but I wasn’t able to verify that.

No one seems to know who created the female image, but it apparently was first used in England in the early part of the 19th century. It appeared in print in this country around 1830. It was popularized by Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, a white woman who advocated the abolition of slavery in her writings and poetry, including the poem “The Kneeling Slave” around 1833. African American abolitionist Sarah Mapps Douglass, who was active in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, sent her a drawing of a kneeling woman after seeing the poem in print.

The female tokens were sold by women organizations to fund their anti-slavery campaigns. (Here are some other items that used the symbol.)

Several sites noted that the token was listed as No. 10 among the 100 Greatest Tokens and Medals in a book by Katherine Jaeger and Q. David Bowers.

The previous owner had kept the anti-slavery tokens in protective packaging.

Related posts:

1. An anti-slavery token with a personal history?
2. Wedgwood anti-slavery pin
3. Brothel tokens – fake or real?

With time on my hands and a touch of curiosity, I decided to play around with it, the way most of us do when we see a globe or a ball. I spun it around, feeling like a giant looking down at the world at my fingertips, searching first for my little spot on it: my continent, my country, all in one sweep.

The "Slave Coast" is printed boldly on the globe up for auction. Millions of Africans were shipped out to the Americas into slavery.

I didn’t just stop at my corner of the world; I twirled it around to Africa, wondering what the map-makers had done with the homeland of my ancestors. I eyed the countries, and realized that they had the names given to them by their European colonizers long ago and re-taken by them in the last century.

Federation of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Union of South Africa (now just South Africa), Belgian Congo (formerly Zaire, now Democratic Republic of the Congo), Nyasaland (now Malawi).

As I headed west along the perimeter of the continent, my eyes landed on two words that stopped me: “Slave Coast.” Instantly, I knew what that meant; it was where thousands of ships landed on the West Coast of Africa and robbed it of its people for the slave trade in North America, South America and other places.

This map bearing colonial names and the Slave Coast designation must be old map, I surmised. So I started looking for a production date but could not find one. Printed on the globe, though, were the names of the maker and the cartographer: Replogle Globes Inc., Chicago. Cartographer Gustav Brueckmann.

The globe showed the maker and cartographer's name, along with a guide to help decipher it.

The company was founded in 1930 and is still making globes. Its website has a guide for dating them – find the former name of your country and check the year next to it: The map at auction appeared to be from the 1960s, and the colonial names seemed to confirm this, because most of them dated back to the 1960s. The map also included steamship routes, which were once prevalent but no more.

I Googled to see what I more I could find about the Slave Coast. It wasn’t a bit of our country’s past that was in my history school books.

When I think of the slave trade in West Africa, Senegal’s Goree Island and its “Door of No Return” come to mind. Many folks have traveled to the island’s House of Slaves to pay their respects to the millions of Africans who were traded there. I’d heard little about this coast around the curve from it that saw millions more loaded aboard ships bearing British, French, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese and other flags.

The area dubbed the Slave Coast was in the Gulf of Guinea under the western hip of Africa, near the countries of Togo, Benin and Nigeria. On land, it bore European trading stations of African people captured by Europeans and African tribes, and other commodities. Slavery was not new to African cultures; it had long been a custom among some peoples, but they were treated as indentured servants.

On the globe, countries bordering the Slave Coast in West Africa.

The coast was one of the major trading areas from the 16th to 19th centuries, with the most extensive during the 18th and 19th centuries. From 2 million to 11 million Africans were moved from ports there to North and South America, according to estimates I found on several websites. While many of them came to the United States, the majority ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean.

Africans were also shipped from the East African coastal areas of Mozambique, the Zambezi Valley, and such interior countries as Mali, Chad, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Africa had its other coasts with similar names: the Gold Coast (which supplied Africans for slavery) near Ghana, the Ivory Coast near what is now known as Cote d’Ivoire and the Pepper Coast or Grain Coast near Liberia.

I wasn’t around when the globe sold, but my curiosity got me to wondering about its worth. Christie’s in New York sold a Replogle 12-inch desktop terrestrial lamp globe (with the oceans colored black) in 2000 for $345. On one site, I found desktop globes from the 1930s to 1970s selling for $40 to $395 by Replogle and other companies. You can get some for even less on eBay.

A 1960s floor-model globe by Replogle Globes Inc. of Chicago, sold at auction.

Related posts:

1. An autobiography by a female slave?
2. Buzz is still on story of ‘rare’ slave photo
3. A slave freed to join the Union army

Like Klan paraphernalia, they were inherently evil, I said, and I could not imagine having them in my home. I wondered why anyone would want to collect the stuff.

