This 1856 portrait was once forgotten — now it’s known as the earliest photo of resistance | HO

The Forgotten Box

When Dr. Olivia Chen began her routine cataloging shift inside the Charleston Museum’s storage facility, she expected nothing more dramatic than dust and mildew. The warehouse — a sprawling, airless labyrinth of forgotten donations — was where history went to sleep.

She had been there for weeks, recording dented artifacts and sun-faded specimens when she noticed a box that didn’t belong. It was walnut, not pine, fitted with tarnished brass corners, its lock long since corroded. Inside, wrapped in the faint remains of silk, lay a single daguerreotype — the earliest form of photography — resting in a finely tooled leather case.

Olivia opened it carefully.

The portrait showed a young Black man, early twenties, standing beside a table, hand resting on an open book. His expression stopped her cold. Unlike most portraits of the 1850s, stiff and lifeless, his eyes were alive — intense, unyielding, aware. On the pages beneath his hand, the faint words “freedom” and “liberty” could be read. Etched on the brass mat was a date: May 12, 1856. Inside the case, an inscription:

“Isaac — so that someone will know.”

Dr. Chen didn’t yet realize it, but she had just uncovered what would become known as the earliest photographic evidence of resistance in America’s slave South.

A Portrait Too Bold for Its Time

Historians estimate fewer than a dozen studio portraits of free Black Americans exist from before the Civil War — and almost none taken in the Deep South. To be photographed as an educated, dignified Black man in Charleston, South Carolina, 1856, was not just rare. It was dangerous.

Dr. Chen sent a high-resolution scan to Dr. Marcus Williams, a University of South Carolina historian specializing in early Southern photography. Within an hour, he called her, his voice shaking.

“Do you understand what this is?” he asked. “This isn’t a keepsake. It’s evidence.”

Together, they assembled a team: Dr. Rachel Foster, an expert in antebellum Black history, and Dr. James Chin, a photographic conservator. Under magnification, they found details invisible to the naked eye — a small pin on Isaac’s vest depicting a broken chain, an abolitionist symbol, and words on the book that read like open defiance: “freedom… rights… equal.”

“This photograph was deliberate,” Dr. Foster said. “Every element is a message — literacy, resistance, humanity. In 1856, all three were acts of rebellion.”

“Photographed in Freedom”

Hidden beneath the silk lining of the case, the team discovered writing carved directly into the wood:

“Isaac Freeman, student of truth, photographed in freedom by those who believe all men are created equal. May 12, 1856.”

The phrase “photographed in freedom” stunned them. It was a declaration — not of property, but of personhood.

But who was Isaac Freeman?

The Search for Isaac

Charleston’s records from the 1850s were sparse, most concerning enslaved individuals as property entries, not names. But among the Free Negro Registry of 1855, Dr. Foster found him:

Isaac Freeman, 21. Born free in Charleston. Carpenter. Literate.

A handwritten note added ominously: “Subject demonstrates unusual education. Under observation.”

“Under observation,” Dr. Foster explained, “meant the city was watching him. Free Black citizens who read, wrote, and taught others were viewed as threats.”

Then, a clue in the Charleston Mercury from May 1856, the very month of the photograph:

Authorities investigate reports of illegal school operating in the city. Several free Negroes suspected of teaching enslaved population to read.

The School on Coming Street

Piece by piece, the team reconstructed Isaac’s world. Parish records from Morris Brown Church, Charleston’s largest Black congregation, mentioned a “literary society” renting space on Coming Street in 1855. Donations were recorded from a group called Friends of Learning.

“‘Literary society’ was code,” Dr. Foster said. “It was an illegal night school.”

Testimonies from the Freedmen’s Bureau, collected after the Civil War, confirmed it. A woman named Sarah recalled:

“We came after our work was done, climbing through a back window so no one would see. Isaac said education was our weapon. He showed us his picture — said it was proof we existed.”

Within months of the photograph’s creation, authorities raided the school. Everyone had fled. The book Isaac held — Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans — was seized and burned.

But Isaac had already made it immortal.

The Photographer Who Helped

Producing a daguerreotype in 1856 required skill, equipment, and money — resources few Black residents could access. Dr. Chen traced the plate’s manufacturer’s mark, Scoville Manufacturing Co., to a Charleston studio operated by Jonathan and Mary Wright, Quakers known for abolitionist sympathies.

