Taking these images into consideration may help us to feel more fully the historical impact of Douglass’ portrait. According to the census taken the year Agassiz had his daguerreotypes made, the population of South Carolina’s Tidewater parishes numbered over one hundred twenty-six thousand slaves but only forty thousand free whites. In some districts, there was only one free white for every ten enslaved blacks. 9 In the antebellum South, tensions ran high as the Abolitionist movement, gaining momentum in the North, raised the specter of what would happen should the sort of slaves humiliated in the Agassiz documentation ever be in a position to turn their rage on their white masters. The Douglass daguerreotype may even have been made the same year as the Agassiz pictures. Imagine how his portrait would have looked to white residents of Columbia that year, or how it would have looked to the slaves in Agassiz’s daguerreotypes!

Although Douglass was unlikely to have known about Agassiz’s documentation, at the time it was done he was certainly aware of the racist pseudoscience it represented. He devoted part of a commencement address delivered in 1854 at Western Reserve College, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” to an attack on Crania Americana, the book on which Agassiz had relied. 10 Almost four decades later, at the Columbian Exposition, the influence of the ideas Douglass had attacked continued to be seen in Putnam’s design for the fairgrounds, as well as in the updating that Putnam’s Portrait Types gave to Crania Americana and the Agassiz daguerreotypes.

The fair’s only official recognition of African Americans––“Colored People’s Day,” held August 25, 1893––provided Douglass with an occasion on which to express his disgust at these stereotypes. On this one day, blacks were welcomed to the grounds (while whites, presumably, were to stay away). 11 Despite the opposition to the event of the young black firebrand Ida B. Wells, whom he greatly respected, Douglass decided not only to attend, but to give an address. How else was he to reach his own people? Precisely because the day symbolized all of the exposition’s failings, it presented him with an appropriate opportunity to speak out on the issues.

Yet when Douglass arrived to find that the exposition had a huge supply of watermelons on hand, he began to lose heart. Some whites had shown up after all, in order to heckle, and they unnerved him as he began the speech he had prepared, “The Race Problem in America.” According to a newspaper account of him dating from the very beginning of his career, a Douglass performance at the podium entailed more than just “oratory, or eloquence. It was sterner, darker, deeper than these.” The writer likened Douglass, “as he stalked to and fro upon the platform,” to “the Numidian lion.” 12 But that had been nearly fifty years before.

Now Douglass, who was in his mid-seventies, appeared to falter as his age, the heat, the distraction of the heckling, and perhaps the dubiousness of the occasion itself all got the better of him. Then he decided to set aside his text, lay his glasses down on top of it, and continue extempore. “There is no Negro problem,” he proclaimed. “The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.” 13 By all accounts, the talk Douglass delivered that day ranked among the greatest of his life. It was also his last major public utterance. The “Numidian lion” ended his speaking career as the lion in winter he had become.

Unlike Frederick Douglass himself, the Art Institute’s daguerreotype of him is undocumented. He has a vivid immediacy in it, but it is an obscure historical object. Still, because the velvet lining inside the cover of the daguerreotype’s case bears the name of its maker and the city where he was in business––Samuel J. Miller of Akron, Ohio––we have more information about this daguerreotype than about most others of Douglass (or of anyone, for that matter).