In the post, I acknowledged that some black people collect the awful images that others had prescribed to us. I don’t collect it but I don’t begrudge people who do – whether it’s Nazi, Klan, Confederate or what some call Black Americana pieces. My post even mentioned that there were Jews who collected Nazi paraphernalia.

The words of the Emancipation Proclamation written to form the bust of President Lincoln. It sold for $800 last month at Swann Auction Galleries.

Bob was apoplectic about the post, but not about my comments regarding Nazi artifacts. He ranted about why the Civil War was fought. Never mind that I never mentioned slavery and the Civil War. I only mentioned that some Civil War letters, prints and awards were auctioned that day, but that had nothing to do with the why of the war itself.

I got to thinking about Bob yesterday while reading a commentary in the Philadelphia Inquirer about how some folks have tried to rewrite the reason behind the war. They say it was fought over “states rights” and not over the freedom of my black ancestors, among other reasons. The writer of the newspaper article – titled “Losers have written the Civil War’s history” – did a good job of dispelling that myth.

Bob crudely (I could feel the hatred in his heart and head as he wrote) accused me of getting my American history wrong. The war was not fought to free the slaves, he said, it was fought because the “North was making unfair demands on the South.” Heck, he said, many black people fought on the side of the southern slave-holding states (I added the word “slave-holding”). He forgot to mention that many more left the plantations to fight on the Union side (after President Lincoln laid out the challenge in the Emancipation Proclamation and Frederick Douglass encouraged them to join).

Then he accused us “ignorant Northerners” of not knowing what we were talking about. I’m actually from the South, born and bred in Georgia, still have family and roots there. I suspect that there are some Southerners like myself who also know that the abolition of slavery was the primary aim of the war.

I ignored the man’s comments and refused to post them.

Then he wrote to ask why I didn’t post them. And then he insulted me again. Was he nuts? For one thing, I wasn’t going to let him use my blog to rewrite history. Let him get his own blog; that’s why I started mine so I didn’t have to read garbage like his. A century ago, no one in my family could do that. Now, I can.

This is the 150th anniversary of the war, and there will be celebrations all over. Several years ago, a friend and I visited Gettysburg, Antietam and several other Civil War battlegrounds. It was one of the most fascinating and amazing journeys – both physically and historically - I had ever taken. At Gettysburg, we had our own private tour guide who rode in the car with us and gave us a history lesson that made the war, its purpose and its human losses real.  

Meanwhile, I plan to be on the lookout for war-related artifacts on the auction tables, and as usual, I’ll be digging up the history behind them. Because this my history, too – the true version, though.

Related posts:

1. Book of photos that tell the Civil War story
2. Letter from a black Civil War soldier
3. Frank Sinatra and civil rights

The novel was titled “The Autobiography of a Female Slave” by Martha Griffith. I had to find out more about it and her.

So, I Googled and found an electronic version of the entire novel as part of a digital record of Southern history, literature and culture. Called “Documenting the American South,” it was compiled by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC-CH).

So, I started reading the first chapter:

“I was born in one of the southern counties of Kentucky. My earliest recollections are of a large, old-fashioned farm-house, built of hewn rock, in which my old master, Mr. Nelson, and his family, consisting of a widowed sister, two daughters and two sons, resided. I have but an indistinct remembrance of my old master. … I well remember that, as a token of his good-will, he always presented us (the slave-children) with a slice of buttered bread, when we had finished our daily task. I have also a faint reminiscence of his old hickory cane being shaken over my head two or three times, and the promise (which remained, until his death, unfulfilled) of a good ‘thrashing’ at some future period.”

It seemed pretty idyllic to me, but I didn’t have to wait long to get to the familiar evils of slavery: The patriarch of the family got sick and died, debts had to be paid and the property – including the slaves – had to be sold. The girl telling the story, then about 10 or 12 years old, was sold off alone to an awful overseer for a brutal plantation – leaving behind her mother, an act that Griffith told in wrenching details.

“Surely I was to take my mother with me! No mortal power would dare to sever us. Why, I remember that when master sold the gray mare, the colt went also. Who could, who would, who dared, separate the parent from her offspring? Alas! I had yet to learn that the white man dared do all that his avarice might suggest; and there was no human tribunal where the outcast African could pray for “right!”

I thought I had “discovered” a slave novel by an actual black female. If I had, that would have been a terrific find. But after further research, I was mistaken. Martha Griffith – also known as Mattie – was a white woman who became an abolitionist after growing up in a slave-holding family in Kentucky.

