It was just a portrait of two friends — until experts noticed a shocking truth D
It was just a portrait of two friends until experts noticed a shocking truth. On April 22nd, 2024, Dr. Mur Rebecca Torres, a specialist in Civil War era photography at the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington DC, received a package that would lead to one of the most significant discoveries in post Civil War photographic documentation.
The package contained a single dgeray type photograph carefully preserved in its original leather case sent by an anonymous donor who included only a brief note found in my grandmother’s attic in Charleston. Thought it might be important. The photograph depicted two young women, both appearing to be between 16 and 18 years old, posed together in what appeared to be a professional photography studio.
The image dated from 1868 based on the clothing styles, photographic technique, and a faint studio mark visible on the case interior. What immediately caught Dr. Torres’s attention was the unusual composition and the subject’s contrasting demeanors. The young woman on the left was white with light hair styled in the fashion of the late 1860s, wearing an elegant silk dress with intricate lace detailing at the collar and sleeves.
Most remarkably, she was smiling, a genuine warm smile that reached her eyes. This was highly unusual for photographs of this era when subjects typically maintained serious formal expressions due to both cultural conventions and the long exposure times required by early photographic processes. The young woman on the right was black, with her hair pulled back severely from her face, wearing a dress of similar quality and style to her companions, though slightly simpler in its ornamentation.
Her expression was serious, almost solemn, which was typical for portrait subjects of the period. The two young women stood close together, their shoulders nearly touching, suggesting familiarity and comfort with each other. Dr. Torres began her standard authentication process, examining the dgeraype’s physical characteristics, the case construction, and the image quality.
Everything appeared consistent with legitimate 1868 photography. The studio backdrop, a painted scene of columns and drapery, matched conventions of the period. The lighting and composition were professional and skillful. What puzzled Dr. Torres initially was the context.
Photographs of white and black subjects posed together as apparent equals were extraordinarily rare in 1868, just 3 years after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. While some documentation existed of white employers posed with black servants, those images typically showed clear hierarchical positioning. The white subjects seated while the black subjects stood behind or to the side.
Visual arrangements that reinforced social subordination. This photograph was different. The two young women were positioned as equals side by side at the same height occupying the frame with equal presence. Doctor Torres retrieved her high-powered magnifying loop and positioned the dgeraype under her examination lamp.
She began a systematic, detailed analysis of every element in the image, working methodically from left to right, top to bottom. She examined the white young woman’s clothing, jewelry, and posture. She studied the studio furniture and backdrop. She analyzed the lighting and shadows.
Then she moved her examination to the black young woman, and her breath caught. Around the young woman’s wrists, barely visible beneath the lace cuffs of her elegant dress, were faint but unmistakable marks, linear discolorations consistent with scarring from restraints. Dr. Torres adjusted her magnification and lighting angle.
The marks became clearer. Bands of lighter and darker tissue around both wrists, the distinctive pattern left by prolonged wearing of metal shackles or rope bindings. Dr. Torres moved her examination lower to the hem of the young woman’s dress. The photograph showed just the tops of both young women’s shoes, but at the black young woman’s ankles, visible where the fabric ended, were similar marks, scarring consistent with leg irons or ankle restraints. Dr.
Torres set down her loop, her hands trembling slightly. This was not simply a rare photograph of interracial friendship. This was documentation of something far more significant and disturbing. The black young woman in this image bore physical evidence of having been enslaved. This photograph had been taken in 1868, 3 years after the 13th Amendment had legally abolished slavery throughout the United States.
The implications were staggering and demanded immediate investigation. Doctor Torres immediately documented her findings with high resolution digital photography, capturing the scarring on the young woman’s wrists and ankles from multiple angles and under different lighting conditions. She then began the complex process of trying to identify the subjects, determine where the photograph had been taken, and understand the circumstances that had led to its creation.
The Dgerayype case bore a faint marking on its velvet interior. J Matthew Studio, Charleston, SC. Dr. Torres contacted the Charleston Historical Society in South Carolina and spoke with archavist David Chen, explaining what she had found and requesting any available information about J. Matthews and his photography business.
Chen responded within two days with preliminary findings. Jonathan Matthews had operated a photography studio on King Street in Charleston from 1865 to 1871. He had been a Union Army veteran originally from Pennsylvania who had remained in Charleston after the war ended, establishing his business during the early reconstruction period.
