CHAPTER TWO

`Sojourner Truth Speaks Truth to Power`

PHOTOGRAPHY HAS BEEN central to the creation of historical memory since the 1830s. By the late 1850s, a new photographic technique called cartes de visite had spread from France to the United States. The brainchild of André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, a carte de visite was a thin albumen print attached to a heavy 2½-by-4-inch cardboard mount. It was created using a sliding plate holder and a camera with four lenses, which generated eight negatives each time a picture was taken; an added benefit was the possibility of printing more cards from the negatives at a later date. Originally conceived as an alternative to the calling card, the photographs were more typically shared as family mementoes. Up until this point, only the elite could afford to preserve their likenesses, mainly through commissioned portraits and paintings; even early photographic innovations such as the daguerreotype (invented in 1839) and the tintype were too costly for mass adoption. The relatively cheap cartes de visite brought the possibility of memorializing one’s likeness for posterity to a far broader audience.

Soon America was in the grip of “cartomania.” When photography studios sold cartes de visite of famous figures, they helped create a sense of common national purpose through the consumption of shared images. The wide circulation of Abraham Lincoln’s image in the 1860 electoral campaign owes much to this new technology. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the fad took on a somber tone as those who fought on both the Union and Confederate sides rushed to have photographic images taken for loved ones left behind. In turn, those family members posed for portraits that soldiers could take with them into battle, where the keepsakes were sometimes discovered tucked into a pocket or knapsack of a fallen volunteer. Thus did new technology interact with the most brutal of civil wars.

Women in the public sphere also embraced cartes de visite. Prominent writers and reformers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, Clara Barton, and Victoria Woodhull authorized the distribution of their likenesses. Soon suffragists joined the trend, with cartes de visite representing some of the earliest examples of suffrage memorabilia. Sojourner Truth took this one step further and seized the possibilities of this new medium to position herself as one of the most widely recognized African American icons of her time.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY wasn’t the only prominent American who attempted to vote in the 1872 election. In Battle Creek, Michigan, Sojourner Truth, an ex-slave, a woman, and a Battle Creek resident and property owner, presented herself to her local Board of Registration and demanded to be put on the voting rolls. After all, she had campaigned widely for Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant—only half in jest, she vowed to move to Canada if Democratic candidate Horace Greeley was elected—and now she wanted to cast a ballot. Not surprisingly, she was refused. Even though she anticipated this outcome, she deliberately took the occasion to join hundreds of other women who were determined in 1872 to make a symbolic public claim to what they saw as a fundamental right of citizenship.¹

Sojourner Truth was one of the most widely known African American women of the nineteenth century, rivaled only by the ex-slave Harriet Tubman, who was twenty years her junior. Her life shows the continuity between women’s rights activism before and after the Civil War. Truth’s antislavery feminism confirms the productive alliance between early women’s rights activists and abolitionists, an alliance that was irrevocably damaged—with grave effects for both—by profound disagreements over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the late 1860s. Throughout her lifetime in the public eye, Sojourner Truth consistently refused to separate race from sex, insisting that black women’s voices be heard in both freedom movements that affected their lives.

A good measure of Sojourner Truth’s prominence can be traced to the widespread circulation of the cartes de visite which Truth sold at lectures and gatherings to support her career. As the biographer Nell Irvin Painter observed, “seizing on a new technology, Truth established what few nineteenth-century black women were able to prove: that she was present in her times. Her success in distributing her portraits plays no small role in her place in historical memory.”²

Sojourner Truth deployed this new photographic medium in unique ways.³ The first extant carte de visite bearing her image dates to 1861. Photographed before addressing a hostile pro-slavery crowd in Indiana, she wears what looks like a vaguely military get-up that includes a heavy shawl and a hooded hat. One historian aptly characterized the result as a “photograph of a woman all but overwhelmed by clothing and accessories.” Truth later explained that the organizers of the event had specifically dressed her in that outfit, and she had gone along with some reluctance: “When I was dressed, I looked in the glass and was fairly frightened. Said I, ‘It seems I am going to battle.’ ” Her talk was indeed interrupted at several points by hecklers and protestors, but she escaped physical violence.⁴

Two years later, she sat for a series of portraits in a style of dress and presentation more to her own liking. Dressed neatly according to standards of middle-class respectability, she wore a Quaker-style white cap and white shawl over her polka-dot dress and apron. She looks forthrightly through her eyeglasses into the camera, sometimes holding in her lap a carte de visite of her grandson who was serving in the Union Army. By 1864, her cartes de visite often featured a ball of yarn and her knitting, a symbol not of leisure but of industriousness and skill. These carefully staged portraits, which remained remarkably consistent for the rest of her life, suggest how deliberately she composed her own self-presentation.

