Sojourner Truth (born Isabella Baumfree)

She was born enslaved under New York State's own slave law, in a Dutch-speaking household in the Hudson Valley, so that Dutch, not English, was her first language. Sold away from her parents at around age nine, she passed through several owners before roughly seventeen years in the household of John Dumont of West Park, New York. In late 1826, ahead of New York's gradual emancipation law taking full effect on July 4, 1827, she walked off Dumont's farm carrying her infant daughter Sophia. Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen took her in; she used their name for a period, Isabella Van Wagenen, and in 1828 sued in Ulster County to recover her five-year-old son Peter, sold illegally into slavery in Alabama. The court ordered him returned to her, among the first recorded instances of a Black woman successfully suing a white man in a United States court. A second suit followed in 1835, a slander action against members of the Folger household who had accused her of poisoning a fellow member of the religious commune known as the Kingdom; she won, reportedly with 125 dollars in damages.

In 1843 she renamed herself Sojourner Truth, telling those who asked that she had been called to travel and speak the truth. Unable to read or write, she dictated her life story to the abolitionist Olive Gilbert, published in 1850 as the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. On May 29, 1851 she addressed the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio; the version of that speech most widely known today, built around the repeated line "Ain't I a Woman?", is a heavily rewritten text published twelve years later by the convention organizer Frances Gage, and imposes a Southern dialect on a woman who had never lived in the South and spoke English as a second language. A contemporary transcript by the abolitionist editor Marius Robinson survives from June 1851 and reads very differently; the historian Nell Irvin Painter's 1996 biography judged Robinson's version the more reliable record of what Truth actually said. The pattern is worth holding onto: the words most associated with Truth today were substantially authored by a white editor working from memory, years later, in a dialect Truth did not speak. Her photographic self-representation from 1864 sits in direct, and probably deliberate, tension with that pattern.

From 1857 she lived in and around Battle Creek, Michigan, first in Harmonia, a small biracial Spiritualist community, and from around 1867 in Battle Creek itself, where she remained until her death on November 26, 1883. A third lawsuit, in 1865, followed a Washington, D.C. streetcar conductor's forcing her off his car and dislocating her shoulder; her suit cost the conductor his job and pushed the streetcar company to enforce the district's desegregation law.

No single itemized inventory of Truth's photographic output has been located in the sources consulted for this page, and two different published counts describe two different things. The Library of Congress's own account, published on the Copyright Office's blog in December 2020, states that Truth "sat for portraits at least eleven times" over the 1860s and, from 1864, "registered her copyright claims in" her cartes de visite; the blog does not say the eleven sittings are limited to the copyrighted series, and this page does not read it that way. Separately, Grigsby's Enduring Truths, reviewed in the journal Panorama in 2017 as examining "twenty-eight different photographs of Truth" made chiefly during the Civil War and again at the end of her life in the early 1880s, counts every documented sitting or print, captioned and uncaptioned alike. The two figures, eleven sittings against twenty-eight photographs, are not reconciled anywhere in the literature located here and may not even be counting the same unit (sittings versus surviving prints); this page treats them as two separate, sourced tallies rather than smoothing them into one number or assuming the eleven figure describes only the copyrighted cards.

What this page's own image research can add is a lower bound on how many distinct sittings and studios are represented among the prints that actually survive in public collections today: at least six can be told apart with reasonable confidence, an uncaptioned Battle Creek sitting from 1863 showing Truth with her grandson's photograph (known in two separate surviving prints, one at NMAAHC and one at the Library of Congress); the captioned, copyrighted seated-with-knitting sitting of 1864 that Grigsby's research and Swann Galleries' own cataloguers identify as Truth's most reproduced pose, surviving in at least four located prints across three institutions and one later cabinet-card reprint; a standing, captioned sitting credited on its own mount to Wright's New York Gallery of Battle Creek; a second standing, captioned sitting, with a cane and a hand-carried bag, held by the Library of Congress and independently cited to Painter's 1996 biography; an uncaptioned seated sitting credited to the Mathew Brady Studio of New York, showing Truth holding a paper or document rather than knitting; and at least two further sittings, circa 1870 and, per Grigsby's own archival lettering, a specific session on June 13, 1881, by the Detroit photographer Corydon C. Randall.