Matthews had a documented reputation for serving both white and black clients, which was relatively progressive for the time and place. Though it had also made him controversial among Charleston’s white establishment, many of whom refused to patronize a business that treated black customers with basic dignity.
Most of Matthews business records had been lost. But the historical society had preserved a partial ledger from 1868 that listed some client appointments. Chen found one entry from July 1868 that noted two young ladies, special commission, private session, and with a fee of $5, an expensive sum for the time, suggesting this was an important or unusual request. Dr.
Torres expanded her research to Charleston newspapers, census records, and property documents from the period. Charleston in 1868 was a city in profound transition and turmoil. The Civil War had ended just three years earlier with the Confederacy’s defeat, bringing both the legal end of slavery and massive social disruption.
Federal troops occupied the city as part of reconstruction. Formerly enslaved people were navigating their new legal freedom while facing violent resistance from white southerners determined to maintain racial hierarchy through other means. The 1870 federal census, the first census to enumerate formerly enslaved people by name rather than as property, listed thousands of black residents in Charleston.
But the 1868 photograph predated the census by two years, making identification significantly more difficult. Dr. Torres needed another approach. She returned to examining the photograph itself, looking for any additional clues in the clothing, jewelry, or background details that might provide identifying information.
The white young woman wore a distinctive brooch at her collar, a cameo with what appeared to be classical imagery. The black young woman wore no jewelry, but her dress, while elegant, showed signs of having been altered or adjusted with slightly uneven hemming visible under magnification. Dr. Torres contacted textile historians and experts in Civil War era clothing to analyze the dresses in the photograph.
The analysis confirmed that both dresses were of good quality fabric, silk or fine cotton, and had been professionally made, suggesting both young women had access to resources. However, the slight alterations to the black young woman’s dress suggested it might have been a handme-down or borrowed garment adjusted to fit her.
The most significant clue came from re-examining the scarring. Doctor Torres consulted with medical historians and forensic pathologists who specialized in analyzing historical injury patterns. Their assessment was definitive. The marks on the young woman’s wrists and ankles were consistent with prolonged wearing of metal restraints, likely for months or years.
The scarring pattern, linear bands with areas of both hyperpigmentation and hypopigmentation, match documented examples of scarring from slavery era shackles. But if slavery had legally ended in 1865, why did this young woman photographed in 1868 bear fresh or relatively recent scarring from restraints? The answer, Dr.
Torres realized, lay in understanding the reality of reconstruction era, South Carolina. Legal abolition had not meant immediate freedom for all enslaved people. In the chaos and violence of the post-war period, thousands of black people, particularly in rural areas, had been held in conditions of continued bondage through various forms of coercion, illegal detention, and forced labor arrangements that technically complied with new laws but functionally maintained slavery. Dr.
Torres needed to find descendants or additional documentation. She posted inquiries on genealological forms, contacted historical societies throughout South Carolina, and reached out to organizations specializing in African-American genealogy. Within three weeks, she received a response that would unlock the entire story.
On May 15th, 2024, Dr. Torres received an email from Katherine Williams, a 72-year-old retired librarian living in Philadelphia. Katherine’s message was brief but electrifying. I believe one of the young women in that photograph is my great great grandmother. Her name was Sarah, and family history says she escaped slavery with help from a white friend named Catherine.
We have letters in a diary that tell the story. Dr. Torres arranged to meet Catherine in Washington DC the following week. Catherine arrived at the Smithsonian carrying a carefully preserved wooden box that had belonged to her grandmother. Inside were documents that had been passed down through four generations.
Letters, a small leatherbound diary, a faded ribbon, and one additional photograph, an image of an elderly black woman taken in the early 1900s, identified on the back as Sarah, age 68, Philadelphia, 1905. Dr. Torres examined the later photograph closely. The woman was elderly, her face deeply lined, her hair completely white.
But certain features were unmistakable. The shape of her eyes, the set of her jaw, the way she held her head. This was the same person as the young black woman in the 1868 photograph, aged nearly 40 years, but recognizably the same individual. Catherine sat across from Dr.
Torres in the museum’s research room and began to share what she knew. Sarah was born enslaved on a rice plantation outside Charleston around 1850. We don’t know the exact date. Enslaved people’s births weren’t officially recorded. Her mother was enslaved on the same plantation. Sarah never knew who her father was, though family stories suggest he was the plantation owner’s son.
According to Catherine, Sarah had grown up working in the plantation house rather than in the fields, which was both a privilege and a particular form of vulnerability. She had learned to read and write secretly, taught by one of the enslaved house workers, who had been literate. This was extraordinarily dangerous.
