The Publisher Was the Sitter

The business was running seven months before the copyright

Sojourner Truth was selling photographs of herself by post, at a published price, in the summer of 1863. A dispatch in the National Anti-Slavery Standard of 4 July 1863, written on the occasion of her grandson James Caldwell enlisting in the 54th Massachusetts, closes with the terms of trade. The sentence survives through one modern source, the exhibition text Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby wrote for Berkeley in 2016, and we have found no second witness to the price itself: readers are told that Sojourner will send her photograph by mail to anyone who writes to her enclosing fifty cents and a three-cent stamp, and that letters are to be directed to Battle Creek, Michigan.

That matters because the copyright is easy to mistake for the beginning of the story. It was not. The registration of 16 February 1864 came more than seven months after the mail-order price was in print, which makes it an instrument brought in to protect an existing operation. The scholarship goes further in the same direction: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, whose Enduring Truths is the fullest study of these cards we could reach, establishes that Truth announced the copyright in a letter published before she had actually filed it.

The selling was systematic and the press she cultivated reported it as such. Notices reprinted in her own Book of Life tell readers not to forget that she has photographs of herself for sale, describe them as her only means of support for the expenses of travel, livelihood and a humble home in Michigan, then record on separate occasions that many of her photographs were purchased and that a number of persons went forward and bought copies.

What she registered was not a photograph

The copyright Sojourner Truth took out in February 1864 does not cover a photograph, because in February 1864 there was no photographic copyright in the United States to take. The entry, made in the Clerk's Office of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan at Detroit, is for the title of an engraving, and the title it protects is the thing printed on the card: a picture of Sojourner Truth, I sell the Shadow to Support the Substance, Sojourner Truth. Photographs were not brought into the protected categories until the Act of 3 March 1865, just over a year later.

So the legal object she owned was a form of words and an image described as an engraving, filed by a woman who could not read the form. That is not a technicality to be smoothed over. It is the shape of the thing she actually held, and it is more interesting than the version in which she simply copyrighted her photograph, because it shows somebody using the only category the statute offered.

The caption and the copyright line arrived together as one commercial package. Grigsby's finding is that the textual additions to the cards happened all at once, so that any card carrying her name and caption carries her copyright and the reverse holds too. The physical evidence agrees. On the Smithsonian's card 2018.17.12 the front reads I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance, Sojourner Truth, and the back carries the notice entered according to the act of Congress in the year 1864, by Sojourner Truth, in the Clerk's Office of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Mich.

Our reading: the photographer has no name because she took the space

On an ordinary carte de visite of the 1860s the bottom of the mount carries the studio's imprint, and on Truth's captioned cards that space carries her caption and her name instead. The consequence is visible in every modern catalogue. The Metropolitan Museum explicitly records the artist of its 1864 card as Unknown. The Library of Congress record for the Gladstone carte and the Smithsonian's own NMAAHC record for 2018.17.12 simply carry no photographer field at all. The Art Institute of Chicago is the exception and names S. C. Wright as a collaborator. That this was a choice rather than an archival accident is our reading and not a statement any source makes, so we mark it as ours; what the sources do carry is the comparison that makes it legible. Frederick Douglass had a hundred and sixty portraits made between 1841 and 1895 and, like most sitters and unlike Truth, allowed the photographer's name to be printed at the bottom of the card instead of his own.

Only two studios can be attached to her cards at all, and neither attaches to the one this archive holds. The firmest is the Randall Studio of Detroit: the National Portrait Gallery's record NPG.79.220 gives Randall Studio, dates the object to 1864 and printed about 1870, and catalogues it as a cabinet card rather than a carte de visite, so it is not from the captioned carte series at all. The gallery's own attribution carries a question mark on the studio's dates, active 1865 to 1875 with a query, against an object dated 1864. The softer attribution is to Wright's New York Gallery in Battle Creek, which survives as a mount imprint on a card formerly with an auction house, alongside the Art Institute of Chicago's description of its own 1864 to 1865 card as made by Truth in collaboration with S. C. Wright.

Set beside the other woman in this archive who registered her own photographs, the difference is the direction of the claim. Julia Margaret Cameron registered 508 of her photographs at Stationers' Hall as the photographer, which is the ordinary way round: the maker of the image owns it. Truth registered as the sitter, and left the maker of the image unnamed. She was, in trade terms, the publisher of the card, and no source we reached names the maker of the image on it.

The price, the tax stamp and the figure nobody has

Three published figures for what a card cost are in circulation and they do not agree. The honest summary is a range of twenty-five to fifty cents, with the mail price at the top of it and a warning that the sources are not independent of each other: Grigsby stands upstream of at least two of them.

