Augustus Washington

Augustus Washington was born about 1820 in Trenton, New Jersey, a free child of color in a nation that still held millions in bondage. His father was a former slave; his mother, who died when Augustus was very young, is remembered in the record as a woman of South Asian descent. Raised afterward by a stepmother who had herself been enslaved, he grew up hungry for learning and determined to rise by his own discipline.

He pursued schooling at the Oneida Institute and Kimball Union Academy and entered Dartmouth College. To pay his way, he learned the young art of daguerreotypy, and it changed his course. Leaving Dartmouth, he opened a studio in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1846. There he prospered for years, praised for "beautiful and correct Miniatures," becoming one of the very few African American daguerreotypists whose work and careers are documented today.

Convinced that Black Americans could not fully claim their dignity and rights in the United States, Washington emigrated in November 1853 to Liberia, the West African republic settled by free Black emigrants. In Monrovia he founded the Washington studio and carried his camera into Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Senegal, making portraits of a free Black society and preserving faces history might otherwise have lost.

In Liberia he also served his adopted nation — as legislator, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and founder of the newspaper New Era — before his death in Monrovia on June 7, 1875. May his steady eye and his labor for a free people be honored across every generation that looks upon his images.