?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
(ABOLITION.) Carte-de-visite album including portraits of Truth, Douglass, Phillips, Garrison, and other abolitionists. 50 photographs, all carte-de-visite cards including one mounted tintype, inserted into a period album with two generations of manuscript captions. Quarto, 5¾ x 4¼ inches, embossed morocco with original clasp produced by Miller & Burlock of Philadelphia with decorative title page, minor wear, coming detached from contents; mounts have corners slightly trimmed to allow for easier insertion; titled "E R Post Album" in pencil on front flyleaf. Various places, circa 1860s, with one 1902 photo added
Included in this family photo album are also portraits of several of the leading abolitionists of the 1860s:
Sojourner Truth, with her usual 1864 copyright statement backmark and no revenue stamp or caption on verso. This card could not be safely slid out from its mount, although its partner can be, so the front caption (if any) remains unknown. She is seated, knitting with a ball of yarn in her lap against a plain backdrop, as seen in portraits taken at two sessions in 1864 and 1865. This exact pose is not among the many recorded in Grigsby, Enduring Truths, pages 65-77.
Frederick Douglass. Blank on verso; period mount. Photograph credited to Henry P. Rundel and Charles Warren Woodward of Rochester, NY, circa 1865, in Stauffer, Picturing Frederick Douglass #40.
William Lloyd Garrison. Could not remove to examine backmark.
Wendell Phillips, with the backmark of J.E. Tilton & Co. of 161 Washington St. Boston.
Oliver Johnson, with the backmark of Charles D. Fredricks & Co., 587 Broadway, New York.
Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Philadelphia abolitionist; could not be removed from album.
Composite portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet. Blank on verso; period mount.
These abolitionists appear in a family photo album kept by Elizabeth R. Post (1835-1934), from a prominent Quaker family on Long Island, New York. Her parents Joseph Post (1803-1888) and Mary W. Robbins Post (1806-1892) were abolitionists; their correspondence with Lucretia Mott is preserved at Bryn Mawr College. Joseph's brother Isaac Post of Rochester, NY (not depicted here) was a more well-known abolitionist. Most of the photographs have circa 1860s captions by Elizabeth, and many have later pencil captions by a Willis family niece. A complete list of the family photos is available by request.
