With a quiet, unflinching confidence, Virginia L. Molyneaux Hewlett Douglass posed for the photographer, one slender hand rustling the pleats of her fine silk dress. Although portraits were trendy and accessible in the 1860s when hers was shot, hand-colored photographs were a luxury, and this one is saturated with shades of emerald and lilac, underlining Virginia’s wealth and high social standing as the wife of Frederick Douglass, Jr., son of the celebrated abolitionist. Her name is handwritten above the portrait in flowery cursive as Mrs. Frederick Douglas, pasted into one of two recently discovered albums that have the potential to change much of what we know of the network of African-Americans centered around the steep north slope of Boston’s Beacon Hill in the 1860s and beyond.
Last fall, the Boston Athenaeum—one of the nation’s oldest independent libraries—quietly acquired the two leather-bound photo albums believed to have been compiled in the 1860s by Harriet Bell Hayden, who fled slavery in the South to become a deeply respected member of the city’s African-American community.
Inside the albums’ delicate brass clasps lie a treasure trove of 87 portraits, a veritable “Who’s Who” of 19th-century Black Boston dressed to the nines in Victorian finery. The images bring to life politicians, military officers, literary figures, financiers, abolitionists and children, formally posed in opulent studio settings and gazing with great dignity directly at the camera.
Procured from a dealer who had acquired the albums at auction, the two albums were tenderly preserved by a New England family for generations, says John Buchtel, the Athenaeum’s curator of rare books. The albums provide the opportunity to piece together details of a remarkably courageous life all too often reduced to having simply been wed to an important man. “We don’t know a lot about Harriet Hayden. Her name is always linked to [her husband, Lewis],” concedes Jocelyn Gould, a guide with the National Parks Boston who gives lectures at the African Meeting House, the church that formed the socio-political cornerstone of the Haydens’ community.
As for Lewis, we know that it was his experiences as an enslaved laborer, including having his first wife and son sold away, that built a fiery drive to not only escape slavery but bring others out of it as well. The Haydens and their son escaped from bondage in 1844, arriving in Canada with the help of two abolitionists from Oberlin College. They ultimately resettled in Boston in 1846 out of a moral compulsion to further the abolitionist cause.