6 10 101 https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/54a293636b9225433d69e5b47cb993d5.jpg 2026f1f6eadf4c9fab7133334f13e24f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mirror of Race Subject The topic of the resource Mirror of Race Main Collection Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data ambrotype Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image Sixth Plate (2.75 x 3.25 inches) Factual Commentary Factual Commentary A period slip of paper inserted into the image case (see below) identifies the sitters as “Manuel Ybana Dudagertia, Pedro Ybana D. (bald)”; the English notation “bald” indicates a United States maker and context for the photograph, as do the style of case and the mat, although these materials were imported for the use of photographers in Mexico and other Central and Latin American countries. Interpretive Commentary Interpretive Commentary Latinos, or Hispanics, have been part of the Americas for longer than the northern European colonizers, who began arriving in significant numbers and lasting settlement in North America only in the 1600s. When looking at a photograph such as this one, it is worth remembering that Latinos were living in the lands that became the United States for generations, even centuries, before those lands became states of the Union. We do not know, but it may well be the case that the brothers Manuel and Pedro were just such Latino citizens of the United States. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure008 Title A name given to the resource Manuel and Pedro Ybana Dudagertia Subject The topic of the resource Manuel and Pedro Ybana Dudagertia Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource circa 1860 Type The nature or genre of the resource studio portrait Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Gregory Fried Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Unknown Photographer https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/98b5cd64ea470a37ae547131c7b21d31.jpg 4b820e3f782d5acfecfdaf9233ecd6be Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mirror of Race Subject The topic of the resource Mirror of Race Main Collection Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data daguerreotype Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image Ninth Plate (2 x 2.5 inches) Factual Commentary Factual Commentary Captain Walker became famous as an abolitionist and slave-liberator after he was seized in 1844 at sea while attempting to bring seven escaped slaves to the Bahamas, a colony of the British Empire, where slavery had been abolished. A Florida court sentenced him to be fined and branded on the hand with the letters “S. S.” for “slave stealer.” Abolitionists raised funds to pay Walker’s substantial fine and to secure his release from prison. After his release, Walker traveled for several years as a popular speaker at abolitionist events, and in 1845 he published a book based on his experiences, his Trial and Imprisonment of Captain Jonathan Walker. The photograph below portrays Walker later in life; printed on the back of the card mount for the photograph is an outline of Walker’s life. walkermedwalkerrevmed J. D. Westervelt, Jonathan Walker, cabinet card (circa 1870), collection of Greg French Interpretive Commentary Interpretive Commentary White Suffering and The Branded Hand Martin A. Berger Sometime in 1845, Jonathan Walker (1799-1878) entered the fashionable Boston daguerreotype studio of Southworth & Hawes to sit for an unusual portrait. In contrast to the many middle-class patrons who made their way to portrait studios to have bust- or full-length likenesses of themselves made for family and friends, Walker had agreed to the request of a prominent Boston physician, Henry Ingorsoll Bowditch (1808-1892), to have a commemorative daguerreotype taken of his hand. Just a few years prior, Walker was a little-known New England tradesman and shipwright who had relocated to the sleepy territorial town of Pensacola, Florida. He gained international fame in November of 1844 when convicted by a Florida jury of “aiding and inducing two slaves to run away, and stealing two others.”(1) A white man who had long been opposed to slavery, Walker was known in Pensacola for his unusual determination to treat the slaves and free blacks around him with respect. In June, Walker embarked on a more radical path, consenting to the request of seven enslaved men to sail them several hundred miles to freedom in the Bahamas. Once Parliament’s passage of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act initiated gradual emancipation in British possessions, Canada, to the north, and various Caribbean islands, to the south, became alluring destinations for American slaves. Unfortunately for Walker and his passengers, his small boat was discovered after fourteen days at sea by a passing American sloop; suspicious of seven blacks sailing with one white man in a cramped boat, the captain ordered Walker’s vessel towed back to a Florida port so that the men could explain themselves to authorities. Ardent abolitionists such as Bowditch considered Walker a hero for putting his life and liberty at risk for the sake of American slaves. But even for northerners less committed to the abolitionist struggle, Walker’s story was deemed remarkable for the cruelty of the punishment he stoically endured. After a speedy trial, a Florida judge sentenced Walker “to be placed in the pillory for one hour; then brought into court, and branded in the right hand with the letters SS.; then remanded to prison for fifteen days, and remain there until the fine (one hundred and fifty dollars) and the costs of the prosecution should be paid.”(2) The clearly visible branding scars in the daguerreotype, which stood for “slave stealer,” were intended as a punishment for Walker and as a warning to like-minded whites not to act on their political convictions. The daguerreotype Bowditch commissioned―now in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society―shows Walker’s open right hand resting on a table with its palm facing toward the camera and thumb extended upward. The dark cuff of Walker’s jacket is evident at the left-hand side of the image and a hint of his white, stiffened shirtsleeve visible above and below his wrist. Just under the base of the thumb two raised white scars trace themselves across the lines and wrinkles of Walker’s palm, each of which forms a reversed “S” Daguerreotypes are produced without the aid of negatives. They are made of copper sheets coated with a thin plating of silver that is chemically sensitized to light. Upon exposure to light, a daguerreotype plate produces a mirror image of the object before it, which is why the scars are laterally reversed and the hand appears to be Walker’s left. Because a daguerreotype’s image forms directly on the plate―without mediating negatives―each plate is a unique object from which duplicates are not easily created. The image of Walker’s hand was first and foremost a one-of-a-kind keepsake for a prominent Boston abolitionist who wished to possess a visual reminder of the shipwright’s exploits. The image was seen by small circles of sympathetic men and women who surely passed the image around at intimate gatherings in Bowditch’s home. And yet, despite the limited circulation of the daguerreotype itself, the image of Walker’s branded hand became one of the best-known symbols of the American abolitionist movement. An engraving of the daguerreotype was printed in newspaper accounts of Walker’s ordeal, abolitionist pamphlets, Walker’s bestselling autobiography, and even carved into the imposing funerary obelisk erected to mark his grave upon his death in 1878.(3) Click here to see the Walker Pamplet Walker was feted in the north as soon as he made his way to New York after the last of his court costs were paid by supporters and his release secured. The same abolitionists who raised funds to support Walker’s family during his imprisonment, paid a prominent lawyer to look into his case, and discharged his court fines and costs, now encouraged him to pen an account of his exploits and lecture on his experiences. For several years after his release Walker was a sought-after speaker on the abolitionist lecture circuit who frequently shared the stage with former slaves. Walker and the freemen would recount their harrowing experiences before audiences for the sake of raising concern and funds in the north for the abolitionist cause. His stature was such that newspaper headlines announcing abolitionist lectures routinely listed his name first―or alone―even when he was to appear with such well-known figures as John S. Jacobs, the younger brother of Harriet Jacobs, or the century’s great orator, activist and, later, statesman, Frederick Douglass. The Liberator reported on a joint appearance by Walker and Douglass in August of 1845 under the headline: “Walker Meeting in New Bedford.”