John Brown's Photographer

A single image immortalizes the distance between the son of a freed slave and the College's pro-slavery president.

THREE YEARS AGO THE OLDEST daguerreotype of John Brown was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery for $115,000. Brown famously led the raid on Harper's Ferry to start a "war of emancipation." This daguerreotype was made by Augustas Washington in 1847, the same year Washington was to have graduated from Dartmouth. That Washington was photographing Brown when he might have been studying for finals symbolizes, with the click of a shutter, the fractious politics of the pre-Civil war era. Born in New Jersey in 1820 to a former slave and his Asian wife, Washington saw education as the best way to "elevate the social and political position of the oppressed and unfortunate people with whom I am identified." He enrolled at Dartmouth in 1843, eager to become "a scholar, teacher, and a useful man." Washington earned tuition money by making daguerreotypes and selling them for three to five dollars—about $100 at today's values. Dartmouth faculty and Hanover townspeople were some of Washington's best customers. Not so Nathan Lord, Dartmouth's pro-slavery president, who criticized both Washington and his daguerreotypes. Washington left Dartmouth in 1844, taking with him his personal library of 150 books, and established a successful photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut.

After Washington's departure President Lord wrote that Dartmouth's African-American students failed "from fickleness, inconstancy, and unsound morality." Although not mentioned by name, Washington took the remark personally and published a rebuttal in the February 1846 issue of the anti-slavery newspaper Charter Oak. "During the time I was in college," he wrote, "I neither observed nor felt any manifestations of prejudice (from faculty or townspeople). Our colored students suffer more from a want of pecuniary means, than from prejudice, or want of intellect, or from any other supposed causes."

Convinced that African Americans could never find true emancipation in this country, in 1851 Washington published an eloquent essay in AfricanRepository encouraging migration to Liberia. "He who would not rather live anywhere on earth in freedom than in this country in social and political degradation, has not attained half the dignity of his manhood, he asserted. Two years later Washington, his wife, and their two children sailed to Liberia. There he farmed, took photographs, wrote, and taught Greek and Latin. In 1868 he became Liberia's house speaker—attaining in his adopted country the social and political status he had once hoped to achieve in America with the aid of a Dartmouth education.

Augustus Washington's daguerreotype caught the emotional intensity of John Brown's visage.