Teaching enslaved people to read was illegal throughout the South and could result in severe punishment. The plantation owner’s legitimate family included a daughter named Catherine, born around the same year as Sarah. Katherine continued, “The two girls grew up in the same house, though in completely different circumstances. Sarah was enslaved.
Catherine was the owner’s daughter.” But they formed a friendship that shouldn’t have existed. Catherine treating Sarah as a companion rather than his property. Catherine opened the wooden box and carefully removed the diary. It was small, bound in cracked leather with pages yellowed and fragile.
The handwriting inside was elegant 19th century script written in faded brown ink. This belonged to Catherine, Catherine explained. After Sarah escaped and made her way north, it corresponded for years. When Catherine died in 1892, her family found these letters in the diary. Catherine’s daughter, who apparently understood and supported what her mother had done, sent them to Sarah in Philadelphia.
Sarah kept them for the rest of her life, and they’ve been in my family ever since. Dr. Torres, wearing conservation gloves, carefully opened the diary. The entries began in 1865 when Katherine would have been approximately 15 years old. The early entries were typical adolescent observations about daily life, books she had read, and social events.
But the tone shifted dramatically in entries from 1866 and 1867. One entry from March 1867 read, “Father says the war changed nothing that matters.” He says, “The law may call them free, but on this plantation they will continue to work as they always have, and anyone who tries to leave will be brought back.
” I see how Sarah looks at the road when she thinks no one is watching. I see the marks on her wrists from the chains father had them put on her when she tried to run last year. How can this be right? How can this be legal when slavery is supposed to be ended? Dr. Torres read the passage twice, her heart pounding.
This diary provided firsthand documentation of what historians had long known but struggled to prove with primary sources that slavery had continued in practice on many southern plantations after 1865. Hidden under different names and justified through legal loopholes. Catherine nodded grimly. Catherine’s father, like many plantation owners, refused to accept that slavery had ended.
He kept the people who had been enslaved on his property working under what he called labor contracts. But these weren’t real contracts. They were enforced with violence, threats, and physical restraint. Anyone who tried to leave was hunted down and brought back. Sarah had tried to escape in 1866, about a year after slavery was legally abolished.
She was caught, brought back, and punished with shackles as a warning to others. How did Catherine and Sarah managed to take this photograph? Doctor Torres asked. Catherine carefully removed several letters from the box. That’s where the story gets remarkable. The letters Catherine shared were written by Catherine to Sarah over several decades, beginning in 1868 and continuing until shortly before Catherine’s death in 1892.
The earliest letters written before Sarah’s escape had apparently never been sent. Catherine had written them and hidden them perhaps as a way of organizing her thoughts or as evidence she hoped might someday prove useful. One letter dated June 1868 described Catherine’s growing determination to help Sarah escape.
Catherine had recently turned 18 and had been informed by her father that she would be married within the year to the son of another plantationowning family, a strategic alliance designed to consolidate land and wealth. Catherine wrote, “I cannot marry into this system and become complicit in its continuation.
I cannot live the rest of my life watching Sarah and the others suffer while I benefit from their bondage. I have decided what I must do, though it terrifies me and may cost me everything.” Catherine’s plan was both simple and extraordinarily risky. She would use money from her dowy, funds her father had set aside for her marriage to help Sarah escape to the north.
But before the escape, Catherine wanted to create a permanent record of their friendship, something that would document who Sarah was as a person rather than as property. She wanted a photograph that showed Sarah as she truly was intelligent, dignified, and worthy of freedom. In July 1868, Katherine arranged for both herself and Sarah to visit Charleston, ostensibly for Catherine to shop for her truso in preparation for her upcoming marriage.
This was plausible enough that Catherine’s father approved the trip, though he sent an overseer to accompany them and ensure Sarah didn’t attempt to run. Catherine had anticipated this and had developed a plan. She had learned through discreet inquiries that Jonathan Matthews, the photographer, was sympathetic to formerly enslaved people and had been known to help those seeking documentation for travel or legal purposes.
Catherine went to his studio on King Street alone first, while Sarah and the overseer waited outside. She explained the situation to Matthews directly. Sarah was being illegally held in bondage despite the 13th Amendment, and Catherine intended to help her escape. But first, Catherine wanted a photograph.
Documentation of their friendship and of Sarah’s humanity. Matthews could have refused. Helping an enslaved person escape, even in 1868, when slavery was legally abolished, was dangerous in South Carolina, where white supremacist violence was endemic and federal authority was limited. But Matthews agreed.