(4) It may seem surprising that white newspapers gave greater attention to Walker than Douglass. After all, the white abolitionist spent just eleven months in a Florida jail before his northern supporters paid his court fine and costs, while the former slave endured decades of bondage before escaping on his own to the north. In addition, Douglass was widely acknowledged as an unrivaled speaker who excelled in communicating to audiences the appalling conditions under which slaves lived. But no matter how poignant their experiences and eloquent their testimony, freemen did not enjoy the authority of white abolitionists among European-Americans in the north. White speakers on the abolitionist circuit were valued for their perspectives on slavery, but also for their ability to authenticate the stories told by blacks. The authority of whites is demonstrated by a nineteenth-century publishing convention for slave narratives, whereby publishers routinely included a foreword by a prominent white citizen attesting to the truthfulness of the slave whose story was told in the chapters that followed. The forewords offered tacit assurance to readers that the author of the narrative was a former slave (and not a white impostor hoping to turn a quick buck), as it explicitly vouched for the veracity of the story told. As America’s most famous white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote reassuringly in the preface to Douglass’s bestselling Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845): “I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination; that it comes short of the reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to SLAVERY AS IT IS.”(5) Since Garrison had witnessed none of the events recounted in Douglass’s autobiography, his willingness to lend his name to Douglass’s story was ultimately as important as his choice of words. Much as Garrison vouched for Douglass’s printed account by attaching his name to the autobiography, so Walker bestowed legitimacy on the freeman’s oral testimony through his willingness to share the stage. But Walker’s presence worked on white audiences in other ways as well, allowing them to imagine the centrality of suffering, white martyrs in the anti-slavery movement. The comparatively few white abolitionists who’d been imprisoned, mistreated or martyred for acting on their beliefs became the face of slavery for millions of whites in the north, notwithstanding that it was millions of black Americans who lived under and engaged in daily struggles against the slave system. The white abolitionist organizer and editor, Maria Weston Chapman, lamented how the plight of the occasional white abolitionist distracted white audiences from their attention to the much greater distress of millions of blacks. As she observed, when a white man is arrested for attempting to free slaves: “The whole North, aye, Europe, is unusually moved. Money is poured out, like water, for the prisoner’s family, and to test points of law for the prisoner’s benefit.” Speaking specifically of Walker’s treatment, Frederick Douglass observed that it “was one of the few atrocities of slavery that roused the justice and humanity of the north.”(6) The historian Marcus Wood reminds us that the suffering of the black slave was long associated by whites in Great Britain and the United States with the suffering of Christ. As Wood explains, “the abused and tortured body of the slave was closer to Christ’s experience than were the bodies of free abolitionists. Ultimate suffering at the hands of the wicked implicitly raises the slave victim above the white audience either inflicting or contemplating suffering.”(7) And as Wood points out, the image of the black slave as a Christ-like figure posed a peculiar challenge for even the most radical white abolitionists, since few whites could then conceptualize of blacks as their moral, intellectual, or spiritual equals. Because a belief in the evils of slavery did not equate with a belief in black equality, the specter of suffering blacks being closer to Christ than God-fearing white abolitionists was unsettling to many whites. This is what made the narratives of white abolitionist martyrs so appealing to European-American audiences. While no one could argue that Walker suffered more than the slaves he tried to aid, his suffering appeared nobler, given that it was freely chosen. Like Christ, and unlike slaves who were forced or born into servitude, Walker chose his fate. Walker’s autobiography is filled with references to his chosen suffering and to the religious nature of his cause. He repeatedly wrote of “the act for which I was called to suffer;” “the misery and suffering of imprisonment;” the “severe” pain he endured during and after his branding, which he deemed part of “the most degrading punishments that human invention has produced.”(8) In his detailed recounting of the court-ordered branding, Walker described the scene in the following manner: “When about to be branded, I was placed in the prisoner’s box [in the courtroom]. The Marshall, Ebenezer Dora, formerly of Maine, proceeded to tie my hand to a part of the railing front. I remarked that there was no need of tying it, for I would hold still.”(9) It is a minor but telling detail that Walker recounts his willingness to compliantly present his hand for branding. As wrong as he believes the punishment ordered by the court to be, Walker accepts his sentence as something he is called on to stoically endure. A subsequent press account of his court case took pains to note that Walker, “on Christian grounds objects to any legal [appeal] proceedings in his own behalf, choosing to suffer wrong.”(10) White accounts of Walker’s ordeal consistently presented him as a Christ-like figure who chose to suffer for the cause of abolition. Many of his supporters re-branded the “SS” scars to stand for “soul savior,” “slave savior,” or “salvation to the slave,” making Walker’s links to Christ even more clear by highlighting how black salvation hinged on his sacrifice. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier brought these links before a large reading public in “The Branded Hand” (1846), his famous tribute to Walker. In it he wrote that Walker’s “branded palm shall prophesy, ‘Salvation to the Slave!’” A heated essay appearing in the Boston Chronicle took the imagery a step farther in its conflation of Walker and Christ. The editors wrote of the branding: “This thing which ye have done unto the least of his little ones, ye have done unto Him who died for the slave. Into His hands, still bearing the nail-marks of the cross, have ye burned the literal signet of your malignity to man and human freedom.”(11) Given the like placement of Walker’s brand and the stigmata on Christ’s hands, few would have missed the visual analogy as Walker moved among abolitionist crowds at the conclusion of his talks, holding out his marked right palm for eager audiences in the 1840s.(12) So fixated was Walker on his own suffering, that the first edition of his 119-page published account of his exploits contains not a word on the fate of the seven men who set off with him from Florida. Several of them are not even named in the text. The enslaved men who enlisted Walker’s help, initiating the chain of events described in the autobiography, are inexplicably dropped from the narrative at the moment of Walker’s arrest. We know from surviving accounts of Walker’s abolitionist talks that he would hold up his hand to audiences so that they might view his famous scars. At the conclusion of his lectures, one can imagine Walker passing among eager audiences, allowing men and women to take his middle-aged hand in their own to inspect the scars up close. Younger, less restrained, observers may even have touched the raised letters. The daguerreotype allowed this intimate ritual to be repeated by Bowditch and his associates at their leisure. Produced on a “Ninth Plate (2 x 2.5 inches),” The Branded Hand was created on one of the smallest daguerreotype plates in circulation, measuring just 2 x 2.5 inches. Even with the inclusion of its protective casing, the framed image was diminutive. To see it clearly one needed to take it in hand; while women and children may have used both hands to cradle the daguerreotype, a man could easily have grasped it in one. To hold and study the daguerreotype is to see the stigma burned into the copper plate as a visual reminder of Walker’s ordeal, and to place an overlay of the “SS” brand across one’s own palm. For the elite, white viewers who cradled the daguerreotype, the mere desire to hold the image attested to their own abolitionist credentials, as it aligned Walker’s more famous hand with their own. With the superimposition of his “SS” scars on their palms, the daguerreotype may also have flattered viewers into imagining his or her own “suffering” (either emotional or financial) for the noble abolitionist cause. As it raised interest in and awareness of the fight against slavery, the Branded Hand daguerreotype helped to ensure that abolition would remain linked in the minds of white northerners to the dedication and suffering of European-Americans. In the odd logic of its day, the plight of blacks was publicized through attention to the experiences of whites whose more modest―and often imagined―suffering bore little relation to that experienced by millions of American slaves. Martin A. Berger is Director of the Visual Studies Graduate Program and Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent book is Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2011). NOTES (1) Jonathan Walker, The Branded Hand: The Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola, Florida, for Aiding Slaves to Escape from Bondage (Boston: Anti-Slavery Society, 1848), 32. (2) Walker, Branded Hand, 40. (3) For engraved reproductions of the daguerreotype image, see “The Branded Hand,” Prisoner’s Friend: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Criminal Reform, Philosophy, August 13, 1845, 79; “The Man with the Branded Hand,” Zion’s Herald, July 12, 1899, 877; and the title page in each of Walker’s many editions of his autobiography The Branded Hand. For the popularity of newspaper engravings of the branded