National Portrait Gallery has resurrected the abolitionist John Brown's150-year-old photo

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John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave, but the National Portrait
Gallery has resurrected the abolitionist in a long-lost, 150-year-old
photo made by the son of a former slave. It goes on display Thursday. It's
an early example of an American daguerreotype, the primitive process
brought from France only a few years before the photo was taken about
1847. The little brown picture, only 4 inches by 3 1/4 inches, was the
work of Augustus Washington, who set up a studio in Hartford, Conn., that
year, apparently the first in the city. Brown was running a wool brokerage
in nearby Springfield, Mass. The business failed the following year and he
eventually moved to Kansas, where he led antislavery guerrilla bands in
bloody clashes with pro-slavery ``Border Ruffians.'' A member of one of
his bands was August M. Bondi. Bondi's great-granddaughter, Betty Adler
Schermer, and her husband, Lloyd G. Schermer, contributed some of the
$115,000 that the gallery bid for the daguerreotype at a major auction
house. Mary Panzer, curator of the show, said the original had been lost
since the last century and was known only in reproductions. It turned up
at a small auction near Pittsburgh and then went to a major sale at
Sotheby's. Ms. Panzer said she did not know who the owners had been over
the years. It shows Brown without his later big white beard, one hand
raised as if taking an oath and the other holding an unidentified flag. In
1859, Brown and a band of 18 seized the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Va., up
the Potomac River from Washington, in the hope of raising an ``army of
emancipation.'' He was captured by federal troops under Col. Robert E.
Lee. Brown was convicted and hanged on Dec. 2, 1859, a few months before
the outbreak of the Civil War. Lee took command of the Confederate forces.
Augustus Washington, who came to believe that the freed slaves needed a
separate country of their own, had moved to Liberia, where Americans set
up a black government. When his supplies for making daguerreotypes ran
out, he spent the rest of his life as a teacher and farmer. At the time
Brown was fighting in Kansas, Washington was writing articles about
Liberia for the New York Tribune and the Hartford Courant. PANews