He was a Union veteran who had fought to end slavery, and he understood the importance of what Catherine was asking. The plan was executed the following day. Catherine, Sarah, and the overseer returned to the studio. Catherine told the overseer she wanted a formal portrait made and that it would take at least an hour.
She gave him money and suggested he wait at a nearby tavern while the photography session took place. The overseer, apparently seeing no risk in leaving two young women in a photography studio, accepted the money and left. Matthews locked the studio door and got to work immediately. He posed Catherine and Sarah together, deliberately positioning them as equals, side by side at the same height, occupying the frame with equal dignity.
He instructed Catherine to smile, which was unusual for the era, but which Catherine insisted upon. She wanted the photograph to show joy and genuine affection, not formal rigidity. Sarah wore one of Catherine’s dresses, altered to fit her. Matthews had specifically suggested that Sarah be photographed in fine clothing to emphasize her humanity and dignity to create a visual record that contradicted the dehumanizing narratives used to justify slavery.
But he did not hide or obscure the scars on Sarah’s wrists and ankles. Those marks were evidence documentation of what had been done to her, and Matthews understood they needed to be visible in the photograph. The exposure took several minutes, as was typical for dgeray type photography. Catherine maintained her smile throughout.
Sarah held her serious expression with quiet dignity. When the plate was developed and the image fixed, Matthews made two copies, one for Catherine and one for Sarah to take with her when she escaped. The session concluded just as the overseer returned from the tavern. Catherine paid Matthews $5, an enormous sum, but one that ensured his discretion and his commitment to the plan.
She and Sarah returned to the plantation with the overseer, who apparently never suspected anything unusual had occurred. The escape would take place exactly two weeks later. Catherine’s diary entries from late July 1868 documented the final preparations for Sarah’s escape. Catherine had been secretly collecting money for months, taking small amounts from her dowy fund and from household accounts where her father wouldn’t notice.
By late July, she had accumulated nearly $120, enough to pay for Sarah’s passage north and provide her with funds to survive for several months while establishing herself in a free state. Catherine had also been corresponding secretly with abolitionists in Philadelphia using contacts she had discovered through church networks.
These abolitionists, though the war had ended and slavery was legally abolished, continued to operate networks helping black people escape from situations of continued bondage in the south. They provided Catherine with specific instructions. Sarah should travel by train to Richmond, then to Baltimore, and finally to Philadelphia, where she would be met by members of the Society of Friends who would help her find housing and employment.
The plan required careful timing and an element of deception. Catherine’s upcoming marriage was scheduled for August 15th, 1868. In the days leading up to the wedding, the plantation household was chaotic with preparations, guests arriving, and her father distracted by social obligations.
Catherine chose the night of August 2nd, less than 2 weeks before her wedding, as the time for Sarah’s escape. According to Catherine’s diary, she waited until well after midnight, when everyone in the house was asleep. She went to the small room where Sarah slept, a windowless space off the main kitchen that had once been a storage closet.
Catherine woke Sarah and handed her a bundle. Men’s clothing that would allow her to travel with less attention, the money Catherine had collected, detailed written instructions for the journey, letters of introduction to the Philadelphia abolitionists, and the Dgeray type photograph in its leather case.
Catherine’s diary entry from that night was brief but emotional. I gave Sarah everything I could, money, instructions, and the photograph so she would always have proof of who she was and that someone saw her as fully human. We embraced, both of us crying silently. She thanked me, but I told her she owed me no thanks.
If anything, I owed her an apology for being born into a system that had stolen her life. She told me she forgave me, though I don’t believe I deserve forgiveness. Then she was gone, slipping out the kitchen door into the darkness. I pray she makes it safely. I pray I never see her again, because if I do, it means she was caught.
Sarah traveled on foot for three miles to reach the nearest train station, walking through the night along roads she had memorized from Catherine’s instructions. She was dressed in men’s clothing with her hair hidden under a cap, hoping to avoid attention. At the station, she used some of Catherine’s money to purchase a ticket to Richmond, claiming to be a free black man traveling north for work.
The journey was terrifying and dangerous. Railroad conductors and passengers were often hostile to black travelers. Any black person traveling alone could be stopped and questioned, potentially arrested on suspicion of being a runaway or simply because local authorities wanted to intimidate and control black mobility.
