FIGURE 1

Samuel J. Miller (American; ?– 1888).
Frederick Douglass, 1847/52. Daguerreotype; 14 x 10.6 cm
(5 1/2 x 4 1/8 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago, Major Acquisitions Centennial Endowment (1996.433).

 

The centerpiece of the 1997 exhibition “In Their Own Right: Images of African Americans from The Art Institute of Chicago” was a pre-Civil War daguerreotype of the Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass (fig. 1, left) that the museum had recently acquired. 1 This was not the first time that Douglass had been seen in the museum. His previous appearance had been in person over a century earlier in the Art Institute’s original building, only a few feet from where the daguerreotype would one day be installed. At that time, Douglass was attending the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition as the Commissioner of the Haitian Pavilion. He had been invited to serve in this capacity by the government of Haiti because he had just finished a term as the American minister to that country.

This honor came toward the end of a long and eventful life that had made Douglass the most important African American spokesman of the nineteenth century. His rise to prominence ran parallel with the rise to popularity of the daguerreotype as a medium for portraiture. A small, copper plate with a coating of silver that has been made photosensitive, the daguerreotype was invented in France in 1839, the year after Douglass escaped from slavery. A mulatto born on a Maryland plantation in February 1818, Douglass had made a break for freedom at the age of twenty via the Underground Railroad. Finding his way to New England, he began the speaking career for which the presence of mind we see in the Art Institute’s portrait gave him a natural talent.

Douglass had initially attracted national attention in 1845 as the author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, the first of three autobiographies. 2 Since he was subject to arrest under the Fugitive Slave Act once this book had revealed his identity, he fled to Great Britain until Quaker Abolitionists there raised the money to buy his freedom from his former master. In 1847 he returned to North America free at last from all the constraints of slavery except, of course, prejudice, which he would have to continue fighting the rest of his life. At the end of 1847, he began publishing an influential newspaper 3 that was to promote the Abolitionist cause to every Northern leader right up to President Abraham Lincoln, who met with him twice at the White House before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. After the Civil War, Douglass used his many official honors, including his appointment at the 1893 exposition, to combat the oppression of his race. 4