Born around 1833, Griffith was raised by one of her father’s female slaves after she was left an orphan. She freed the slaves that she inherited from her family and took her inheritance to help them with their new start. She moved north and eventually married a former newspaper correspondent with the last name Browne.

Griffith wrote poems and sketches for anti-slavery publications and assisted William Lloyd Garrison in the abolitionist movement. She wrote “The Autobiography of a Female Slave” – for which she would become well known – in 1856, and it was published anonymously in 1857. Garrison printed an extract, revealing it as having been written by a “white southern woman.”   

Many thought it was the real thing written by an actual slave. Griffith was actually one of several abolitionists who wrote fictionalized versions of the lives of slaves, including  Richard Hildreth’s “The Slave, or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836)” and Jabez Delano Hammond’s “Life and Opinion of Julius Melbourn (1847).” These novels were used in anti-slavery efforts.

The Griffith novel at auction was in rough shape. Part of its spine was missing and its cover was worn. The inside pages had some water spots but appeared to be in pretty good condition. The auction sheet noted that it was an 1874 first edition from the library of Joseph Brinton from Chester County, PA.

The inside page in the actual novel gave an 1857 copyright date. The book got one bid and sold for $500. I found a better copy of the 1857 first edition on a website for $1,950.

While Griffith’s and other books like it played their role in showing the horrors of slavery, William Wells Brown lived it. In “Clotel,” he wrote of a woman who was the fictional daughter of Thomas Jefferson. The novel was written at a time of rumors about Jefferson’s fathering of children with his slave Sally Hemings.

It showed the hypocrisy of men who extolled democracy but lived as slave owners exploiting their female slaves, as noted in the UNC-CH site.

Brown was born a slave in Kentucky in1814 of mixed blood, just as his character Clotel. He escaped in 1834 and made his way into Canada, assuming the name of the man who helped him. He became an anti-slavery speaker, eventually moving to Boston and writing his autobiography “Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself.”

Wells traveled abroad, and became a prolific writer – producing plays, autobiographies and history books. He died in 1884.

“Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States,” published first in London in 1853, is considered the first African American novel.

Related posts:

1. Pondering the Slave Coast off West Africa
2. Buzz is still on story of ‘rare’ slave photo
3. A slave freed to join the Union army

I’m an auction lover and am always on the lookout for items with an African American theme (not the type of stuff that denigrate us as a people). So I was intrigued about the photo in particular and the slave document purchased by collector Keya Morgan in April. He had paid $30,000 for the photo, which some historians had attributed to renowned Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. 

 
The same photo was sold as a stereo-view card on Ebay for $163 and can be found in the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. I decided to contact the eBay seller last week because I wanted to know the story behind how he got the stereo-view card and his take on the question of the validity of the photo. And you know how I love a good story. (Photo of stereo-view card above was taken from the eBay auction site.)

The stereo-view card was inscribed with the name J.N. Wilson, who owned a photography studio in Savannah, Ga., for 30 years in the 19^th century. The eBay seller, who wished to remain anonymous but says he had been in the antiques and collectibles business for 25 years before retiring, believed the photo attributed to Brady was actually a copy of the Wilson stereo-view card. 

Morgan has defended the authenticity of Brady as the photographer, and questioned the eBay seller’s motives for doubting that authenticity. The eBay seller has said that it’s important to get at the truth of who shot the photos of the boys. I did tons of Google research on the issue, because it involved the history of my people in this country and it stirred my journalistic interest (I was a newspaper reporter and editor for more than 30 years).  I wrote about what I found, not as a critic of the purchase or to discredit the photo.

Who actually photographed these boys? I have no idea, and likely no one else unless both the photo and the card are examined by experts. The bottom line is that the ultimate decision is Keya Morgan’s. It’s his photo; he paid for it. It’s not in a public museum; it’s in his private collection. What he chooses to do with it is really his decision – whether he keeps it for himself or sells it to someone else. But it’s probably a good idea to have it authenticated just to turn down the sound buzzing around it.  

I’m sure these boys would never have fathomed that this photo of one instance in their lives would generate so much news – much more than was ever printed while they were in bondage. How sad.

Related posts:

1. How “rare” is the slave boys’ photo
2. Searching for J.N. Wilson’s stereoview cards
3. An autobiography by a female slave?