The tax stamp looks like the most objective of these and it is the shakiest. The Berkeley text records a tax stamp on one of two known cards carrying caption, name, copyright and stamp, but gives no denomination. The only published statement that it is a two-cent stamp is in Jackie Clay's review of that exhibition, and Clay's next sentence calls the stamps postage stamps, which is a different thing from a revenue stamp. The inference below rests on that one loose word. Under the photograph tax in force from 1 September 1864 a two-cent stamp corresponds to a retail price of twenty-five cents or less, with three cents covering twenty-six to fifty. The same guides note that the duty could be assessed on a whole order with one stamp affixed to a single card of the batch, so a two-cent stamp brackets the price rather than fixing it.

Two primary letters show the trade working at the retail end and both show it working loosely. Truth's own dictated letter from Freedman's Village in Virginia says, enclosed please find four shadows, the two dollars came safely. A customer writing from 53 Broadway in New York on 17 January 1868 sends one dollar and asks for as many of your photographs as the money will pay for, adding that if there are two or three different ones he would like one of each. A buyer who has to ask how many a dollar buys is a buyer who has not been told a unit price.

What the money was for is on the record in period print, though the notices about the house do not themselves mention the cards. One reprinted notice says she is trying to pay off a mortgage on her little house in Battle Creek, and another gives what she was working to clear in her later years: it is encumbered with a mortgage of nine hundred dollars, and to clear this place of debt she is now on a visit to her friends. The Copyright Office ties the earlier phase of the selling to raising money for the First Michigan Colored Infantry. And the cards were not her first paper business. In her own recollection, printed in the memorial chapter added to the 1884 edition of her Narrative, she sold printed songs before she sold photographs, for five and ten cents apiece, and William Lloyd Garrison sold a good many of the little songs for her.

Her own, and where that phrase runs out

Truth could not read or write, and the paperwork of her own business was therefore handled by other named people. Nine days after the registration she was in Detroit, where her friend Euphemia Cockrane wrote a letter for her to Mary R. Gale, and the Library of Congress's own exhibition record states plainly that Truth was illiterate and engaged Cockrane to write it. In another letter she names her reader: Sammy, my grandson, reads for them. Whether Truth or an agent physically carried the deposit into the clerk's office at Detroit is not established.

None of that takes the instrument out of her hands, and the reason it does not is a comparison inside her own affairs. In 1875 the Narrative of Sojourner Truth with the Book of Life appended was published, and its title page enters the copyright according to Act of Congress in the year 1875 by Mrs Frances W. Titus, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. Titus was her white manager and amanuensis. Her book was registered in somebody else's name. The 1864 card is the one property instrument of her life that stands in her name alone, which is a fair measure of how deliberate it was.

Three things our own record had wrong

This article was written against our record for the card, and the research found three defects in it, all corrected in the same push. The most serious is an attribution. Our record said that the Library of Congress's own account states that Truth captioned, marketed, placed under copyright and sold at least eleven different carte-de-visite portraits of herself. The sentence is real and the count is real, but it is not the Library of Congress's. It belongs to the Library Company of Philadelphia, in its object record for its own captioned carte, and its verb is copyrighted rather than placed under copyright.

The reason this matters beyond tidiness is that a second and different eleven exists, in the United States Copyright Office post we also cite, and that one says something else entirely: that Truth sat for portraits at least eleven times. One is a count of captioned copyrighted cards, the other a count of sittings across her whole carte career, and they are not interchangeable. Our record had effectively merged them under the wrong institution's name. Both are now stated separately and the Library Company is credited. The standing flag on that Copyright Office source, which said the page could not be opened and had been reconstructed from search-engine text, is also discharged: it has now been read in full in an Internet Archive capture.

The second defect is a claim that was a little too large. Our record called her copyright the only known instance of a sitter of that era, rather than a studio, holding copyright in her own photographic image. The sitter claim stands. The wider one does not: cartes de visite of the child Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence were copyrighted in 1863 in the name of the woman who had bought her freedom, so a person other than a studio holding the copyright was not unprecedented. What is unprecedented, so far as anyone has shown, is the sitter holding it herself.

The third is a date. Our record described the Randall Studio portrait as a later, separate sitting from Truth's final decade. The National Portrait Gallery dates its own print to 1864 and printed about 1870, places the studio in Detroit, and catalogues the object as a cabinet card rather than a carte de visite. It is a late print of an early negative, and it is not from the captioned carte series at all.