Lot 101: Sojourner Truth CDV, “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance,” 1864, with Manuscript Inscription Dated March 30, 1871
Toronto. I mentioned earlier that Mike Lehr down in New Jersey has an online auction on the 24th of this month. Mike chose lot 101 in his auction (a CdV) to review. He expands on its background which will be of great interest those who admire American History.
The lot 101 description states:”Most Sojourner Truth CDVs are artifacts of commerce. This one is an artifact of presence.
“The front is the famous image, Truth seated, knitting, a vase of flowers at her right, her gaze level and unapologetic. Below the photograph, in printed text: I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth. The back carries the statutory copyright notice, entered in 1864 with the Clerk’s Office of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
“It was one of the earliest and most deliberate acts of image self-ownership in American photographic history, announced publicly even before the copyright was filed, as a declaration of property rights.
“That would be enough. That is already a major piece. But then there is the ink inscription on the back, in a neat period hand: Visited at our house March 30th 1871.
“This CDV was not purchased at a lecture hall table or ordered through the mail. It was given, almost certainly by Truth herself, during an in-person visit to a private home. The person who wrote the note was recording an encounter. They were saying: she was here. We sat with her. She left this.
“Truth used these photographs to raise funds for her causes, and understood the transaction with a clarity that still startles: “I used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.” The CDV was simultaneously a fundraising tool, a political statement, and, in the form of a personal visit, a gift. When she walked into someone’s home and left one behind, it carried the full weight of that.
“The date matters too. By March 1871, Truth had been based in Battle Creek, Michigan since 1857, but she continued to travel and speak. Earlier that same year she had addressed the Second Annual Convention of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Boston, arguing that women’s rights were essential “for the benefit of the whole creation, not only the women, but all the men on the face of the earth.” She was 74 years old, still moving, still working, still handing out her shadow in exchange for the substance of her causes.
“The photograph itself repays careful looking. Truth’s choice to be shown knitting was deliberate. During the Civil War, knitting had acquired patriotic connotations, becoming a public sign of industry and advancement, an insistence on her own making, her touch, her manual labor. She was not merely the subject of the picture but its author. She used the card mount to promote her causes and to present herself as a model for an emancipated, prosperous African American future. Every element, the shawl, the flowers, the open book, the yarn trailing across her lap, was chosen. Nothing was accidental.
“By copyrighting and selling this image, a symbolic representation of her personhood, she supported her abolitionist and suffragist efforts and staked a claim to self-representation that few African Americans could achieve in this period. The slogan was not modest poetry. It was a legal and philosophical declaration. The shadow, the photograph, belonged to her. The substance, her freedom, her advocacy, her life’s work, was what it funded.
“Juneteenth marks the end of legal enslavement. This CDV marks something adjacent and equally profound: a Black woman, born into slavery in New York around 1797, who escaped, who sued and won, who traveled the country as one of its most powerful voices, and who, in a country that had treated her body as property, copyrighted her own image, sold it on her own terms, and on a Tuesday in March 1871, carried one to someone’s house and left it there as a record that she had come.
“That is what this CDV is. A receipt for a visit from Sojourner Truth.”