hand image, see Hazel Wolf, On Freedom’s Altar: The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), 67. (4) “Communications: Jonathan Walker and John S. Jacobs on Sunday,” The North Star, March 31, 1848; “Walker Meeting in New Bedford,” The Liberator, August 22, 1845, 135. (5) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: FQ Classics, 2007), 10; when John S. Jacobs published an account of his life in The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, the journal’s white editors prefaced his essay with their comment that “The writer of these autobiographical sketches has, since his escape from slavery, held positions of trust in free countries, and every statement may be relied on.” In “A True Tale of Slavery,” The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation (February 7, 1861), 85. (6) Maria Weston Chapman, The Liberty Bell (Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, 1845), 205-06; Douglass quoted in “The Branded Hand,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 2, 1878, 1. (7) Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000), 243. (8) Walker, Branded Hand, 101, 20, 40, 86. (9) Walker, Branded Hand, 40-43. (10) Walker, Branded Hand, 44; C.M. Bruleigh, “Tour on the Cape,” Liberator, February 28, 1845, 35. (11) For whites’ reinterpretation of the “SS” branding, see Walker, Branded Hand, 108; “Walker Meeting in New Bedford,” The Liberator, August 22, 1845, 135; “Jonathan Walker,” Christian Reflector, August 21, 1845, 136; “The Branded Hand,” Liberator, September 5, 1845, 1; also, see Frank Edward Kittredge, “The Man with the Branded Hand,” The New England Magazine, November 1898, 369. “The Branded Hand,” Boston Chronicle, reprinted in Elihu Burritt, Sparks from the Anvil (London: Charles Gilpin, 1847), 97-98. (12) [Anti-Slavery Society], The Branded Hand, pamphlet #9 (Philadelphia: Anti-Slavery Society, c.1846), 34. For abolitionist’s empathetic imaginings of themselves and their family members as suffering slaves, see Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolition: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 237-39, 242. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure007 Title A name given to the resource The Branded Hand of Captain Jonathan W. Walker Subject The topic of the resource The Branded Hand of Captain Jonathan W. Walker Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1908) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource circa 1845 Type The nature or genre of the resource studio portrait Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Massachusetts Historical Society Collection (Photo 1.373) https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/33a1049fc0d8b5cfe501e9574bd7699e.tif 7519191e31bc21d48cd3499a74e3c508 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mirror of Race Subject The topic of the resource Mirror of Race Main Collection Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Ambrotype Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image Quarter Plate (3.25 x 4.25 inches) Factual Commentary Factual Commentary In this highly unusual image, human hair, placed between the glass cover and photographic plate, frames the image. It was not uncommon for family members to place locks of their loved ones hair together with their portraits, pinning the hair into the mat, but this portrait incorporates the hair into the composition of the photograph itself. We do not know who the woman or the baby were, but the type of photograph (an ambrotype) and its style of case and mat suggest a date of the late 1850s to the early 1860s. Exposure times in early photography could be quite long, and so a baby or toddler would often have to be held to prevent a blurred portrait. The African America woman holding this white baby still is almost certainly its nanny. Was she enslaved, or a free servant living in a free state? We do not know. Interpretive Commentary Interpretive Commentary What is so arresting in this image is the juxtaposition between the photographic plate and the human hair adorning the composition. Why is it there? Whose hair is it? Does it belong to the woman or to the baby? While locks of hair were often treasured as keepsakes of distant or even dead friends, spouses, and relatives, the inclusion of the hair in the photograph is unusual and even jarring because it does not fit in with our regular expectation of what a photographic plate should include. The child is almost certainly the focus of this portrait. As noted in the factual commentary, early photography usually involved a relatively long exposure time, so in portraits of very young children, we often see an adult present to keep the child from moving and blurring the image. The baby sits in the center of the composition, clearly the focus. Also, the baby’s clothing is tinted blue; such tinting cost extra, and it also indicates that this image, as a portrait, is at least intended as a portrait of the child. If the photograph was intended as a portrait of the white child, then the young African American woman was probably the child’s caretaker or nanny. But is she a free servant, employed by the family, or a slave? Her clothes are ordinary but good quality, and she wears a brooch and a ring that are tinted gold, all of which would be quite unusual for a slave. Even if she was free, what does her inclusion in this portrait mean? Was she simply used as tool to hold the child still? Keeping a servant was expensive; was the intent to display the family’s wealth? Also, keeping a servant of color was a status symbol for whites, a sign of social ascendancy and racial dominance available only to the elite. Or was she intended to be part of the portrait, as a valued member of the household? The fact that some of her possessions are tinted in the photograph indicates at least some attention for her as more than a mere prop. Or was it some combination of these motives? Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure005 Title A name given to the resource Nanny, Baby, Human Hair Subject The topic of the resource Unknown Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource circa 1860 Type The nature or genre of the resource Studio Portrait Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Greg French Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Unknown Photographer https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/6402395bbb522a2b1c9da62f84cd6d81.jpg 51f54d64d437f8ff9cf27c4c02f5bb6c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mirror of Race Subject The topic of the resource Mirror of Race Main Collection Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Daguerreotype Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image Half Plate (4.25 x 5.5 inches) Factual Commentary Factual Commentary John Jabez Edwin Mayall operated a studio in Philadelphia in the 1840s, until he moved permanently to London in 1846. This portrait is probably from his last years in Philadelphia, around 1845 or 1846. It can be identified as a Mayall by the distinctive inlaid, octagonal table, which he employed as a studio prop in Philadelphia. Mayall used this table in a portrait of Albert Sands Southworth, the partner of Josiah Johnsohn Hawes, who together operated the famed Southworth and Hawes photography studio in Boston, MA. That image may be seen in Sotheby’s April 27, 1999 auction catalogue, The David Feigenbaum Collection of Southworth & Hawes and Other 19th-Century Photographs, sale 7295 (New York: Sotheby’s, 1999), p. 46. Mayall was a highly skilled photographer, with a good eye for light and composition; he exhibited at the London Fair in 1851. In London, he quickly became a popular photographer among the aristocracy and upper classes. An example is this portrait below of Lord Brougham (1778-1868), a British nobleman and politician who was an early and vigorous advocate for eradication of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery in the British empire. Notice the announcement at the bottom of the back of the card: “All Mr. Mayall’s productions are published by Marion & Co., 22 & 23 Soho Square, London W”; Mayall sold prints of such famous people to the public. Mayall’s success as a portraitist to the upper echelons of British society won him an invitation to take portraits of Queen Victoria and the royal family. He subsequently made a considerable fortune mass-marketing these portraits, such as this one of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Beatrice (1857-1944). J. J. E. Mayall, Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1868), Gregory Fried collection. J. J. E. Mayall, H.R.H. The Princess Beatrice,” carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1862), Gregory Fried collection. Interpretive Commentary Interpretive Commentary What constitutes “whiteness”? John Jabez Edwin Mayall was one of the most technically and artistically accomplished of the early photographers. His portraits would have commanded high prices, and the two young women posed here, who look alike enough to be sisters, come from the upper class of Philadelphia society. We can see this in the expensive clothes they wear, their elaborately curled hair, and in their jewelry ― the young woman on the left holds a pencil on a long gold chain. But wealth alone is not enough to mark whiteness. Is whiteness marked by skin tone or facial features or style of hair? Or does it also involve more subtle social cues? Whiteness in mid-19th century America was a virtually indispensible qualification for access to the higher reaches of society. Where do we see this in what is an otherwise normal portrait? Does the whiteness of these young woman lie also in their self-possession, the ease of their unusually relaxed and intimate portrait, in which they casually lock arms, one of them smiling gently at us? It is a portrait like this that reminds us that most early photography was made for the clients closest friends and family. What characteristics did this one seek to convey, and to what extent can we read the privileges and power of whiteness even in such an image? Consider that Mayall was successful enough to become an official photographer of Queen Victoria in England. Mayall produced carte-de-visite portraits of the queen and her family for sale to the public, such as the one below of the queen and the children morning her husband and their father, Prince Albert (1819-1861). royalfamilymed J.J.E. Mayall, The Royal Family Mourning Prince Albert, carte de visite (circa 1862), collection of Gregory Fried The royal family was one of the touchstones for what it meant to be white in that time. What qualities would Mayall have had to be able to convey in his portraiture to have this degree of success, and how do these features differ from the photographs of people excluded from the category of white? Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure004 Title A name given to the resource Two Young Women Subject The topic of the resource Unknown Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource John Jabez Edwin Mayall (American, 1810-1901) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource circa 1846 Type The nature or genre of the resource Portrait Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Gregory Fried Collection https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/45cacb13a88b6fc8146e7937a9ce9812.tif 7ed69105fb52c80316a5bb2415b9f8ea Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mirror of Race Subject The topic of the resource Mirror of Race Main Collection Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Daguerreotype Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image Half Plate (4.25 x 5.5 inches) Factual Commentary Factual Commentary Very little is known about this image, although based on the style of the mat and case, it probably dates from the early to mid-1850s. We hope that further research will tell us more about the two warriors portrayed. The posed scene of physical combat is quite rare for an early photograph, as action shots were virtually impossible to take; these two subjects would have had to hold still in this pose for many seconds, perhaps even a minute. Interpretive Commentary Interpretive Commentary Although we do not know much about this photograph, the size of the image (a Half Plate (4.25 x 5.5 inches) daguerreotype) means it would have been quite expensive at the time (the early 1850s). This, combined with the fact that it is a dramatically posed studio portrait, suggests that the photographer may have made this photograph for display as promotion for the studio. Apart from the mystery of who the two men were, this photograph raises a number of questions. For example, how did these two Native Americans in full regalia come to be in a formal studio setting, possibly in a city? Were they ambassadors from their tribe, for example, who were invited by the photographer to have their portrait taken while they passed through or stayed in town on their mission? Was the combat pose something chosen by the subjects of the photograph, or was it suggested to them by the photographer, as a way to play to expectations of whites that the "Indians" were a savage race? Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure003 Title A name given to the resource Two Warriors Subject The topic of the resource Unknown Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource circa 1850 Type The nature or genre of the resource Staged Studio Scene Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Greg French Collection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Unknown Photographer https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/7fcc929ba86042b5e607c166e52e4307.tif 0c31aa29c3f04b464a8fa8e907872248 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mirror of Race Subject The topic of the resource Mirror of Race Main Collection Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Daguerreotype Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image Sixth Plate (2.75 x 3.25 inches) Factual Commentary Factual Commentary Princess Victoria Kamamalu Ka’ahumanu, 1838-1866, was the sister of King Kamehameha IV, who reigned in Hawai’i from 1854 to 1863. She was the granddaughter of Kamehameha the Great, who founded the kingdom by uniting Hawai’i, and she was presumptive heir to the throne when she died. When her brother the king died in 1863, she was serving the kingdom as Premier (Kuhina Nui), as she had since 1855, and in this role, she had the power to appoint his successor. She named another brother, Lot Kapuaiwa, as king (Kamehameha V), but she herself had in fact been queen regent for the one day (Nov. 30) during which she made this appointment. In this photograph, taken around 1855, she would have been about 17 years old, and probably already serving as Premier. Interpretive Commentary Interpretive Commentary Hawai'i occupies a distinct place in the history of race and identity in American history. In part because the Hawaiians continued under their own rule until the 1890s, with a royal family granted respect by the resident Americans and Europeans, the color prejudice that afflicted the distant mainland did not have the same effect on these islands ― despite the fact that the Hawaiians suffered the effects of colonization. This image in particular illustrates the determination of the Hawaiians to maintain their dignity and autonomy, despite the cultural, economic, and political power of the United States. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure002 Title A name given to the resource Princess Victoria Kamamalu Subject The topic of the resource Princess Victoria Kamamalu Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hugo Stangenwald Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource circa 1855 Type The nature or genre of the resource Studio Portrait Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Greg French Collection https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/e3f52457558b4c7855b2a41e9c14e611.jpg e62b5e2ebc782528d0eb10fef8d44510 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mirror of Race Subject The topic of the resource Mirror of Race Main Collection Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Ambrotype Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image Quarter Plate (3.25 x 4.25 inches) Factual Commentary Factual Commentary Little is known about this image. The setting is a photographer’s studio, because we can see a backdrop behind the figures. The two young men are both wearing working men’s clothes, rather than sporting attire. Judging by the photographic process (ambrotype) and the style of the clothes and the brass mat, this ambrotype probably dates to the Civil War period (1861-65) or possibly the late 1850’s. We do not know who the photographer and the two men were. Interpretive Commentary Interpretive Commentary Interpretive Commentary 1: The Mirror Image, by Gregory Fried This photograph is emblematic for the Mirror of Race project as a whole. It depicts two young men of apparently different races ― a black man and a white man ― confronting each other in a boxing stance. They pose as opponents in what was a notoriously bloody and dangerous sport of the period: bare-knuckle boxing. This violent sport seems a ready metaphor for race relations not just of that era but for most of American history: wesee them poised on the brink of combat, defenses ready, prepared to attack. And yet the antagonists mirror each other, or more correctly, they pose themselves identically: each facing the other, with right leg forward, right arm out to block, left hand back at the chest, ready to strike. Their outstretched arms overlap, and we now see that the photographer has composed them in such a way their entire stance forms a unitary image with strikingsymmetry.