Sarah had papers, a letter Katherine had forged, claiming Sarah was a free woman employed by Catherine’s family and traveling on family business, but such documents were often ignored or dismissed by authorities determined to harass black travelers. Sarah later wrote about the journey in letters to Catherine.
She described sleeping in train stations, going hungry because restaurants refused to serve black customers, being threatened by white passengers who objected to her presence, and living in constant fear of being detained. But she also wrote about moments of unexpected kindness. A black porter who shared his food with her.
An elderly Quaker woman who sat beside her on a train and engaged her in kind conversation. A black family in Baltimore who gave her shelter for a night when she had nowhere else to go. After 6 days of travel, Sarah reached Philadelphia on August 8th, 1868. She was met at the train station by members of the Society of Friends, just as Catherine had arranged.
They provided her with temporary housing in a boarding house that catered to newly arrived black migrants from the South. They helped her find work as a seamstress. She had learned sewing skills while enslaved and was highly skilled. Within a month, Sarah had secured steady employment and had begun building a new life.
Meanwhile, back in South Carolina, Catherine faced consequences for her actions. When Sarah’s absence was discovered the morning after her escape, Catherine’s father immediately suspected his daughter’s involvement. Catherine had made no particular effort to hide her sympathies or her friendship with Sarah. Her father questioned her aggressively, and Catherine, understanding that lying would only delay the inevitable, admitted what she had done.
According to Catherine’s diary and her later letters to Sarah, her father’s rage was volcanic. He called her a traitor to her family, her race in the South. He accused her of theft, claiming Sarah had been valuable property despite slavery’s legal abolition, and of conspiring to violate South Carolina’s labor laws, which he claimed gave him legal authority to enforce labor contracts.
He threatened to have her arrested, though he ultimately didn’t follow through on this threat. Apparently unwilling to create a public scandal that would humiliate the family and potentially interfere with Catherine’s upcoming marriage. Instead, Catherine’s father chose a different punishment. He confined Catherine to the plantation house under watch, forbidding her to leave or to have any contact with anyone outside the family.
He moved the wedding date forward from August 15th to August 10th, just 8 days after Sarah’s escape, apparently hoping that marrying Catherine off quickly would end the situation and place her under her husband’s control, but Catherine refused to comply. In one of her most dramatic diary entries dated August 9th, 1868, she wrote, “Father informed me that I will be married tomorrow, whether I consent or not.
He says my disobedience has disgraced the family and that my husband will be responsible for correcting my character. I told him, “I will not marry a man I do not love in order to preserve a system I despise.” I told him, “I would rather die than become the wife of a plantation owner and spend my life benefiting from the bondage of others.
” He struck me across the face and told me, “I have no choice, but I do have a choice. I will make it tonight.” That night, Catherine fled the plantation. She took only a small bag with some clothing, her diary, her mother’s jewelry that she could sell for money, and letters she had received from the Philadelphia abolitionists.
She walked several miles to a neighbor’s house, a family she knew to be more moderate in their views, and begged them for help. They, shocked by her appearance and her story, agreed to shelter her for the night and help her arrange travel north. Within 3 days, Catherine was on a train heading to Virginia, using money from selling her mother’s jewelry to pay for her passage.
She sent a brief letter to her father from Richmond, explaining that she would not return and would not marry. She wrote that she was forfeiting any claim to her inheritance or to the family name. She asked only that he not attempt to find her or to harm Sarah. Catherine’s father never responded to her letter.
According to family records that Catherine had researched, Catherine’s father told relatives and neighbors that his daughter had suffered a mental breakdown and had been sent to live with distant relatives in Europe, a lie designed to save face and prevent scandal. He never admitted publicly that she had run away or why.
Catherine eventually reached Philadelphia in late August 1868. Through the same abolitionist networks that had helped Sarah, Katherine found temporary housing and began searching for work. She was educated and literate, which gave her advantages many women lacked. But she had no practical work experience and no family support.
She found employment as a governness for a Quaker family, teaching their children reading and arithmetic. In September 1868, Catherine and Sarah reunited in Philadelphia. Catherine wrote in her diary, “I saw Sarah today for the first time since that night. We both wept. She has found work in a room in a decent boarding house.
She looks healthier than I ever saw her in Charleston. The weight of bondage has lifted from her shoulders, though I see she still bears the scars on her wrists. We spoke for hours. She thanked me again and again I told her she owes me nothing. If anything, our friendship is the greatest gift I have ever received.