Sojourner Truth’s post-1864 cartes de visite feature another innovation: she copyrighted them in her own name. Instead of the photographer being given credit and control of the image, Sojourner Truth claimed all legal rights to distribute her likeness. In modern parlance, she controlled its intellectual property. At the time she applied for copyright protection, US law had not been updated to include photographs, although it soon was. Sojourner Truth seems to be the only person who ever copyrighted her own image on a carte de visite.⁵

Truth took it one step further. Starting in 1864, her cartes de visite featured not only the copyright and her name but also a caption: “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” Shadow was a widely used term for the new medium of photography, so she was making a play on words. The “substance” it supported was her itinerant lifestyle as a preacher and women’s rights activist. Selling these cartes de visite for thirty-five cents each (or three for a dollar) at her lectures and other public events, as well as through the mail, was her primary means of support. The wide circulation of her image—twenty-eight versions are extant, from at least fourteen different photographic sessions—increased her fame and celebrity.

Sojourner Truth found a novel way of “turning paper into value” in a way remarkably similar to the circulation of paper currency, which was becoming more widespread during the Civil War. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. said in 1863, “card-portraits, as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the sentimental ‘green-backs’ of civilization.” Truth’s image had value, and the public was willing to pay for it, thus providing her with a steady source of income. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, when the word selling was applied to African Americans, it most often referred to the trafficking of human slaves. Once freedom was assured, Truth turned that on its head by selling herself once again, but for her personal profit, not that of a slaveholder master.⁶

Sojourner Truth spent the first thirty years of her life in bondage. The exact date of her birth is unknown, but it was around 1797 and she was named Isabella. Her first language was Dutch. Over the first three decades of her life, she was the property of five owners. She married and bore five children, although the names of only four of them are known. Somewhat complicating the usual slavery story, her bondage occurred not in the South, but in Ulster County, New York—a reminder of how ubiquitous the practice was in early-nineteenth-century America. Her freedom was linked to the passage of a New York State law in 1799 that began the process of gradual emancipation, with slavery to end completely in the state on July 4, 1827, the year she was freed.⁷

The enslaved part of her life concluded, the woman now known as Isabella Van Wagenen (after her last owner) became deeply involved in various religious and perfectionist communities in upstate New York and Massachusetts. In 1843 she took the name Sojourner Truth, which translates roughly as itinerant preacher. Inspired in part by the publication in 1845 of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, which sold 4,500 copies in less than six months, she began to dictate her own story. (Truth never learned to read or write, and she depended on others to take down her words and handle her correspondence.) The book appeared in 1850 as Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828, with a Portrait. The technology did not yet exist to include a photograph of the author, so it featured a tin engraving of her likeness, probably from a daguerreotype. Truth self-published the book, going into debt to pay for the plates, and then sold and distributed it during her travels. Priced relatively inexpensively at twenty-five cents a copy, the book went through several editions and was reprinted seven times.

As early as 1851, Sojourner Truth was already turning up on platforms speaking in support of women’s rights. At a convention in Akron, Ohio, she made a powerful speech in which she announced, “I am a woman’s rights” and declared that the sexes were equal: “I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and moved, and can any man do more than that?” That contemporaneous rendition of her speech differs from Frances Dana Gage’s more widely quoted 1863 version with its “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” refrain, but either way, Truth was affirming that poor, black, and working women must be included in the discussion of women’s rights. On the lecture circuit, she continued to face naysayers, including those who doubted whether she was actually a woman. At a 1858 gathering, she answered her critics by baring her breast, saying that “her breasts had suckled many a white babe, to the exclusion of her own offspring” and asking those who questioned her sex “if they, too, wished to suck!”⁸

While deeply committed to the abolitionist cause, Truth steered clear of formal politics in the 1850s. With the election of Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the Civil War, she became a dedicated Republican supporter. As the country debated the fate of freed slaves, hers was a unique voice: “I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored woman.” When the Civil War ended, she said forcefully of the broader women’s cause, “We are now trying for liberty that requires no blood—that women shall have their rights, not rights from you. Give them what belongs to them.”⁹

Sojourner Truth was right in the thick of the debates over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, specifically whether the rights of freed African American men should take precedence over those of women, black and white. “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women, and if colored men get their rights and no colored women get theirs, there will be a bad time about it,” she predicted. Truth always supported universal suffrage and believed that, in many ways, black women needed suffrage even more than black men did, given their limited educational and job prospects. She also believed that the vote would encourage a measure of financial independence for African American women. As she said forcefully on another occasion, “if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”¹⁰