― The story of race in America is often one in which antagonists pose themselves and oppose others as distinct groups with separate identities and separate destinies. Race is one of the most combustible elements in our society, always poised, like these two boxers, on the verge of explosion and violence. Although the specific idea of race, as a set of characteristics that are biologically innate, is one that the white Europeans imposed upon others, whether “native” or “imported” human beings, the fact of group identification and opposition is not new to Europeans. Nevertheless, since the rise of biological racism in the late 18th century, the dynamic of belonging, difference and exclusion has largely, if not exclusively, played itself out in terms of race in America. And yet, despite the racialist notion that race separates us, our history has entwined us in our opposition. Even victims of racism sometimes adopt, internalize and apply the racialist mentality to themselves and to others. Our history has bound us together in a symmetry of belief and a unity of experience thatwe often do not recognize. What is the meaning of race? Is it merely a biological concept, or has it also come include cultural components, so that what we refer to as “race” means much than a person’s genetic composition? What is the extent of race’s role in our history and in our future? Is race real, or is it a fiction that, once imposed, takes on a grotesque pseudo-reality of its own? To what extent do those who have been the victims of racial categorization go on to mirror and thereby perpetuate the racialist way of thinking? Is race the original sin of the American founding, one that can be expiated so that the nation may be redeemed ― or is it the fundamental betrayal, a testimony to the hypocrisy of an experiment that must necessarily fail because grim realitycontradicts its stated ideals? The goal of the Mirror of Race is to explore questions such as these without a preordained notion of what the answers are. The project seeks to look and to look closely at images like this one of the boxers so that we can both respond to the raw individuality of what we see and to reflect critically upon ourselves and upon our own presuppositions by looking intothis mirror of the past. Returning to the two boxers, then, and looking closely: let’s not forget that this photograph is a pose, and not everything may be as it seems. First, it is worth remembering that this is a staged scene in a photographer’s studio, so it can’t be a photograph of an actual fight. As an ambrotype, it is a unique image, so it could not even have been used for widespread promotion of a fight. Such images were overwhelmingly made as personal objects, to be shared with friends and family. So it is more likely that these two young men were friends than that they were genuine opponents in a boxing match. And so in looking closely, we feel compelled to ask, who were these two young men, and what does this boxing pose mean? Notice the clothes: while not particularly fancy or fashionable, they look sturdy and well made; both young men wear good shoes and jaunty caps. These youths might both be tradesmen, striking a boxing pose as a playful way to demonstrate their pluck or their interest in the sport, which was one the most popular for working-classmen at the time. Looking again, we’d also probably say that the man on the left looks obviously looks black, the one on the right, white. The fact that the photographer’s studio has added a light tinting of pink to the cheek of the man on the right, but not to the man on the left, lends further supportto the raced identification of the men. But can we be so sure of what we see? Certainly, many if not most Americans looking at this image would “see” the man on the left “as” black, the one on the right “as” white. But in the history of race in America, seeing isn’t everything. The notorious one-drop rule, which came fully into force only by the mid-19th century, decreed that even a single African ancestor would make a person “negro,” no matter how white he or she looked. By the one-drop rule, then, the man on the right could be of mixed-race descent and therefore look white but be black ― at least according to the racialistlogic. Is he white or black, then? We just don’t know. But one goal of the Mirror of Race project is to get us ― we as viewers ― to look into these images as mirrors that reflect on ourselves and on the assumptions that we bring to our seeing. The fact that we do not know more about these two people than what we see forces us to confront our own need to locate people on a racial map. I am asserting that our lack of knowledge about an image such as this can be a positive thing. Imagine being told the racial identity of these two men, as a matter of historical fact: this would allow us to place them and the image into the convenient categories we already are familiar with. But not knowing displaces us in a way that makes possible an examination of what it is we want to know. Just as we do not know about these two men of the past, we also do not know about the strangers we meet in our daily lives today. The difference is that, while our everyday presumptions and assumptions generally remain unexamined, the photograph has the power to arrest us and give us pause to reflect on what we desire to know, what that desire means, and whether thatdesire it is even valid. So, why do we tend to see the man on the right as white and the man on the left as black? Largely, because our seeing of race in America has been defined by the influence of the one-drop rule. We tend to see darkskin as black, light as white. But can we also learn to see that the one-drop rule is entirely arbitrary? If the one-drop rule were reversed, perhaps the man on the left could be “white.” Why do we not see anyone with a hint of “white” features as white, rather than the reverse? The obvious answer is that the one-drop rule developed historically as a defense of white supremacy and white racial purity, so that any deviation from that purity, whether seen or unseen in a specific individual, had to be proscribed. Still, the question is, why does our society still largely follow this rule in our seeing? Even those most committed to ending racism still tend to see race according to this rule. Moreover, can and should we learn to see otherwise? Is it even possible to see in a manner that is not racialized? If it were possible, then the two young men in this photograph truly would mirror each other as sharing in the qualities essential to being human, without the distorting mediation of race. But it would also be a distortion to forget the history and the historical power of race, to pretend that it no longer has its effect on us. Somehow, we must find this balance: to see the influence of race on our historical ways of seeing each other while at the same time seeing beyond race to what unites us as humanbeings. Annotated Bibliography For a helpful introduction to the history of the one-drop rule in America, see F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1991). Interpretive Commentary 2: The History and Cultural Context of Bare-Knuckle Boxing, by GregoryFried Boxing: From Greco-Roman Sport to Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting Fist fighting as a sport has ancient roots in the West. The ancient Greeks included boxing as one of the events in the Olympic games. The Romans, who admired many elements of Greek culture, also adopted boxing. Like wrestling, a sport which the Greeks and the Romans both practiced, boxing was not strictly speaking a martial art: it had no direct relevance to the modes of actual military combat ― the armor, weapons, and tactics ― used in these societies. Instead, it served as a ritualized display of combat and violence, one in which the antagonists stood against each other with no weapons and no armor. Because of this, the appeal of this form of combat was that the opponents had to face each other purely on the basis of their own physical strength, endurance and skill. The purity of this form of ritual combat appealed to the Greeks and Romans because it served as an elemental display of the physical and moral virtues essential to their conception of manliness: the courage to confront the opponent with one’s own unequipped body, the stamina to endure intense pain and a long struggle, the willingness to strike and to draw blood at close quarters, and the mercilessness needed to defeat the opponent by rendering him simply unable to continue fighting, by either knocking himout or disabling him entirely. After the fall of Rome in 411, the practice of boxing disappeared, because the specifically Greco-Roman culture of organized sport ended and because the emerging culture of Christianity was antithetical to boxing. This is not to say that people stopped fighting and using their fists to do so; rather, it was boxing as an organized sport, with recognized rules and audience participation, which disappeared. It reappeared more than 1000 years later, in 18th century England. There is an important distinction to be made between bare-knuckle boxing and the kind of boxing we are more familiar with today, which requires the use of equipment such as padded gloves, mouth guards and the institution timed rounds, and the like. Such equipment and regulation is intended to protect the opponents from serious bodily injury. There was no such protection in ancient boxing and in 19th century bare-knuckle boxing. The Greeks used to wrap the boxers’ hands with leather straps, but this was to protect the boxer’s hands, not to protect the opponent from dangerous blows, and the Romans, when they used gloves, often reinforced them with lead and iron, or even with spikes. (For an image of Greek boxers using leather straps see this image on Tuft’s Perseus Project website) Bare-knuckle boxing does not even provide this kind of protection to the hands of the boxers. And the fight continued until one man was unable to go on. The point of this was simple, and it goes back to the ideal of the primal, agonistic contest prevalent among the Greeks and Romans: the boxer is supposed to display himself as a man, and this means being willing to endure the possibility of flowing blood, great pain, andeven crippling injury and death. Bare-knuckle boxing emerged from the culture of the duel, which in Europe had its roots in the medieval practice of jousting and chivalry’s code of honor. We tend to think of duels as involving two men facing each other with pistols or swords, with clear rules of engagement including the presence of seconds for each of the two opponents. Dueling served as a defense and assertion of a man’s honor, and as such it was necessarily a public display, even if the audience included only the seconds of the dueling parties. Offering to risk his own life preserved a man’s honor in the face of an insult, particularly