Beginning in February 1864, Truth had a new series of cartes de visite printed carrying, beneath her portrait, her name in capitals and the line "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance," and on the back a printed notice: "Entered according to the 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 Michigan." The Library of Congress's account of the registration states that Truth deposited "the title of an Engraving, the title whereof is in the words, towit: [Picture of Sojourner Truth] 'I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance, Sojourner Truth,'" and that the claim entered the record on February 16, 1864, filed in Detroit.

The mechanism is the point. Photographs did not become their own explicitly protected category under federal copyright law until the Act of March 3, 1865. Truth registered her image more than a year earlier by using the existing statutory category for prints and engravings, available since 1802, to claim a photograph before photographs themselves had a dedicated legal home. The 2024 University of Pittsburgh Law Review article "Abolitionist Creativity, Care, and the Shadow of Intellectual Property," by Julia Choucair Vizoso and Chris R. Byrnes, draws on Grigsby's research for a sharper comparative point still: of the surviving cartes de visite of the period that carry any copyright notice at all, and few do, every other one names the photographer. Truth's cards are the only ones from the period known to register the copyright in the sitter's own name rather than the studio's. Frederick Douglass, an avid and photography-literate sitter in these same years, appears on cards that credit the photographer at the bottom of the mount, in the ordinary commercial convention. Truth, illiterate, formerly enslaved and past sixty, is the outlier on record.

"Shadow" was ordinary nineteenth-century usage for a photograph, playing on the older studio warning to "secure the shadow ere the substance fade." Grigsby's research establishes that Truth used the word this way in her own recorded speech, not only on the printed cards. Read as a simple pun the caption says: I sell my image in order to support my body and my life's work. Grigsby's closer reading goes further, arguing that the line does something more deliberate for a woman whose own body had once been legally another person's property: Truth "sells not her substance, not herself, not her 'I' but her shadow, a substitute so elusive as to thwart bodily violation," so that "the commodified self is redefined as part of the image world, of representation, not embodiment." The communications scholar Celnisha L. Dangerfield reads the same caption, from a Black feminist framework, as "an act of indignant agency," a legal and commercial instrument built by and for white male authorship, turned to a formerly enslaved Black woman's own account.

Truth put a version of the point in her own recorded words late in life. Truth is reported to have said, on an occasion the sources consulted do not securely date or attribute to a named publication, that she "used to be sold for other people's benefit, but now she sold herself for her own," a line that should be read, like the 1851 Akron speech, as someone else's rendering of an illiterate speaker's words rather than a verbatim transcript she reviewed and approved. Grigsby traces a further layer specific to the Civil War years: shadow and substance were also the terms of a live monetary argument over whether the federal government's new paper currency, backed by public confidence rather than gold, could count as real value. Truth's cartes de visite, cheap paper notes bearing her image, printed, multiplied and exchanged for coin at her lectures, worked the same trick the government's own currency worked, turning a representation into value by shared confidence, in order, as Grigsby puts it, "to produce wealth dependent on a consensus that representation produces material results, to make money where there was none, and to do so partly in order to abolish slavery."

Truth is documented deliberately choosing what she held across her sitting career. Grigsby's research, reflected in the wall text for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive's 2016 exhibition built from it, describes the shift as "initially, the photograph of her heroic missing grandson and thereafter, her knitting." The 1863 sitting places a daguerreotype of her grandson James Caldwell, a private in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry then held prisoner on James Island, South Carolina, in her lap: a formerly enslaved grandmother displaying a photographic keepsake of family bonds slavery worked to sever, and of the war she spent her later life supporting. From 1864 the props change to a small table bearing a book and a vase of flowers, and knitting held mid-stitch in her hands, the yarn trailing visibly down her skirt in several surviving prints. A bonnet, spectacles, a fringed shawl and plain, respectable Victorian dress recur across nearly every sitting located for this page, whichever studio made it.

