CDV photograph of enslaved children in New Orleans with Caucasian phenotype, by Charles Paxson, New York. These cdvs were sold to raise money for abolitionist causes and create awareness and empathy for enslaved people. 1864. From the website: “Photograph shows a vignette portrait of freed slaves, Rebecca Huger, Charles Taylor, and Rosina Downs. Civil War era. “Entered, according to act of Congress, in the year 1864, by S. Tackaberry, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York” printed on back of the mount. “The nett [sic] proceeds from the sale of these photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the Department of the Gulf, now under the command of Major General Banks” printed on back of the mount. “No. 4”
In 1863, the Union military (specifically the Department of the Gulf under Maj. Gen. N.P. Banks) the American Missionary Association, and the National Freedmen’s Relief Association cooperated in a joint effort to provide funds for schools for freed slave children in Louisiana. To this end, they arranged for a series of photographs of slave children from New Orleans with ‘white’ features and tours with these children. A new photographic medium, cartes de visites, allowed images of the children to be sold both as a fundraising device and to buoy up support for the ongoing war.
To appeal to the white middle class in the North, the children were photographed as in typical middle class family portraits. Although several of the children were age 6 or 7, the one of whom most cdvs have survived is Rebecca Huger, a young New Orleanian of about age 11. Rebecca was photographed in numerous poses and clothes and most of the photographs with several children include Rebecca.
Harper’s Weekly wrote about Rebecca “to all appearance, she is perfectly white. Her complexion, hair, and features show not the slightest trace of negro blood.”
from the website: “Following the Union victory in May 1865, upon ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, chattel slavery was effectively ended any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”