Mar 30, 2023 - Sale 2631

Sale 2631 - Lot 251

Price Realized: $ 17,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
(MILITARY--CIVIL WAR.) Sixth-plate ambrotype of a Black Confederate valet. Ambrotype photograph, 3 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches, in original union case; a bit of light contemporary retouching to the shirt and necktie, case rebacked. No place, circa 1861-1865
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Additional Details

This portrait depicts a Black man in a Confederate uniform pants and jacket over a civilian shirt and vest. He was almost certainly not an enlisted soldier in the Confederate Army, and given his tidy appearance was probably not one of the many thousands of enslaved laborers forced to work on the Confederate defenses. He was very likely an enslaved valet who was forced to accompany his owner to the front.

In the desperate closing weeks of the war, the Confederate Congress did pass a law on 13 March 1865 authorizing the enlistment of Black troops, which was then issued as an order to the army by Jefferson Davis on 23 March. Union troops occupied Richmond just eleven days later. Because of the Union blockade, photography supplies were in very short supply in the Confederacy by the last weeks of the war.

Provenance: acquired by Ed Duer of Hourglass Antiques in Virginia at a small country auction; exhibited by the Museum of the Confederacy from March 2000 to March 2001; published in the magazine Virginia Cavalcade 50:1 (Winter 2001), page 46, captioned as "unidentified man from Albemarle County, shown wearing a Confederate shell jacket over a civilian vest, is believed to have worked as a body servant in the Army of Northern Virginia (courtesy of Ed and Pam Duer, Madison County, Virginia)"; Cowan's auction, 18 May 2003, lot 265, to the consignor. Since its 2003 appearance at auction, the image has occasionally appeared elsewhere on the Internet, drawn into a long historical debate over whether Black soldiers ever served in the Confederate Army. The Georgia Civil War Commission posted it on their Facebook page in 2013, drawing a response from the cwcrossroads blog. It has also appeared on Pinterest and Tumbler. The photograph offered here is the one and only original.