None of this reads as incidental studio furniture. Literacy signaled by the book, domestic industry signaled by the knitting, and a controlled, seated or upright posture with direct eye contact into the camera together constitute a visual register aimed squarely against the caricature conventions used elsewhere in nineteenth-century print culture to depict Black women, conventions Truth would have known from wide circulation in the abolitionist and general press of her own lifetime. That this second, later prop set, table, flowers, knitting, was also the sitting Truth's own copyright notice protects and the sitting she sold in the greatest volume is not a coincidence this page treats as settled by the available scholarship: it argues that Truth chose, registered and marketed the specific image of herself she wanted circulated, and that the choice was itself the argument.

Unlike a painter's oeuvre, nothing here is disputed as forged or misattributed in the connoisseurial sense; the difficulty is instead that most of Truth's surviving cartes carry no studio imprint at all. NMAAHC's own catalog record for the 1863 grandson sitting leaves its photographer unidentified, and no backmark or studio imprint is published for it; the same is true of the 1864 seated-with-knitting sitting that became Truth's most reproduced image, whose photographer is not named on any of the located surviving mounts (Metropolitan Museum, Library of Congress Gladstone Collection, NMAAHC cabinet-card reprint) despite that sitting being the one Truth herself registered and sold in volume.

Three studios are documented by name. A carte de visite credited on its own printed mount to "Wright's New York Gallery, Battle Creek, Mich." shows Truth standing, and the Art Institute of Chicago separately credits a photographer named S. C. Wright as collaborator on a differently posed, differently dated 1864-65 captioned carte in its own collection; whether the Wright named at the Art Institute and the Battle Creek gallery imprint refer to the same person or business has not been established in the sources consulted here. A wholly different, uncaptioned seated portrait, showing Truth holding a paper or document rather than knitting, is credited on its own mount, and by the National Portrait Gallery's catalog record, to the Mathew Brady Studio of New York, placing one of the era's most famous commercial photographic operations among Truth's documented sitters' galleries, circa 1864. And the Detroit photographer Corydon C. Randall, active 1865 to 1875 by trade record, is credited with at least two further sittings: a seated portrait circa 1870, now at the National Portrait Gallery, and a specific, later session a dealer's catalog description dates to June 13, 1881 and identifies, via Grigsby's own archival lettering, as "session K," made when Truth was in her eighties and among her final documented sittings.

The Library of Congress's account of the registration states that Truth charged twenty-five to fifty cents per card at her lectures. Grigsby's research, reflected in the BAMPFA exhibition materials built from it, gives fifty cents plus postage for cards ordered by mail, a distribution method that depended on the same expanding federal postal system that was, in these same years, carrying soldiers' letters and photographs across the country. A dealer's catalog description of the 1881 Randall cabinet card records a specific commercial transaction on the other side of the counter: Truth purchased 100 copies of that sitting from Randall for five dollars, a wholesale unit cost of five cents a print against a retail price several times higher, consistent with a working system of margin between what a sitting cost her and what she then sold the cards for herself.

A second, independently surviving transaction record sits on the back of the NMAAHC cabinet-card reprint of the 1864 seated-with-knitting sitting, beneath the printed 1864 copyright notice itself: a handwritten annotation reading "Purchased of Sojourner Truth / Apr 24th 1870 / Washington, D.C. / by J.P.R." This is, so far as the sources consulted for this page establish, a literal point-of-sale record in Truth's own commercial practice, dated and located six years into the captioned series and naming the city rather than Battle Creek, evidence that she was still personally selling this sitting's cards, in person, in the nation's capital, six years after registering it. The identity behind the initials "J.P.R." has not been established here.

