ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 19, 1996 TAG: 9612190042
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
About a dozen years before he was hanged, abolitionist John Brown visited the photo studio of a former slave's son and had his first known picture taken in a glowering swearing-in pose without his unruly white beard.
The original, only 4 inches by 3 1/4 inches, was done about 1847 and disappeared a century ago. Recovered, it's going on show today at the National Portrait Gallery.
The picture turned up last spring in its original padded brown case at a small auction in the Pittsburgh area. Later it brought $115,000 at Sotheby's. Mary Panzer, curator of the National Portrait Gallery show, said Wednesday she did not know who owned it over the years.
Part of the money for the purchase was contributed by Betty Adler Schermer and her husband, Lloyd Schermer. Her great-grandfather, August Bondi, was among Brown's ``Free-Staters'' battling pro-slavery ``Border Ruffians'' in Kansas and Missouri.
Photographer Augustus Washington, son of an Asian mother and a black former slave, learned to make daguerreotypes - a primitive photo process that had recently been brought to the United States from France. He wanted to earn his way through Dartmouth. Parents, friends and the president of the college disapproved, but Washington did a thriving business in his studio at Hartford, Conn. - apparently the first in the city.
He never got through Dartmouth.
Washington's customers included prominent abolitionists, and Brown, running a wool brokerage in nearby Springfield, Mass., came to pose. The picture shows him clean-shaven at 47, with one hand raised as if taking an oath, the other on an unidentified flag.
In 1859, Brown and 21 others occupied the arsenal at Harper's Ferry in what is now West Virginia to start a ``war of emancipation.'' The next day, a company of Marines under Col. Robert E. Lee took Brown's last stronghold by assault. Ten people died, including two of Brown's 20 children.
Brown was convicted of treason to the Virginia commonwealth and conspiracy to murder.
Washington later went to Liberia, where freed American slaves had set up a black government. But for daguerreotypes he needed copper plates, silver halide, mercury and other chemicals, and after a year his supplies ran out. He went into farming, taught Latin and Greek, and wrote for American newspapers.
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Part of the money to acquire this photo of Johnby CNBBrown came from a descendant of one of his followers. color.