A beautiful example of a carte-de-visite, published and sold by the formerly enslaved Black abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and itinerant preacher Sojourner Truth (1799-1883). This picture (Grigsby, fig.55, session H) is from the sitting which produced what are known as Truth’s “favourite portraits”, and indeed this image would form the basis of the engraved frontispiece for Truth’s 1875 expanded third edition of Narrative of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of Olden Times.
Following her escape to emancipation in 1826, the woman formerly known as Isabella Bomefree or van Wagenen, assumed the name Sojourner Truth on Pentacost of 1843. A fiercely intelligent though illiterate woman, she had an innate sense of her own personhood and self-ownership, borne out through her relationship with her photographed image as both a symbol and a commodity.
In her lifetime, Truth had at least 28 portrait photographs taken of herself across 14 sessions with 6 different photographers. Truth was sitting for portraits from as early as 1863, but crucially, in Detroit on February 16th 1864, Truth filed for copyright of her own image, after which her pictures bear the following statement to the verso: “Entered according to act of Congress in the year 1864, by SOJOURNER TRUTH, in the Clerk’s Office, of the U. S. District Court, for the Eastern District of Mich.”
She sold these pictures, alongside her printed books, through the mail and at her speaking events as a means of subsistence. This is encapsulated in the evocative statement printed beneath the portrait: “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance”. In an 1863 letter from Truth she described the sale of her photographs as “living on my shadow” (Grigsby, p.45).
It was almost unheard of for a woman to copyright her photograph in nineteenth century America–the only other example we’ve encountered is anarchist and labour organiser Lucy Parsons, whose c.1886 cabinet cards were expressly copyright and published by herself. Parsons, also a woman of colour who historians believe to have been born into slavery, may have been inspired by Truth in this venture.
Truth’s understanding of the power of media was transformative in regards to her personal circumstances, as well as her visibility within the causes she championed. “A slave until she was thirty, Isabella was destitute when she entered life as a free woman in 1827. She worked at ill-paid household labour in New York City until she became Sojourner Truth in 1843. Yet after the 1850 publication of her Narrative, she managed to buy a house in Northampton in 1850, a house in Harmonia, Michigan, in 1856, and a house in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the 1860s, in which she dies in 1883. With the exception of $390 that the Freeman’s Bureau paid for relief work in Washington after the Civil War, her means of support were the proceeds from the sale of her books and her “shadows” and donations from her reform minded audiences and supporters. Considering the poverty in which masses remained in the mid-nineteenth century, her persona - as embodied in these objects, proved remunerative” (Painter, 487).
This three quarter length portrait photograph depicts Truth seated at a small table with a vase of flowers beside her, with a piece of knitting in one hand and the trailing thread contrasted against the full black skirt of her dress. The pose is similar to a pre-1864 sitting in which she holds in her lap a framed photograph of her grandson James Caldwell, a member of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, the first all-Black voluntary infantry to fight for the Union in the Civil War.
The substitution of this portrait for her knitting was no less of a political statement and indeed, “[d]uring the Civil War […] knitting acquired new patriotic connotations. No longer merely a feminine domestic art, knitting had become a public sign. When the United States Sanitary Commission was established in April 1861 in order to distribute donations and volunteers to battlefields and hospitals, newspapers published the plea that sewing and knitting societies devote themselves to serving the cause: “Every woman in the country can, at least, knit a pair of woolen stockings, or, if not, can purchase them” and send them to the commission’s depots. Sometimes socks were mailed with poetry and notes to anonymous soldiers” (Grigsby, p.80). In the same period, Truth also taught knitting to emancipated slaves living in Freedmen’s Villages, who often as former field workers lacked such domestic skills as might provide them with a pathway out of agricultural labour in their newly free lives.
Grigsby, D.G. Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadow and Substance. University of Chicago Press, 2015; Painter, N.I. “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known.” The Journal of American History. Vol. 81, No. 2. Sept, 1994. pp.461-492. .
