A routine authentication review at the Smithsonian led to the discovery of a photograph that challenges conventional narratives about the end of slavery in America. In April 2024, Dr. Rebecca Torres, a specialist in Civil War-era photography at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, received an anonymous donation. The package contained a single daguerreotype in its original leather case, sent with a brief note explaining it had been found in a grandmother’s attic in Charleston and might be important.
The image, dated to 1868, depicted two young women posed together in a professional studio. The woman on the left was white, wearing an elegant silk dress and smiling warmly, a highly unusual expression for portrait photography of the era. The woman on the right was Black, dressed in similar quality clothing, her expression serious and solemn. Dr.
Torres noted that photographs of white and Black subjects posed together as equals were extraordinarily rare in 1868, just three years after the Civil War. Existing documentation typically showed clear hierarchical positioning, with white subjects seated and Black subjects standing behind them. This image was different, showing both women side by side at the same height with equal presence. While examining the photograph under magnification, Dr.
Torres noticed faint but unmistakable marks around the Black woman’s wrists and ankles, linear discolorations consistent with scarring from prolonged wearing of metal restraints. The implications were staggering: this was documentation of a person who had been physically enslaved three years after the 13th Amendment had legally abolished slavery. The daguerreotype case bore a faint marking from J. Matthews Studio in Charleston, South Carolina.
Research by the Charleston Historical Society revealed that Jonathan Matthews had operated a photography studio on King Street from 1865 to 1871. He was a Union Army veteran who served both white and Black clients, making him controversial among the city’s white establishment. A partial ledger from 1868 contained an entry from July of that year noting “two young ladies, special commission, private session,” with a fee of $5, an expensive sum for the period. In May 2024, Dr.
Torres received an email from Katherine Williams, a 72-year-old retired librarian in Philadelphia. Williams believed one of the young women in the photograph was her great-great-grandmother, Sarah. Family history told of Sarah escaping slavery with help from a white friend named Catherine. Williams traveled to Washington DC carrying a wooden box containing letters, a leather-bound diary, and a photograph of an elderly Black woman taken in 1905, identified on the back as Sarah, age 68.
The facial features matched the young woman in the 1868 image. According to family records, Sarah was born enslaved on a rice plantation outside Charleston around 1850. She grew up working in the plantation house, where she secretly learned to read and write, an act that was illegal throughout the South. The plantation owner’s legitimate daughter, Catherine, was born around the same year, and the two girls formed a forbidden friendship.
The diary entries traced the legal reality of reconstruction-era South Carolina. An entry from March 1867 quoted Catherine’s father saying the law may call enslaved people free, but on his plantation they would continue to work as they always had, with anyone who tried to leave brought back. The passage documented that Sarah had been shackled after attempting to run the previous year, providing firsthand written evidence that slavery continued in practice after its legal abolition. Catherine’s father had arranged for her marriage to the son of another plantation-owning family, a strategic alliance.
Unwilling to participate in a system she despised, Catherine developed a plan to help Sarah escape using money from her dowry. Before the escape, she wanted a photograph documenting their friendship and Sarah’s humanity. In July 1868, Catherine arranged a trip to Charleston with Sarah, ostensibly to shop for her trousseau. Her father sent an overseer to accompany them.
Catherine visited Matthews’s studio alone first, explaining the situation directly. Despite the dangers of assisting an escape in South Carolina, where white supremacist violence was endemic, Matthews agreed to help. The following day, Catherine sent the overseer to a nearby tavern with money while the photography session took place. Matthews posed the two women deliberately as equals, instructing Catherine to smile while Sarah maintained her serious expression.
Sarah wore one of Catherine’s dresses, altered to fit her. Matthews did not hide the scars on Sarah’s wrists and ankles, understanding they were evidence of what had been done to her. Two weeks later, on August 2, 1868, Catherine woke Sarah after midnight and gave her a bundle containing men’s clothing, money, written travel instructions, and the daguerreotype photograph. Sarah traveled for six days, facing hostility, hunger, and constant fear of detention, before reaching Philadelphia on August 8, 1868, where she was met by members of the Society of Friends.
When Sarah’s absence was discovered, Catherine admitted what she had done. Her father’s rage was volcanic. He confined her to the plantation and moved the wedding date forward. Catherine refused to comply, writing in her diary that she would rather die than become the wife of a plantation owner.
She fled the plantation that night, eventually reaching Philadelphia in late August 1868. The two women reunited in September 1868 and maintained their friendship for the rest of their lives. Sarah married a freeborn Black man named James in 1871, with Catherine attending as her witness. They had four children, two of whom attended college.
Sarah later opened a small sewing shop in South Philadelphia, employing other Black women. Catherine never married, devoting herself to work with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and writing articles exposing continued oppression of Black people in the South. She moved into Sarah’s household in 1885 after Sarah’s husband died, and the two women lived together until Catherine’s death in 1892. Sarah died in 1905 at age 75, surrounded by her children and grandchildren.
The daguerreotype remained a private family treasure for over a century, passed down through four generations. In September 2024, the Smithsonian opened a special exhibition titled “Two Friends: The 1868 Portrait and the Reality of Freedom Delayed,” curated by Dr. Torres in collaboration with Katherine Williams and other descendants. The exhibition included high-resolution reproductions that clearly showed the scarring on Sarah’s wrists and ankles, alongside her diary, letters, and historical documentation from the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Historians noted that Sarah’s experience was part of a widespread pattern, with Black people held in conditions of continued bondage through fraudulent labor contracts, debt bondage, and outright illegal detention well into the reconstruction period. The photograph became iconic, appearing in textbooks and documentaries. For the Smithsonian, it became one of the museum’s most important acquisitions, a primary source document combining visual power with historical significance.
The image of the two young women, one smiling, one serious, now bears witness to what they endured, what they risked, and what they created together.