Album containing Carte de Visites of Freed People's School Teachers and Missionaries in Mississippi

Chicago; other named locations include Vicksburg and Natchez, Mississippi: Circa 1864-1869. 6 x 5-1/4 inches. [4], 25 thick cardstock leaves containing 47 CDVs and one tintype, the majority of which have been captioned neatly in ink, plus one illustrated card. Brown leather commercial album designed to house CDVs, with gold clasps, gilt decoration and titling, and all edges gilt. Front hinge split; light soiling and toning to endpapers; scattered soiling to leaves containing CDVs; tear to bottom edge of first leaf housing a CDV; light damp-staining to last leaf and rear endpapers. Some light soiling/wear/spotting to CDVs, not affecting overall clarity of image. Good.

A rare photograph album documenting teachers and missionaries working at Freed People's schools and with Freed People in Natchez and Vicksburg, Mississippi from at least 1864-1869, as well as, to some extent, the relationships between them. The album appears to have been compiled by one of the teachers, Mary Hyde Brown (1798-1882), as its front free endpaper bears Brown's name and the date, January 1, 1866 (the paste-down has the date "Aug 10, 1865"), and two images of her are present in the album, as well as portraits of several of her family members.

Included in the album are portraits of 18 teachers, plus two missionaries to Freed People in Natchez about whom we can find little outside information, two delegates of the Christian Commission in Natchez, and an orphanage director in Louisiana. All are captioned, and some are further noted on the "Index of Portraits" at the beginning of the volume. With the exception of the two school supervisors for Vicksburg and Natchez, all but one of the teachers are women. All appear to be white, and all appear to be northerners, possibly mostly from the Midwestern states. Mary Hyde Brown was from Chicago, and some of the other teachers -- when we have been able to identify them in census records or by additional captions on the backs of their CDVs -- are from elsewhere in Illinois and Indiana.

According to data provided by the Freedmen's Teacher's Project: Teachers among the Freed People in the U.S. South, 1861-1877 (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/0HBDZD), the teachers and missionaries in the album were affiliated with a range of Freedmen's aid associations. These include the American Missionary Association, the Northwest Freedmen's Aid Commission, the Methodist Episcopal Freedmen's Aid Society, the National Freedmen's Aid Association (New York), the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission, the United Presbyterian Church, and smaller organizations or private individuals labeled only as "Others" and "Unknown," respectively, in the FTP dataset.

Perhaps the most stunning portrait is the last, showing Mary Hyde Brown with a group of young Black women students holding books. The caption reads, "Mary Hyde Brown with her school in Natchez 1864, when the war was raging. At two different times the alarm came the enemy was approaching, Terror prevailed". Natchez surrendered to Union troops early in the war, after the fall of New Orleans in May, 1862, and in 1863 was the temporary headquarters of Ulysses S. Grant. After the Battle of Vicksburg in July, 1863, Natchez and the nearby area was flooded with refugees and newly emancipated Freed People. Confederate troops were never far, however, and raids on the city's surrounding plantations were common.

Per the Freedmen's Teachers Project, Brown taught in the South from 1861-1864, meaning she took great risk in doing so, although it places her in Vicksburg for that period; it is possible that she came to Natchez with the other refugees, and continued teaching there, and then possibly went back to Vicksburg, as the caption for her portrait places her there in 1867. According to one source, https://evanstonwomen.org/woman/mary-hyde-brown/, she traveled through the South for a period with her husband, Reverend Arza Brown, an itinerant preacher whose image is included in the album, working for the Christian Commission; after her husband's death, she moved to Evanston, Illinois, in 1870, where she became involved with the Women's Temperance Alliance and the Women's Foreign Missionary Society. Her daughter, Mary Hyde Brown Hitt, also included in the album, was the first graduate of Wesleyan Female College in Cincinnati and was also involved in the Women's Temperance movement, and a friend of Frances Willard.

All in all, a remarkable album, and the only one of its kind that we've been able to locate. Boston Public Library holds an album of 85 portraits of New England Freedmen's Aid Society teachers, but in that case there is documentation supporting the fact that the teachers were instructed to have their portraits taken for the purpose of the Society compiling the album. A vernacular album such as the one here, compiled by a teacher of the portraits of her coworkers and associates, is highly unusual.

A full list of the photos and their captions, as well as additional details about each teacher, is available upon request.