The buyer was the collector Keya Morgan, whom I had not heard of before, but apparently is pretty well-known among collectors (especially for sale of the Marilyn Monroe sex tapes two years ago). According to the Associated Press story, he paid $30,000 for an album of photos of John and others (experts attributed the photo to the studio of renowned Civil War photographer Mathew Brady) and $20,000 for a bill of sale for John (from 1854).

Art historians think it’s a rare photograph of Civil War-era slave children from the 1860s. The photos and document were found at a moving sale in Charlotte in April, according to the story.

The photo presents the children and their lives in all its misery – etched in their faces and in the dusty tattered clothes they are wearing.

Practically everyone reprinted the AP story, except for blogger Kate Marcus at Before It’s News who found the same photo sold as a stereo-view card for $163 on eBay. The blogger questioned the rarity of the photo. (Stereo view card above was taken from the eBay auction site. Click on it for a fuller view.)

I also found a copy of the stereo-view card in the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, attributed to J.N. (Jerome Nelson) Wilson, who was a Savannah, Ga., photographer.

Intrigued, I decided to do some digging on my own and emailed the eBay seller. I was curious about how he/she had come across the card. He wrote back: He is a part-time Ebay seller from Connecticut with 25 years experience as an antiques and collectibles collector and estate-liquidator. He asked that I not identify him.

I’ll let him tell the story (with some minor editing):

“Since my forced retirement, I’ve had to sell off the things I’ve collected over the years (a lot of which I haven’t seen for years). One of the lots I decided to sell recently was a bag of stereo view cards and a desk top viewer I had acquired many years ago at a Wethersfield, Conn., estate sale. I sorted the cards by subject and listed them on eBay.

One of the lots of cards was a set by J.N. Wilson of Savannah, Ga., (all of the cards  in the lot had ‘Photographed and Published by: J.N. Wilson’ with a Savannah address) typeset on the back. There were six views of ‘Bonaventure’ (a former plantation near Savannah). These had typeset descriptions of the plantation and the depicted view. There were two cards with handwritten descriptions titled ‘Pine Trees’ and ‘Entrance to the Park.’ (At right is a photo of the back of the New York Library stereo view card.)

Then there were the four cards titled ‘Plantation Life.’ Three had this typeset on the back of the card with a handwritten picture title. They were titled: 

1. ‘Cotton Field’ (a view of a Black family standing in a cotton field with baskets of picked cotton).

2. ‘Cotton Field’ (a view of two young boys standing in a cotton field with a basket of picked cotton between them).

 3. ‘Rory’s Cabin’ (a view of a family standing and sitting in front of their cabin).

 4. This had a typeset title on a strip of white paper glued to the back of the card: ‘Plantation Life: Happy Little Nigs’ (this was a view of two young boys sitting on a board on a wood barrel in what looks like a sugar cane field).

This last card is identical to the ‘Brady’ card found in North Carolina with the exception that the stereo card is a wider view showing more background and the ends of the board they’re sitting on (the image would have been cropped to fit the CDV).

Here is what I know about stereo cards. They are taken with a ‘stereo camera.’ That is a camera with two lenses set about three inches apart. It takes a … picture with both lenses creating a double image. The images are of slightly different angles which when viewed through a stereo viewer creates a ’3-D’ image. The camera sees the same way our eyes see – two images when combined create perspective or depth. If you take a stereo photo of a single photo, you end up with a flat image on the photo (no 3-D effect). The only way to end  up with a true stereo view is to take a stereo photo from life.

All of the J.N. Wilson cards were true stereo images (I viewed them all several times through my viewer). This means that the stereo card of those two young boys could only have been made from a live sitting. 

I am convinced that all of the cards were photographed by Wilson in Georgia. I have found out that his work is known to collectors and that he operated a lucrative photography business in Savannah starting in the 1870′s.

Sugar cane was never grown in North Carolina (From Sherry: In my Google search, I found that some sugar cane was grown in coastal North Carolina but it apparently was not grown in large quantities on plantations). It was a major crop along the Georgia seaboard with several large plantations on the mainland and the outlying islands.

When I saw the North Carolina card I immediately thought about what I knew about Mathew Brady. I know that Brady did not do stereo views. I know that Brady had a reputation of commandeering other photographers’ work he liked and republishing it under his name. I know his business was faltering in the 1870′s and he published any good image he found as his own.   

I was shocked to see that several ‘experts’ had authenticated the card as a Brady produced war image. Every good photography historian is intimately familiar with Brady’s catalog of work and his personal history. They should also be familiar with Wilson’s (good Southern photographers were quiet rare and the exceptions have been thoroughly studied).

