Learning Is Wealth

I love finding recipes and old letters and pressed four leaf clovers, but there's something much more exciting about finding a little piece of a greater history. Today's post features a handful of cartes de visite which I discovered were

sold in 1863-1864 by a group that included Union Maj. George Hanks and representatives of the American Missionary Association and the National Freedman's Relief Association to help raise money to pay for schools for emancipated slaves in New Orleans. 

"They need to raise money for these schools, and someone somewhere along the way decided to take a group of freed people to the North to raise money for the cause," where they were also photographed for the cartes, according to Mitchell. (Mary Niall Mitchell, associate professor of history at the University of New Orleans. Mitchell had researched the group for her book, "Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery") 

"They realized that the sympathies that people would have for children who looked white but had been slaves was going to be greater than the sympathy they might have for black-skinned children," she says.

You can read the entire NPR article here.

Here's what I found:

I also found these two photographs, the smaller one is a tintype, the large one has the name "Wm. H. Drake" written on the back:

All were found in "Confederate War Papers" by Gustavus W. Smith. Published by Atlantic Publishing and Engraving, 1884.

-Click to enlarge photos-