White and Black Slaves from New Orleans,

ca. 1863

This carte de visite from 1863 served to advocate for the end of slavery. The carte de visite was a pocket-sized photograph that could be distributed widely. Like the photograph <em>Learning is wealth</em> (2017-48), this image circulated as part of a publicity campaign mounted by Union General Nathaniel P. Banks to raise money for educating formerly enslaved people in Louisiana. The emancipated Black people pictured here were brought to New York to sit for photographs and attend fundraising events in the North. Comparison between this photograph and a similar wood engraving from <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015021733780&amp;view=1up&…’s Weekly</em></u></a> (January 30, 1864) identifies the three figures in this photograph as Isaac White, Mary Johnson, and Augusta Broujey. Identifying White as an exceptionally bright student and describing Johnson’s mistreatment and the scars that testify to her experience, the article goes on to explain that Broujey’s “mother, who is almost white, was owned by her half-brother, named Solamon, who still retains two of her children.” This image exemplifies an abolitionist strategy that stressed the whiteness of some enslaved people in an effort to undermine the perceived difference between the presumed white audience and the Black people pictured in photographs like these.