Truth never held a formal leadership role in the suffrage movement, but she was a frequent speaker at suffrage conventions, and was especially close to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. That friendship was strained by the disagreements over the Reconstruction Amendments, especially Stanton’s defense of educational and property requirements for voting, her disparaging statements about whether black men were equipped to exercise the franchise wisely, and her support for Democratic candidates in 1868, anathema to a diehard Republican like Truth. Yet Truth tried very hard to find a middle ground as the former close alliance between abolitionists and women’s rights activists strained and then snapped completely. Truth never wavered in her commitment to universal suffrage, but she pragmatically accepted the necessity of supporting the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

In 1869, when the suffrage movement split in two, both sides had good reason to think they could count Sojourner Truth on their side. She initially sided with the Stanton-Anthony wing, despite her profound disagreements with their antiblack and anti-immigrant rhetoric, and she continued to hope that there might be a way to avoid a permanent break. By 1871, however, Truth found herself gravitating toward the American Woman Suffrage Association camp. Yet she retained enough personal ties to Stanton and Anthony to sign onto their “New Departure” campaign, which encouraged women to go to the polls in the 1872 presidential election—and she did so that November in Battle Creek, with determination and defiance.

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote the first volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage in the early 1880s, Sojourner Truth was the only African American woman prominently included. Typical of the highly selective and often suspect choices of the authors, the Sojourner Truth who appeared in the official history only talked about women’s rights; her longstanding commitments to universal suffrage and the civil rights of black men were downplayed or ignored. As Nell Painter aptly put it, “The Stanton-Anthony Truth tends first and last toward women.”¹¹

Stanton and Anthony did learn something fundamental from Sojourner Truth, at least indirectly: the importance of visual images. The early women’s rights movement was the subject of vitriolic and sustained criticism, especially cartoons and caricatures like the 1848 “Leaders of the Woman’s Rights Convention Taking an Airing” which mocked women for speaking out. The Bloomer costume with its short skirts and pantaloons, which several prominent suffragists adopted briefly in the 1850s, was an especially tempting target for mockery and disdain. To try to counter such negative portrayals, suffragists began to experiment with controlling their own images.

Suffragists in the post–Civil War era increasingly paid attention to their portrayal in the press, and they worked hard at presenting a positive, less threatening image to the American public. A daguerreotype of the eminently respectable Quaker activist Lucretia Mott became the basis for a carte de visite that circulated widely. Except for their different skin colors, there are strong similarities between Mott’s self-presentation and Sojourner Truth’s, especially their white bonnet caps and shawls. In 1870, Stanton and Anthony got into the act, sitting for “pictures in all forms & positions” at a photography studio in New York, according to Anthony’s diary. Twenty years later, they reprised the widely circulated dual format in another iconic pose, as they settled into what looked like (but wasn’t) a sedate old age. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton exclaimed to the suffragist Olympia Brown, “We wish posterity to know that we were a remarkably fine looking body of women!!”¹²

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented a united front when they sat for this joint portrait in 1870. Their close physical proximity and parallel uncompromising gazes suggest the strength of their personal and political bonds. *Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.*

Sojourner Truth continued to rely on the sale of her photographs until the very end of her life. Always concerned about her finances and saddled in old age with debt related to family responsibilities, she sat for three additional rounds of photographs in the early 1880s. At this point, Truth was more than eighty years old. Although she was not as active on the lecture circuit as she had been in the 1850s and 1860s, she remained a public presence and still needed to support herself. When it came time to place an order, she showed that she planned to stick around for quite a while by optimistically ordering two hundred cards, both cartes de visite and the larger 6½-by-4½-inch cabinet cards that were coming into use.

These final images of Truth differ somewhat from the earlier ones. For one thing, she no longer wore glasses or held her knitting in her lap. Perhaps at her advanced age, her vision was clouded by cataracts, and arthritis prevented her from holding the knitting needles. She still aimed to convey middle-class respectability in her dress, head covering, and shawl, but now she was often shown standing, rather than sitting. And the backdrops of some of her photographs were more ornate, cluttered with bric-a-brac and “stuff,” reflecting a different aesthetic from the earlier days of photographic portraiture. Yet the power of her gaze was just as strong as ever. Sojourner Truth the itinerant preacher was bearing witness right up to her death in 1883.

Sojourner Truth spoke truth to power, literally and symbolically, in her person and with her image. Truth lectured on suffrage platforms and participated in suffrage debates from the 1850s to the 1880s, claiming a place in the wider national discussion about the rights of both newly freed slaves and women. Her presence served as a challenge to the racism which was so deeply embedded in the white suffrage movement. African American women believed they had just as strong a right to full citizenship as white women, and they acted on that conviction. They were there from the start, and they made a difference.