It taught me to see the world as it truly is and gave me the courage to choose conscience over comfort. The two young women maintained their friendship for the rest of their lives. Sarah and Catherine both spent the remainder of 1868 and all of 1869 establishing themselves in Philadelphia. They lived in different neighborhoods.
Catherine in a Quaker boarding house in the city center, Sarah in a predominantly black neighborhood in South Philadelphia, but they saw each other regularly, meeting for walks, attending church services together, and supporting each other through the challenges of building new lives far from everything they had known.
Sarah’s transition to freedom was both liberating and difficult. For the first time in her life, she controlled her own time, her own labor, and her own choices. She could walk down the street without fear of being stopped and questioned. She could enter shops, attend church, and speak to people without needing permission.
But freedom also meant vulnerability. She had no family in Philadelphia, no network of support, and limited resources. She worked long hours as a seamstress, often taking peacework home to complete by lamplight late into the night. The letter Sarah wrote to Catherine during this period, which Catherine had preserved, documented both the joys and struggles of her new life.
In one letter from October 1868, Sarah wrote, “I wake each morning and for a moment forget where I am, and I feel the old fear rising. Then I remember, I’m free. No one owns me. No one can sell me or chain me or take away my humanity. Some days this knowledge fills me with such joy I can barely contain it.
Other days, the weight of what was stolen from me, my childhood, my mother’s presence, the years I lost to bondage, feels overwhelming. But I am building something now. I’m creating a life that belongs to me.” Catherine’s letters from the same period reflected her own complicated adjustment. She had given up wealth, social position, and family connections to follow her conscience.
While she never expressed regret for helping Sarah escape, she did write honestly about the losses she had experienced. Her family had disowned her completely. Her father died in 1870 without ever contacting her or acknowledging her existence. She lived on modest wages and had to learn practical skills, cooking, cleaning, managing money that she had never needed as a plantation owner’s daughter.
But Katherine also found purpose in community. She became involved with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, which despite slavery’s legal abolition, continued to work on behalf of formerly enslaved people, helping them navigate legal systems, find employment, and resist efforts to reinslave them through debt bondage or fraudulent labor contracts.
Catherine used her education and her firsthand knowledge of how southern plantation owners operated to help the organization develop strategies for protecting vulnerable black migrants from the South. In 1871, Sarah married a man named James, a freeborn black man from Pennsylvania who worked as a carpenter.
The wedding was small, held in a black church in South Philadelphia, and Catherine attended as Sarah’s witness and honored guest. Catherine’s diary entry from the wedding day expressed profound joy. To see Sarah in her wedding dress, smiling with genuine happiness, standing beside a man she chose freely, promising to build a life together.
This is what freedom looks like. This is what we fought for. This is why I left everything behind. Sarah and James had four children over the next decade, two sons and two daughters. Sarah continued her sewing work from home while raising her children. Catherine remained a constant presence in their lives, serving as an unofficial aunt to the children, helping Sarah with child care and providing support during difficult times.
Catherine never married. In letters to Sarah, she explained that she had no desire to enter into a legal arrangement that would give a husband control over her property, her choices, or her freedom. She valued her independence too much to risk losing it, even to a kind man.
Instead, she devoted herself to her work with the Anti-Slavery Society and to her friendship with Sarah and her growing family. The 1868 Dgerayype photograph remained Sarah’s most treasured possession. She kept it in its leather case, wrapped in cloth, stored in a wooden box under her bed. She showed it to her children when they were old enough to understand its significance, explaining what it represented.
Proof that she had survived, proof that friendship could cross the barriers of race and circumstance, and proof that she was fully human and deserving of dignity long before the law recognized these truths. Dr. Rebecca Torres spent several weeks after meeting Katherine Williams, contextualizing Sarah and Catherine’s story within the broader historical framework of reconstruction and its aftermath.
What had happened to Sarah, being held in continued bondage after slavery’s legal abolition, was not an isolated incident, but part of a widespread pattern of resistance by white southerners to accepting black freedom. Research into South Carolina during the reconstruction period revealed extensive documentation of illegal continuation of slavery under different names.
Plantation owners who lost their legal right to own human beings as property developed various strategies to maintain control over black labor. Fraudulent labor contracts that bound workers to plantations for years. debt bondage systems where workers were charged for food, housing, and supplies at inflated prices that ensured they could never pay off their debts.
Apprenticeship arrangements where black children were forcibly bound to white employers, and outright kidnapping and illegal detention of black people who were held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. Federal authorities during reconstruction attempted to intervene, but their power was limited and inconsistently applied. The Freriedman’s Bureau, established to help formerly enslaved people transition to freedom, was chronically underfunded and understaffed.