when that offer was accepted by the offending man; the duel itself did not have to result indeath or even in the spilling of blood to uphold each participant’s honor. Dueling was originally the prerogative only of the ruling orders: the knights and aristocracy of the Medieval and early modern eras, as only these classes could be men of honor. But the culture of honor, and of fighting to defend one’s honor, spread throughout society. Fist fighting was the duel for everyman: it required no expensive weapons or equipment. An affronted man could call out his opponent, and they might fight, without set rules, until one gave up. It is also clear that bare-handed fighting before a paying audience had become common in the village and city fairs of England in the mid-1600’s, after the end of the ascendency of the Puritans, who took a dim view of spectacles andviolence other than in the service of God. Fist fighting as an organized sport got its start in the 1720’s, when permanent theaters for this form of combat began to open. The boxers themselves came from the working class, and often from occupations whose form of labor demanded the greatest physical strength and exertion: watermen, blacksmiths and the like. Boxing received backing from both middle-class investors, such as promoters and theater-owners, as well as from gentlemen and aristocrats who were eager to patronize the sport, to engage in betting and the excitement of the spectacle, and to reward the victors with cups and prizes. There were “champions” and “challengers,” and contenders fought for glory and a cash prize, but what this shows is that this form of fighting was no longer a defense of one’s personal honor against a specific insult: it had become a defense of one’s honor against all comers as the best fighter. Jack Broughton, a powerful waterman, became England’s first celebrated national champion; he opened his own theater for the sport, and in the 1740’s developed a set of rules for matches. As Dennis Brailsford has argued in Bareknuckles: A Social History of Prize-Fighting, these rules were designed not so much to protect the health of the contestants but rather to ensure the reliability of the matches so that spectators could bet with confidence. The rules included: a clearly marked stage for the fighting; a fixed time limit for a man to go down; an absolute ban on men other than the contenders entering the fray; the selection of umpires to decide disputes; and a prohibition against hitting a downed adversary or seizing him by thehair or below the waist (Brailsford, 8-9). Despite these rules, this form of boxing remained a bloody, brutal and dangerous sport. Matches frequently ended in serious injury, maiming and death. The violent cruelty of bare-knuckle boxing, its popularity with raucous elements of the lower classes, and its association with gambling were all factors that provoked more respectable segments of society, particularly those upholding Christian ideals of behavior, to condemn the sport as barbaric and to advocate banning it by law. But its popularity with gentlemen and aristocrats, and its patronage by several royal princes, ensured that this form of boxing would continue. Successful boxers offered themselves, alongside fencing and staff-fighting masters, as instructors to the gentry in the art of pugilism as a form of manly self-defense. Jack Broughton realized that however much gentlemen might enjoy boxing as a spectator sport, they had no intention of competing in the prize-fighting ring themselves, and they would be reluctant to risk their own teeth and faces in barehanded training. So he instituted the use of padded gloves for the instruction ofgentlemen (Brailsford, 9-10). Race and Boxing It is essential for the understanding of boxing in this period to remember that it has its roots in a culture of honor. One might fight with fists to uphold one’s personal honor against an insult, or one might enter the ring to uphold one’s public honor as a champion, but the necessary condition in either case was that the opponent be a person whom one might honorably fight. A child or a woman, in this context, could not ordinarily be a legitimate opponent, because the code of honor held that such persons must be defended from violence, not subjected to it. The code of honor also held that a man must be willing to risk himself, and thereby prove himself as a man, against another man who ― as much as you might hate him personally ― was also a man of honor. Fighting a criminal conveyed no honor: one might beat him into submission, but to stand up, man against man in a boxing match with a dishonorable person, would dishonor the better man as well And so fist―-fighting as a public sport or as a private extension of the culture of the duel presumed an essential equality between the contestants: each must be a person capable of bearing a man’s honor in society. (There was, of course, a separate code of honorfor women, but it did not include physical combat!) The question for our purposes then is: could a black man fight a white man in a bare-knuckle match? Because doing so would indicate that the black man was being recognized as an equal. And this recognition would not come only from the opponent in the ring, but from all those willing to participate as seconds, referees, financial backers and spectators. Would this be possible in 19th century America? The remarkable thing is that black Americans did become renowned boxers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries ― but in England, not in America. Bill Richmond was a 13-year-old servant on Staten Island in 1777 during the American Revolution. A commander of the British forces, General Lord Percy, admired the spirit and the look of the boy and brought him back as his servant to England. There, Lord Percy gave Richmond an education and supported him in learning a trade as cabinet-maker. Richmond grew up strong and tall, better educated than most English workingmen, and sure of his own dignity. His sense of self-worth made it impossible for him to back down from insults, and he began to gain a reputation as an indomitable fighter. He went on to become a winning prize-fighter (although never national champion), and he parlayed his success into a business as a prosperous and fashionable tavern-owner in London, as a boxing promoter, and as a boxing trainer sought after by aspiring working-class prize-fighters as well as aristocrats and gentlemen. Although in his youth he might be called a “black devil” (and those who did so paid for it with a fight), his color was no bar to his career in the sporting world; he was treated with respect by theworking class sporting public, as well as by noblemen and gentry. Tom Molineux was a man of obscure origin, either from Virginia or Maryland, who made his way to New York as a dockworker and from their to London in 1809. He had already learned a rough-and-ready fist-fighting from his working days, and he sought out Bill Richmond as a promoter. In the young and powerful Molineux, Richmond believed he had found a black man who could win the title of champion of all England. Molineux trained with Richmond, and they challenged Tom Cribb, the reigning English champion, in 1810. Molineux fought well, but lost after a long fight. They challenged Cribb again in 1811, but Richmond could not get Molineux to discipline himself in training or in life: the young athlete wasted his health on food, drink and womanizing; Cribb beat him quickly and soundly, breaking his jaw. There were other black boxers in England as well, but the particular significance of Richmond and Molineux was that neither society nor the sporting world made race an obstacle to their highest ambitions, even though those ambitions weren’t realized. Furthermore, they were Americans, but their nationality did not count against them either. Not that color wasn’t an obstacle; the fact that Richmond and Molineux were in England without family or established connections, and that the black community was poor and dispersed, made it more difficult than it would have been for white Englishmen to raise funds and maintain patrons. But certainly Richmond’s success, if not as a champion, then at least as a sportsman, businessman and gentleman, demonstrates that color was not an absolute barrier. If we look across the Atlantic at this same time period, it is remarkable, as Elliott J. Gorn has observed in The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America, that Americans ― who were otherwise so eager to find ways of “twisting the British lion’s tail” ― took no particular interest in the Molineux-Cribb championship fights (Gorn, 34). While it is true that formalized, bare-knuckle prize fighting did not really catch on in the United States until the 1820’s, this does not fully explain the lack on interest in the Molineux-Crib saga. After all, here was an American challenger to the champion of the Mother Country, and this in a sport that put the very claim to manliness of the nation at stake!But still this drama had no resonance in Molineux’s native land. The reason for this was of course the cultural meaning of race and the variation of that meaning from context to context. In 1810 and 1811, a young America was still committed to slavery, and slavery demanded a corresponding commitment to the color line.