Ambrotype of Three Friends Joining John Brown
Title/Subject: Samuel Swifin Burdett, Gardner Clark Trowbridge, and Henry Payson Kinney
Date: May 7, 1856
Type: ambrotype
Format: image, 2 1/4" h x 2 3/4" w; case, 3 1/8" h x 3 5/8" w
Collection: Photographs: Cased Images (RG 32/3)
Three Oberlin students, close friends, sat for this hand-tinted ambrotype portrait. They are (left to right) Samuel Swifin Burdett (Oberlin Preparatory Dept. 1853-56, Oberlin College 1856-57), Gardner Clark Trowbridge (Preparatory Dept. 1853-55, and citizen of the Kansas Territory), and Henry Payson Kinney (Oberlin College A.B. 1859, A.M. 1862). Filled with the spirit of abolitionism common at Oberlin, they joined John Brown during the conflict in “Bleeding Kansas” in May of 1856. The ambrotype of Burdett, Trowbridge and Kinney was taken on May 7, 1856, likely just before their departure from Oberlin for Kansas.Prior to statehood, the Kansas Territory was hotly contested between proslavery and antislavery forces. Free-soil forces from the North formed armed emigrant associations to populate Kansas, while proslavery advocates poured over the border from Missouri. On May 21, two weeks after the ambrotype was made, a proslavery mob wrecked and burned the hotel and newspaper office in Lawrence. The day after the attack, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave an impassioned address on the "Crime Against Kansas" committed by supporters of slavery, whereupon a U.S. Representative from North Carolina viciously beat Sumner with his cane on the Senate floor.
Tucked into the case of the ambrotype was a note by Kinney dated November 7, 1856, written in Oberlin. The note is as fascinating as the portrait. On the back Kinney wrote two lines backwards, requiring a mirror to read. The subject of the “secret” message was slavery. The transcription of the complete note is as follows:
Oberlin Nov. 7, 1856 / This group represents S.S. Burdette (sic), G.C. Trowbridge, and H.P. Kinney at the time when the latter was of age, and the others nearly so, taken May 7, 1856. Two are students of Oberlin College, the first of the freshman, the last of the sophomore class. Trowbridge is a citizen of Kansas Territory. / When shall we three meet again, may well be said of us. Fortune 8 years ago brought us into intimate friendship, but now our paths again diverge, Trowbridge probably to settle in Kansas an ordinary citisen (sic), the other two perhaps to become ministers of the gospel in distant lands. / What else may be, they who look at this a century hence may say. / Witness my hand and seal. / Henry P. Kinney / [The following is written in backwards script] Written in the presidency of Franklin Pierce. The slavery question will soon render this Union asunder. / [The following in normal script] May the Lord of Heaven and Earth direct, / Henry Payson Kinney / E.S.B. + E.A.M.
The student records at the Archives tell us what became of them. At the start of the Civil War, Burdett (born England, 1836-1914) enlisted in the First Iowa Cavalry, as captain of a company he had formed. He was the commonwealth's attorney in Missouri after the war and was a member of the Forty-first and Forty-second Congress, and later was the Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. Trowbridge (born Sparta, New York, 1835-1897) went to Texas with his brother a few years previous to the outbreak of the war and could not get back home to Oberlin. He refused to join the Confederate army, and managed to work on his brother's farm and teach until 1866, when he did return home. He continued to teach, in Kansas, Arkansas, and Tahlequah for the Cherokee Nation, where he became principal of a male seminary there. Kinney (born Oberlin, 1835-1915), whose academic career was far more extensive, married in Michigan in 1860 and was appointed first lieutenant in Company I of the 24th Michigan Volunteer Infantry. After the war he moved to Kansas, where he resided the greater part of his life as a farmer and businessman, and fathered eight children. In 1911 he moved to East Lansing, Michigan where he died in 1914.
An ambrotype is a negative on glass which when backed with an opaque coating (black lacquer, for example) appears as a positive image. Its highlights are soft and pearly in tone. The more commonly known daguerreotype is a clear and crisp image on burnished silver covered with glass, highly reflective. Both were primarily used for portraiture and were unique images. Both object types are typically set into a frame embellished with velvet, silk, or other material, and secured in a hinged case. The ambrotype was cheaper and easier to make; it replaced the daguerreotype in the late 1850s. The damage along the bottom edge is the result of the dry emulsion flaking and lifting off the glass. It cannot be repaired without risk of further deterioration.
Sources
Alumni Records: Graduates and Former Students (RG 28).
Gordon Baldwin, Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms (J. Paul Getty Museum in Association with the British Museums Press, 1991).
"Bleeding Kansas," Encyclopaedia Britannica online, accessed 11/10/2020.
Related Collections
Oberlin and the Civil War (digital collection)
The Oberlin Sanctuary Project (digital exhibit)