Bureau agents were often threatened or attacked by white southerners who resented federal interference. Many cases of illegal bondage went unreported because the victims had no access to authorities or feared violent retaliation if they complained. Doctor Torres found documented cases strikingly similar to Sarah’s situation.
Black people held on plantations after 1865, forced to work without wages, subjected to physical restraints and punishment if they attempted to leave, and told that despite the 13th Amendment, they were still bound to their former owners through contracts or obligations. Some had been enslaved children who were claimed as apprentices or wards.
Others were adults told their debt for food and shelter during slavery had to be worked off before they could leave. The practice of shackling black workers who attempted to escape continued well into the reconstruction period. Dr. Pri Torres found Freiriedman’s Bureau reports from South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. Documenting cases where bureau agents discovered black workers chained or locked in plantation outuildings held prisoner by white land owners who claimed legal authority to restrain workers who had violated labor contracts. The scarring visible on Sarah’s wrists and ankles in the 1868 photograph was physical evidence of these practices. documentation that contradicted post-war narratives, claiming slavery had ended cleanly with Confederate defeat. These scars testified to the reality that for thousands of black people in the South, freedom was delayed, partial, or entirely denied for years after 1865. Dr. Torres also researched the phenomenon of white allies like Catherine, who actively assisted black people in escaping continued bondage.
Such individuals were rare and faced severe social, economic, and sometimes legal consequences. White Southerners who openly opposed slavery or helped black people were labeled traitors, ostracized from their communities, threatened with violence, and sometimes prosecuted under local laws designed to criminalize assistance to black people.
Katherine’s decision to help Sarah escape and then to flee the plantation herself placed her in a small but significant category of white southerners who chose to break completely with their families and their racial cast rather than participate in ongoing oppression. Most of these individuals have been forgotten by history because they left few records and their actions were deliberately concealed to protect themselves and those they helped.
The photograph itself represented an extraordinary act of documentation and resistance. By deliberately including the scars on Sarah’s wrists and ankles in the image, photographer Jonathan Matthews created visual evidence of illegal bondage that could potentially be used in legal proceedings. By posing Sarah and Catherine as equals and encouraging Catherine’s smile, Matthews created an image that challenged prevailing racist iconography, showing black people as subordinate, subservient, or suited only for labor. Dr. Torres understood that this photograph was not just a personal momento between friends. It was a political statement and a historical document of the highest significance. Katherine Williams shared additional documents that traced what happened to Sarah and Catherine in the decades following their escape to Philadelphia. Both women lived long lives and maintained their friendship until Catherine’s death in 1892. Sarah continued working as a seamstress throughout her life, eventually opening a small shop in South Philadelphia, where she employed other black women and trained young seamstresses. Her business was modestly successful, providing her family with financial stability and
independence. Her four children all received educations, a priority for Sarah, who remembered being denied literacy as an enslaved child. Two of her children attended college, an extraordinary achievement for that era. Sarah became active in Philadelphia’s black community organizations, particularly those focused on helping newly arrived migrants from the south.
She understood from personal experience the challenges of arriving in a northern city with no resources or connections. And she devoted considerable time to helping others make the transition. She also participated in church networks that continued to assist people escaping illegal bondage in the south, providing financial support and sharing her own story to encourage others.
Katherine continued her work with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and later with organizations focused on women’s rights and education reform. She became a published writer, contributing articles to abolitionist and progressive publications under a pseudonym to avoid attracting attention from her estranged southern family.
Her writings focused on exposing the continued oppression of black people in the South and arguing for federal intervention to enforce constitutional rights. In 1885, Sarah’s husband, James, died suddenly from pneumonia, leaving Sarah a widow at age 55. Catherine, who had never married, moved into Sarah’s household to help with expenses and to provide companionship.
The two women lived together for the remaining seven years of Catherine’s life. Their friendship having evolved into something deeper, a chosen family, a partnership built on shared values and mutual respect that transcended the racial divisions of their era. Katherine died in January 1892 at age 62 from complications of tuberculosis.
Sarah was with her at the end. In Catherine’s final letter to Sarah, written just days before her death and preserved by Katherine Williams, Katherine wrote, “My dearest Sarah, I am not afraid to die because I know I lived my life according to my conscience. Helping you escape was the most important thing I ever did. Our friendship has been the greatest blessing of my life.