― As we have seen, boxing in this era was an extension of the culture of the dueland the code of honor. In his book, Honor and Slavery, Ken Greenberg has shownhow Americans of African descent, most prominently in the antebellum South, butalso to a large extent in the North, had to be excluded by the logic of race-basedslavery from activities and practices that demonstrated and certified a man’shonor. Greenberg explains the meaning of the duel with pistols, especially aspracticed in the South (it was rare for Northerners to duel): It is easy for a modern observer to misunderstand the central point of the duel. Although some men dueled in order to kill a hated adversary, the vast majority dueled in order to demonstrate that they possessed the central virtue of men of honor: they did not fear death. The central purpose of the duel was not to kill, but to but to be threatened with death. Hence, the exchange of shots on a dueling ground should be thought of as a double gift exchange. Each man shot a bullet and gave his adversary a chance to demonstrate that he did not fear death; honor was more important than life. And each man allowed his adversary to shoot at him, and therefore paid him the compliment of acknowledging his social equality. Men, after all,only dueled with their social equals. (Greenberg, 74) Of course, we are talking about fist-fighting, not dueling with pistols. But the larger point is that, while it had a very specific form for the aristocratic upper classes of the South, the ethos of the dueling resonated throughout the country in this period. Fist-fighting was the poor man’s duel: no equipment was required, and one could call out an offender on the spot.And let’s not forget: bare-knuckle boxing could be lethal, too. Combat in any form of duel that adhered in some recognizable way to the code of honor required that each party in the encounter regard the opponent as an equal at least in this: that the adversary be a person against whom either victory or defeat could be honorable. As Greenberg shows, it was for this reason that slaves were excluded by definition from dueling. This necessarily included any form of competition, like boxing, that was related to the ethos of dueling ― namely, a way to demonstrate one’s manhood and therefore one’s worthiness for freedom. One could whip a slave like an animal, but one could not fight him like a man. To do so would contradict the very basis of the justification for slavery: that the slave prefers the certainty of life under slavery to the uncertainty of deadly combat for the sake of freedom, that consequently the slave has no honor, that he does not share in the rights and privileges of manhood, and that he may therefore be treated as a possession and violently coerced into labor if need be. The rise of ideological racism in the 19th century as the primary justification for the specific enslavement of Africans and their descendants (rather than, say, of any man deemed dishonorable and therefore not truly a man) meant that even freed slaves could not be treated as fully equal in the sense that they could expect to meet a white man on the field of honor. As Elliott Gorn has argued, even fights between slaves themselves were generally discouraged, because of the threat to the owner’s property and because the practice might undermine the discipline of the slaveholding regime (Gorn, 34-35). Even in the rare cases that slave-owners trained slaves to fight for sport and gambling, the practice was more like another popular sport of the period, cockfighting, which pitted animal against animal. Slaves were not allowed claim the rights of honor even with respect to each other. To allow this would set a precedent of mutually acknowledged self-worth that the slave-master could not tolerate, because having one’s honor acknowledged even by one’s fellowslaves could lead to more dangerous ambitions for securing one’s dignity. The Photograph With this cultural history in mind, let’s look again at the image of the two boxers. I have argued in my other interpretive commentary on this photograph, “The Mirror Image,” that despite appearances, we cannot be completely sure of the racial identity of the men. But obviously the force of this image is that a black man appears to be confronting a white man, and their at-ready stance indicates that they are prepared for a fight according to the formal rules of bare-knuckle boxing. Furthermore, the image strongly suggests the equality of the two men: they are of about the same height, their clothes indicate a similar class background, they strike the same pose, and they occupy symmetical positions in the composition. This is striking because it seems to contradict everything we have learned so far about the racial politics of combat sports during this period of American history. We can draw several possible conclusions from this. One is that this photograph is an anomaly, a deviation from the standard cultural practices, and that we simply cannot know the circumstances that gave rise to it. Another is that despite the overall accuracy of the history we have sketched, actual historical reality was much more complicated and might have permitted such an image in contexts that our general overview could not account for. Consider the experience of Frederick Douglass, a man born into slavery who escaped to freedom and became one ofthe nations greatest abolitionist orators and activists. A turning point in Douglass’slife came when his master rented him out to work with a notorious slave-breaker,Edward Covey, in order to tame Douglass’s rebellious spirit. Covey beat Douglassseveral times for insubordination, but finally Douglass fought back, a daringstep that could have cost him his life. Douglass and Covey battled for hours,and the struggle ended in a draw. But a draw was tantamount to victory for Douglassbecause Covey had failed to make him submit, and Douglass had successfully assertedhis independence as a man ― in principle if not in fact, since he was still aslave. The beating had been transformed into a metaphorical duel. This was thedecisive turning point in his self-conception, and although he did not gain hisfreedom for several years, that freedom became his single-minded goal. Later,when Douglass had become a leading abolitionist and went on the road to advocatefor the rights of blacks and for women, he would often be challenged and assaultedat speaking engagements by rowdy opponents from the crowd. Although Douglassdid not welcome such attacks, he recognized that he must not to give ground tothem, that he had to defend himself, by himself, before the public. And so foughtback hand-to-hand with his assailants. Now, these kind of fights may seem more like brawls than boxing, even by the rough standards of bare-knuckle fighting, but they have this in common: both were based on an essential assumption that a man must secure his honor and his self-respect in society by refusing to bow to insult or aggression, and that he place his own body and life at risk in doing so to demonstrate that he would prefer pain, maiming or even death to indignity or submission. By fighting, Douglass believed that he would demonstrate his right to claim the “inalienable rights” guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. That is in part why he later argued so strongly during the Civil War that black men should be allowed to bear arms and fight for the Union cause, ultimately prevailing with President Lincoln. (See figure 16 for an illustration of an African American serving in theCivil War.) The point of this illustration from the life of Douglass is to remember that there were many free blacks, especially in the North, who, despite the overwhelming racial prejudice of the age, did earn the respect of their peers in the local context of their workplace. The vast majority of such people will has passed out of recorded history, because they were ordinary people, working at ordinary jobs, who left behind no record of the day-to-day struggles and achievements of their lives. But free blacks worked with whites (again, mostly in the North) in a variety of trades, from building and carpentry to wharf-work and whaling. The kind of hard labor that free blacks engaged in alongside whites was often of a kind (whaling is a prime example) that forged strong bonds of respect,interdependence and camaraderie among the co-workers. So look again at the two young men in the photograph: their clothes are not those of professionals or gentlemen of leisure; they are the sound and sturdy clothes of the working class. If we recall that bare-knuckle boxing was tremendously popular as a sport with the working men of the period, and that fist-fighting was acknowledged as an appropriate way to respond to an insult and to assert one’s self-respect and defend one’s honor, then it is plausible that these two young men were co-workers who enjoyed sparring as sport and who chose this pose to proclaim their mutual respect. Furthermore, the photographer quite obviously made the decision to compose the portrait with a mirror-like symmetry that confers equality of position to the two young men. Compare this composition to Figure 11 or Figure 15 in the Mirror of Race exhibition, where it is very clear who is supposed to be the center of attention and who is supposed to be subordinate. The fact of the equality of position of the two boxers, despite their apparent racial difference, might even suggest that the photographer’s intent was to challenge the racial hierachy of thetime with a portrait of equality, albeit an equality in the tension of confrontation. There is some historical precedent for this in art. Consider this lithograph by the celebrated French artist, Jean-Louis-Andr―-Th―odore Gericault (1791-1824), titled “Boxers.” Gericault produced this lithograph in 1818, seven years after the last Molineux-Crib fight. Even though Gericault was not present at the Molineux-Crib fight and labeled the print simply “Boxers,” that fight clearly had a wide-ranging impact on the European imagination. 