In 1976 the staff of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University made a startling discovery hiding in an attic storage cabinet: fifteen rare daguerreotypes of South Carolina slaves. Commissioned by Louis Agassiz, the natural scientist and Harvard professor, these rare photographs date from 1850, when the burgeoning photography business in middle-class portraiture excluded slaves. The photographs depict five men and two women either stripped to the waist or without clothes. In her new book Delia's Tears, Molly Rogers offers the most extensive and enlightening examination of the daguerreotypes to date. Expanding on her 2006 article, Rogers first provides an intricate background on Agassiz and people he met in South Carolina relevant to his photographic project. She then traces Agassiz's changing ideas about racial origins in relation historical events and the contemporaneous work of other American scientists and intellectuals.
One of the foremost natural scientists of his day, Louis Agassiz (1807–73) emigrated in 1846 from his native Switzerland to the United States. A founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard in 1859, Agassiz employed scores of assistants, the next generation of leading scientists, to classify the crateloads of specimens that arrived each week from around the globe. A prolific author, Agassiz published studies on subjects ranging from his pioneering theory of the Ice Age to his more retrograde on the origins of humans (Agassiz never accepted Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection). Agassiz began to focus on humans after arriving in the United States. He met with the Philadelphia scientist Samuel George Morton, whose collections and publications on the crania of North American Indians (1839) and ancient Egyptians (1844), and his racial bias, clearly influenced Agassiz. Like Morton, the Harvard scientist was an advocate of polygenesis, the separate creations of individual races. Although he explained the races as God's creation, Agassiz offended Puritanical New Englanders who believed all humans descended from the “original pair.”
Agassiz had the opposite effect, however, on scientists and slave-owners in South Carolina, where this gifted speaker enjoyed an enthusiastic reception. Agassiz's belief in the inferiority of Africans especially served as justification for their subjugation of slaves. Eagerly hosted by wealthy plantation owners, Agassiz took to the fields looking for “specimens”: slaves who were racially “pure” – either born in Africa or to African parents in the United States. (Though the import of slaves was banned in 1808, many were still smuggled into the country for decades.) Agassiz enlisted Robert Wilson Gibbes, a South Carolina physician and paleontologist, who arranged for a group of slaves to be photographed by Joseph T. Zealy (1814–92), the local portrait photographer in Columbia, South Carolina. Gibbes labeled the resulting photographs with each slave's name, African ethnic group, and slave-owner, and then sent them off to Agassiz.
As common in scientific illustration, the men and women are depicted in frontal, profile, and rear views. In the frontal view, they look straight into the camera, their expressions grave and tense; are they fearful or defiant, or both? Though she looks as if she is crying, Delia probably moved her eyes during the long exposure time for her photograph, illustrated on the book's cover. However, the photograph and the book's title both underscore the suffering of this young woman and hundreds of thousands of other slaves in the American South. What was it like for the slaves to be taken from fields and plantation houses to Zealy's studio, decorated with furnishings of the white man's home? And then to be ordered to strip and stand before the strange wooden box on legs with the protruding brass lens? Rogers imagines their experiences through the book's unusual format. Preceding each chapter, she places a daguerreotype with a one- to two-page fictional piece written in that slave's voice. For authenticity, she taps into written accounts by other former slaves.
Rogers tells us that in September 1850 Agassiz showed the photographs to members of the Cambridge Scientific Club. However, as daguerreotypes, unique images rather than made with negatives, they were of limited use. In addition, the sample of fifteen photographs was small, though Agassiz did collect other photographs of this kind, and he commissioned additional ones of indigenous people on a trip to Brazil in 1865. Of course, there were no photographs of white North Americans or Europeans in his collection of racial types.
In her juxtaposition of fictional vignettes and historical inquiry, Rogers offers a novel and effective approach to the lopsided discourse on photographs of slaves and other colonized peoples that focusses on the photographers and consumers, rather than on the subjects. While less about the photographs and how to read them, than about the scientific theories and racial attitudes that led to their making, Rogers's thoughtful and elegant book helps to bring this sordid chapter in American history to life.