On October 29, 1864, the same year she registered her copyright and began selling the captioned cards, Truth was received at the White House by Abraham Lincoln, an appointment arranged after some weeks by the abolitionist lecturer Lucy Colman working through Mary Lincoln's Black dressmaker as an intermediary. During the visit Lincoln showed Truth a Bible that had been presented to him by Black residents of Baltimore; Truth's own recorded response noted the irony of a government that had once forbidden its enslaved people to learn to read now receiving that gift. A surviving copy of Truth's captioned, copyrighted carte de visite is held by the Library of Congress within its Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana, catalogued alongside Lincoln-related material rather than in the library's general photographic holdings; nothing in the sources consulted for this page states that this specific copy has any documented connection to the October 1864 meeting beyond sharing its year and the collection's Lincoln subject heading, and this page does not assert one.

Prints of the 1864 seated-with-knitting sitting, Truth's most reproduced and only securely captioned-and-copyrighted pose to appear regularly at auction, have sold twice at Swann Galleries' New York sales of printed and manuscript Africana. On March 29, 2018, a carte de visite of this sitting sold for 5,500 US dollars against an estimate of 1,500 to 2,500 dollars; on March 24, 2022, a second example sold for 5,250 dollars against an estimate of 2,000 to 3,000 dollars. Swann's own catalog notes for both lots state that "this seems to have been her favorite portrait, as it appears on a variety of different mounts and was used as the basis for the engraved frontispiece of her" expanded 1875 autobiography, citing specific page and plate numbers in Grigsby's book against the exact mount sold. Swann publishes both results as a single "sold" figure inclusive of buyer's premium, with no separate hammer price stated, so this page reports the totals as given rather than guessing a split the auction house itself does not publish.

A further example of the same sitting, pulled from a larger album of roughly forty Civil War-era cartes and tintypes, sold at Hindman's African Americana auction in Cincinnati on February 23, 2022 for 13,750 dollars against an estimate of 2,000 to 4,000 dollars, reported by the trade press as an auction record for a Truth carte de visite; as with the Swann results, the trade report's figure is not stated with certainty as excluding premium, and this page follows the reported total rather than asserting a hammer price the source does not give. Separately, and not a completed sale, an antiquarian bookseller has listed the documented 1881 Randall cabinet-card sitting, the one for which Truth's own purchase of 100 copies for five dollars is recorded, at an asking price of 8,800 dollars; this page cites that listing only for the purchase-quantity fact it documents, not as a market result.

Set against how well the central claim, the 1864 registration, is documented, several ordinary questions about it remain open. No source consulted for this page records Truth, or anyone acting on her behalf, ever bringing a case over unauthorized copying of her registered image, despite the claim's evident legal novelty and despite cartes de visite being, by design, an easily copied medium. The photographer behind her two most historically significant sittings, the 1863 grandson portrait and the 1864 seated-with-knitting portrait she herself registered and sold, is named on no surviving mount located here. And the two published counts of her total photographic output, at least eleven sittings per the Library of Congress against at least twenty-eight portraits overall per Grigsby, have not been reconciled against a single itemized list in any source consulted, and it is not established that the two counts even measure the same thing.

Truth's photographic practice has moved from a footnote to a subject of sustained scholarly attention over the past decade. Grigsby's 2015 book remains the fullest study and supplied the research behind BAMPFA's 2016 exhibition Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery, which placed a large selection of her cartes de visite alongside Civil War-era federal currency to make explicit the shadow-and-substance argument about paper, value and representation. The Library of Congress's own Copyright Office marked the registration with a dedicated blog post in December 2020, framing Truth as an early "copyright innovator." Most recently, the 2024 University of Pittsburgh Law Review article by Vizoso and Byrnes uses Truth's 1864 registration as a founding example in critical race intellectual property scholarship, reading her assertion of copyright in her own name as a documented instance of a formerly enslaved person occupying, rather than being excluded by, a legal structure built without her in mind.