1818 was also just fourteen years after the conclusion of the successful and exceptionally bloody slave rebellion in Haiti against the French colonial government. The idea of blacks asserting themselves as equals had left a powerful impression in France. Just as in our photograph, Gericault portrays the antagonists in a mirror-like symmetry: both have a powerful build and a similar stature, both are defending but maneuvering for the attack, both have the look of resolute determination; in short, they are equals. Lithography was a new technique in printmaking at the time, and some of the prints may have reached the United States. Could our anonymous photographer have been influenced by Gericault’s work? Perhaps. But even if not, the very nature of boxing, with the familiar at-ready posture at the start of the match, would suggest a similar composition. Furthermore, an astute photographer with some understanding of the use of symbolism in art must have recognized the symbolic power of facing off a light-skinned with a dark-skinned man. And here the symbolism is one of equal power and equal dignity: opponents who are potentially enemies but also potentiallyable to respect each other for the determination to stand and fight. Admittedly, this is only conjecture. We simply do not know. But the point is that the very fact that we do not know is what compels us, if we allow ourselves to be open, to explore such imaginative possibilities ― and to uncover the resources of the past that make such possibilities plausible. As human beings, we are driven to conceive a story when a visually powerful scene or a challenging situation commands our attention. We are compelled to do so because we sense that there is a meaning there that we need to take seriously, but we are not yet clear on what that meaning is. The stories we tell about such things and events allow us to weave together the disparate elements in such a way that the details take on significance proportional to the meaning of the whole. Then we are able to cope with what we see before us. Our compulsion to imagine a story, to construct an interpretation, happens especially when we do not know everything we want to know about what we are seeing. Our imagination insists on intervening to supply the missing information to complete the story of what we see. Our imagination does this instinctively, and we can often rightly call the conjecture that this instinct supplies prejudice, but we must also acknowledge that we engage in this kind of filling-in all the time ― whenever a situation strikes us as meaningful, but we don’t, as it were, have the whole picture. But we never have the whole picture. The question is, then, can we step back and reflect upon these instincts of ours that generate our interpretations of what we don’t fully understand? Can we hold the instinct in check long enough to allow ourselves space to imagine new and rejuvenating stories? Are the elements of the stories we tell ones that we have blindly adopted from the prejudices of our age, or can we reconstruct other possible interpretations of what we see, interpretations that have historical merit and that also challenge our ingrained preconceptions about ourselves and each other? By interpreting critically, by seeking the unexpected stories without distorting what we see before us, we can reflect on the meaning of our history and meditate on both history’s enduring obstacles and its neglected promise. Only then do we allow what we see to become a living mirror forreflecting on our past, our present, and our future. Annotated Bibliography For a history of the rise of bare-knuckle boxing in England, see Dennis Brailsford, Bareknuckles: A Social History of Prize-Fighting (Cambridge, England: Lutterwoth Press, 1988). See also Bob Mee, Bare Fists: The History of Bare Knuckle Prize Fighting (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2001) which covers both the history of British and American bare-knuckleboxing. The American history of fist-fighting receives insightful treatment in Elliott J. Gorn’s The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prizefighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). For a discussion of the culture of honor in America, particularly in the Old South, see Kenneth Greenberg, Honorand Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) The lithograph of Gericault’s “Boxers” is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure001 Title A name given to the resource Two Men Boxing Subject The topic of the resource Unknown Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1860-1865 Type The nature or genre of the resource Staged Studio Scene Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Greg French Collection (ambro68) Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. <a href="https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/exhibits/show/main-exhibition/main-exhibition" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Main Exhibition</a>, <a href="https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/true-pictures" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“True Pictures”: Frederick Douglass on the Promise of Photography</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Unknown Photographer https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/6569ee6d5a6ee5f309cf49b015c54a02.jpg 5cfef2cdf7a0edf3c26939202515401f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Slaves in Black and White Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Exhibition Name Name of the exhibition in which the item appears Slaves in Black and White Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data carte de visite, albumen print Factual Commentary Factual Commentary Rebecca Huger seems to have been a favorite with the photographer. Certainly she is pretty, and she also could easily have passed for white. She is also on the verge of becoming a young woman, and probably something the photographer sought to provoke for the viewer is the fate such a young woman might meet at the hands of an owner for whom an enslaved woman’s body was property to use in any way he saw fit —&nbsp;which would account also for the very existence of “white” slaves such as Rebecca in the first place. The publicity campaign used these photographs to uphold support for a war to end such practices. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure 9 Title A name given to the resource Rebecca: A Slave Girl from New Orleans Subject The topic of the resource Rebecca: A Slave Girl from New Orleans Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Myron H. Kimball (New York) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1863 Type The nature or genre of the resource Studio Portrait Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Joan Gage Collection https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/ca1c897893ad3fe3d9c8e05282d02a37.tif f8cd1aa36bac50257fc1163b92e56c65 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Slaves in Black and White Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Exhibition Name Name of the exhibition in which the item appears Slaves in Black and White Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data carte de visite, albumen print Factual Commentary Factual Commentary Isaac White and Rosina Downs pose in this portrait. The subtitle of the caption calls them “Emancipated slave Children, from the Free Schools of Louisiana,” emphasizing both the political reality of the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 and the policy goal of educating the now free people of the occupied territory of the Confederacy. Once again, the photographer, in this case Myron H. Kimball, has sought to produce a shock by placing a matching pair of the “blackest” and the “whitest” of the children together. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure 8 Title A name given to the resource Isaac and Rosa Subject The topic of the resource Isaac and Rosa Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Myron H. Kimball (New York) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1863 Type The nature or genre of the resource Studio Portrait Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Greg French Collection https://mirrorofrace.bc.edu/files/original/86588c306997cf708285dd8e9d4119ab.jpg 045b4fb735f5c052b93e30f3538eb89e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Slaves in Black and White Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Exhibition Name Name of the exhibition in which the item appears Slaves in Black and White Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data carte de visite, albumen print Factual Commentary Factual Commentary Photographer Charles Paxson has posed Rebecca Huger before the same huge flag as in the previous image. She crosses here arms in an almost prayerful gesture that indicates both love and a sense of protection. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Figure 7 Title A name given to the resource "Oh! How I Love the Old Flag." Subject The topic of the resource "Oh! How I Love the Old Flag." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Charles Paxson (New York) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1864 Type The nature or genre of the resource Studio Portrait Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Joan Gage Collection