Washington, Augustus

Impact on the world

Washington took up daguerreotypy as a Dartmouth College freshman to fund his education, and by the mid-1840s had built the Hartford-based Washington Daguerrean Gallery into one of the city’s most successful studios, producing what is likely the earliest surviving photographic portrait of radical abolitionist John Brown, taken around 1846-47. Concluding after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that no amount of talent or achievement could secure Black Americans’ safety and status in the United States, Washington emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia, in 1853, where he opened a studio that produced meticulously composed portraits of the nation’s president, vice president, senators, and merchant class, images that were also used by the American Colonization Society to promote the colony to prospective American emigrants; he later expanded his practice to Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and Senegal. Washington eventually set aside photography to become one of Liberia’s leading sugarcane planters, and served in both the Liberian House of Representatives, where he was elected Speaker, and the Senate.

Life & background

Born around 1820 in Trenton, New Jersey, to a formerly enslaved father and a mother of South Asian descent, Washington organized a school for Black children in Trenton at age sixteen, studied at Kimball Union Academy and the Oneida Institute, and briefly attended Dartmouth College before financial pressures forced him to withdraw. He operated his Hartford daguerreotype studio from roughly 1846 to 1853, emigrated to Liberia with his wife and children that year, and remained there as a photographer, planter, and legislator until his death in Monrovia on June 7, 1875, at about age 55.

Sources

1. Library of Congress (Picture This); Dartmouth Alumni Magazine; National Portrait Gallery