You showed me what courage truly means. You taught me that humanity transcends all the artificial divisions society creates. I go to whatever comes next, knowing that I chose love over hate, justice over comfort, and truth over convenient lies. Keep our photographs safe. Let it remind the world that friendship and decency are possible even in the darkest times.
Sarah lived another 13 years, dying in 1905 at age 75. She was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. A woman who had survived slavery, escaped to freedom, built a life and a family, and helped countless others along the way. At her funeral, held at the same church where she had married James, Katherine’s letter was read aloud and the 1868 Dgerayite photograph was displayed, allowing those gathered to see visual evidence of the friendship that had changed both women’s lives.
The photograph was passed down through Sarah’s family. Her daughter kept it, then her granddaughter, then Katherine Williams grandmother, and finally to Catherine herself. Each generation was told the story. The story of bondage and freedom, of courage and friendship, of two young women who refused to accept the world as it was and instead created their own version of justice.
For over a century, the photograph remained a private family treasure, its significance known only to Sarah’s descendants. Then, in 2024, Katherine Williams decided it was time for the world to see it. On September 15th, 2024, the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture opened a special exhibition titled Two Friends: The 1868 Portrait and the Reality of Freedom Delayed.
The exhibition was curated by Dr. Rebecca Torres and had been designed in close collaboration with Katherine Williams and several other descendants of Sarah, who had been located through genealological research. The centerpiece was the 1868 Dgerayype, displayed in a climate controlled case under carefully calibrated lighting.
Beside it, a large highresolution digital reproduction allowed visitors to clearly see the scarring on Sarah’s wrists and ankles, the physical evidence of her bondage. Explanatory panels provided historical context about the continuation of slavery after 1865, the reality of reconstruction in South Carolina, and the extraordinary courage required for both Sarah to escape and Catherine to help her.
The exhibition also displayed Catherine’s diary, her letters to Sarah, Sarah’s responses, and the later photograph of elderly Sarah from 1905. Documents from the Freriedman’s Bureau, newspaper articles about illegal bondage in South Carolina, and scholarly analysis about reconstruction all provided broader context. A detailed timeline traced both women’s lives from their births through their deaths, showing how their friendship evolved and endured across decades.
Perhaps most powerfully, the exhibition included testimonies from Katherine Williams and other descendants of Sarah, explaining what the photograph and the story meant to their family. Katherine recorded a video statement that played on a loop in the exhibition. This photograph is proof that my great great-grandmother was not just a victim of slavery, but a survivor who fought for her freedom.
It’s proof that she was seen as fully human by at least one white person in a time when most white people considered black people inferior. It’s proof that friendship and decency are possible even in systems designed to prevent them. And it’s proof that we have to keep telling these stories because the history we think we know is incomplete.
The exhibition received extraordinary attention. Major media outlets covered the story extensively. The photograph became iconic, appearing in textbooks, documentaries, and academic publications about reconstruction, slavery’s aftermath, and interracial relationships in American history.
Historians praise the exhibition for using a single powerful image to illuminate broader historical realities often overlooked in standard narratives. Several aspects of the exhibition sparked particular discussion. The visible scarring on Sarah’s wrists and ankles forced viewers to confront the physical reality of bondage, not as an abstraction, but as trauma inflicted on an actual person’s body.
Catherine’s smile in the photograph, so unusual for the era, prompted conversations about white complicity and resistance, about what it meant for a white person to genuinely oppose racism rather than simply expressing sympathy while maintaining distance. The exhibition also generated renewed academic research into illegal bondage during reconstruction.
Historians began systematically searching Freriedman’s bureau records and local archives for additional documentation of cases like Sarah’s. Several scholars published papers arguing that the conventional historical narrative of reconstruction needed revision to account more fully for the widespread continuation of slaverylike practices well into the 1870s.
For the Smithsonian, the photograph became one of the most important acquisitions in the museum’s collection. A primary source document that combined visual power with historical significance. A reminder that individual stories can illuminate broader truths about our collective past.
The 1868 Daraya type of Sarah and Katherine now resides permanently in the museum’s collection. Preserved with the highest conservation standards, accessible to researchers, and displayed regularly to remind visitors of what these two young women represented. Courage in the face of injustice, friendship across racial divides, and the truth that freedom had to be fought for long after slavery’s legal abolition.
Their smiling and serious faces look out from that 156-year-old image, bearing witness to what they endured, what they risked, and what they created together. A testament to human decency.