The Wrights vanished from Charleston records two years later. But in Quaker meeting notes from Philadelphia, they appear again:

“Jonathan and Mary Wright, formerly of Charleston, have relocated north after persecution for their aid to the oppressed.”

The couple had risked everything to record Isaac’s defiance.

The Man Who Escaped

After the 1857 raids, Isaac disappeared from Charleston’s records. For months, the team found nothing — until Dr. Williams searched the Underground Railroad archives.

In abolitionist William Still’s 1857 logbook, one entry read:

“A young free man from Charleston, educated, arrived seeking passage north. Carried a daguerreotype portrait, said it was his proof.”

From there, Isaac’s trail led to Chatham, Ontario, a sanctuary for freedom seekers. In the 1861 Canadian census, he reappeared:

Isaac Freeman, 27, carpenter and teacher, born South Carolina.

He had escaped — and he had carried the photograph with him.

Resistance in Silver

In 1862, Isaac wrote back to William Still, a letter now preserved in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

“That image taken in Charleston represents everything I fought for — the right to learn, to teach, to exist as a free and educated man. I show it to my students here to prove that even under the lash of tyranny, resistance was possible.”

He also revealed that he had copied the photograph using the newer ambrotype process and distributed it to abolitionist societies in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia “so the proof could not be destroyed.”

He succeeded.

By 1863, newspapers like The Liberator and The North Star advertised “photographic evidence of Negro achievement,” images meant to disprove pro-slavery pseudoscience. Among them was Isaac’s portrait.

The Boston Athenaeum, New York Historical Society, and Smithsonian each unknowingly held a version of the photograph for over a century. Every copy bore a different inscription:

“Evidence of Negro capacity for education.”

“Proof that education among the Negro population is achieved despite legal prohibition.”

“Portrait of Isaac Freeman, teacher of illegal school, Charleston, S.C., May 1856.”

The Book That Couldn’t Be Burned

Dr. Chen’s digital restoration of the image revealed the exact passages Isaac displayed from Lydia Maria Child’s banned book:

“The evil does not merely consist in the deprivation of freedom, but in the degradation of all the moral and intellectual faculties.”

“Slavery crushes the intellect and brutalizes the affections.”

He had arranged the pages so those lines would face the camera.

“He wasn’t just proving he could read,” Dr. Williams said. “He was using Child’s words to argue against slavery — in his own portrait. He turned a photograph into a manifesto.”

When Charleston police burned the original book, they thought they were erasing evidence. But Isaac had already sealed it in silver — an indestructible archive of defiance.

From Evidence to Legacy

In Canada, Isaac built a school, married a freedom seeker from Kentucky, and raised four children. His eldest became a doctor; his daughter followed him into teaching.

In an 1870 essay, he reflected:

“That young man in the photograph represents every student who risked punishment to learn, every teacher who refused silence, every soul who claimed their own humanity when the world denied it.”

Isaac Freeman died in 1893 at 59. In his will, he left the original daguerreotype “to a society dedicated to preserving the struggle of my people.” Through decades of relocations and forgotten inventories, it found its way home — back to Charleston.

The Exhibit That Changed Everything

When The Charleston Museum unveiled Resistance in Silver: The Isaac Freeman Daguerreotype and the Hidden History of Black Education, crowds stretched down the block.

Displayed in a climate-controlled case, the small, gleaming plate drew hundreds to silence.

“This isn’t just a photograph,” Dr. Foster told the audience. “It is the earliest visual proof of organized resistance to slavery — a document of defiance, created when doing so could have cost a man his freedom or his life.”

Among the visitors was Isaac’s great-great-grandson, David Freeman.

“My family always knew we came from a teacher,” he said. “But we never knew he faced such danger, or that he left this — this proof of courage. To see him looking back at us now… it’s like he’s still teaching.”

The Man Who Refused to Be Erased

As the exhibition closed for the night, Dr. Chen lingered before the portrait. Isaac’s gaze, sharp and unwavering after 169 years, seemed to pierce the glass.

He had achieved exactly what he set out to do.

His photograph had survived raids, fire, exile, and time itself. It had crossed oceans and borders, endured in secret archives, and returned to the city where it was born — not as evidence of property, but as proof of resistance.

In his eyes, captured forever in silver and light, one message endures:

“I existed. I learned. I taught. I resisted. Remember me — remember all of us.”

And at last, the world does.