How can a ‘rare, uncirculated, unpublished’ photograph of 1860′s slave children by Brady (or his associate - Timothy H. O’Sullivan) be the subject of a stereo view card by Wilson? The Brady attribution just doesn’t add up. (Photo at left from Morgan’s LincolnImages.com was circulated on the web as the one found in North Carolina.)

There needs to be a comparison made of the North Carolina card with the stereo card. I believe that the results will show that the Brady card is a reprint of half of the Wilson card (each side of the stereo card will be slightly different). This will prove that the North Carolina card is not of slave children from the 1860′s but a photograph of two poor boys from Savannah taken in the 1870′s. Still of great interest but not of the significance given it.’

I also did some more Google digging of my own on Wilson and Brady.

Wilson was born in New York in 1827 and arrived in Savannah in 1865. He was a well-known photographer in Savannah for more than 30 years, and marketed himself tremendously in the local newspaper. He produced stereo views of Bonaventure Cemetery and other sites in the city, steamers in Florida, black chimney sweeps in Savannah, Fort Pulaski in Georgia, the Green House in Macon, Ga., rice fields, orange groves, camp scenes, fishing parties and more. His works are in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Brady is renowned for his photographs of the Civil War and portraits of Abraham Lincoln and practically all of the other presidents. He also photographed J.H. Rainey, the first African American member of the House of Representatives. His portraits are in many collections, including the National Portrait Gallery,  Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art.

As his eyesight failed, Brady sent out teams of photographers to capture the war, according to several websites. He also purchased photos from other photographers and stamped them “Photograph by Brady,” without giving many of them credit – to the rancor of those photographers. A photo of the Lakota Chief Red Cloud was taken by Brady photographer Alexander Gardner in 1872 at the studio.

Despite what the experts said, I also found photos from the Civil War era of slave children, including this one by O’Sullivan and this one from Virginia.

Related posts:

1. Buzz is still on story of ‘rare’ slave photo
2. A black family’s photo album
3. Frederick Douglass photo find

But it’s always interesting to see what tony items will be up for sale and how much people are willing to pay for them. As I perused the photos in the flyer, my eyes stopped on an item to be auctioned on the second day:

 An 18k Wedgwood abolitionist pin in a lovely blue velvet case.

I recognized that pin. It was a white Wedgwood cameo with a black male slave kneeling in supplication, his hands outstretched, pleading to be free. Around the edge was inscribed: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”

I had first seen the symbol in the movie “Amazing Grace” about two years ago during a screening at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The movie, released in theaters in 2007, told the life of abolitionist William Wilberforce, who led a campaign in the 18th century to force Parliament to end the slave trade in the British Empire.  

The movie was as amazing as its title, and one of the things that stayed in my head was that symbol. The piece at the auction was a reproduction, and the auctioneer guessed that it was produced in the early 1900s. It was inscribed with the word Wedgwood on the back, along with a few other details.

The sole bid on the pin was from an absentee bidder, and it sold for $325.  The starting price was too high for me. Hopefully, another one will come around or I’ll find one hidden away in some junk item I get at auction.

The original Wedgwood piece was a black and white Jasper medallion, created around 1787 by renowned potter Josiah Wedgwood. An abolitionist, he created it to serve as a symbol for abolitionists fighting the slave trade and to garner support for the anti-slavery movement, according to my Google research. The medallions were used in various ways as political statements: Men had them inlaid in snuff boxes, women wore them as hatpins, brooches and neckaces. They could be found on milk jugs, sugar bowls and tobacco boxes.  

Some medallions were sent to Benjamin Franklin, who was then head of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. The kneeling figure was modeled after the seal of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in 1787 in London.

Interestingly, in 1830, another abolitionist, writer and poet Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, adopted a female version: a kneeling female slave woman (“Am I not a Woman and a Sister”). Years later, Sojourner Truth would make famous her speech in 1854 at the Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention with the same inquiry: “Ain’t I A Woman.”

I love auctions because they are the place to get in touch with history. This one small pin, which measured only 1 ½” x 1 ¾”, opened up a past for me just by being here at this auction. You can find some of the most valuable artifacts in museums, but auctions are among the non-museum sites where you come face-to-face with the day-to-day pieces from people’s personal lives.

After an auction, when I’m going through boxes at home, I wonder about the person who owned these items, who touched them and who used them. And I ask myself: Did they ever wonder if  these fragments from their lives would be held years later by someone else? And by whom?

Related posts:

1. Man & woman anti-slavery tokens
2. An anti-slavery token with a personal history?
3. Remnants of slavery – auction ads & neck shackles