The Mystery of the Unidentified Daguerreotype Portrait

Edward Jacobs. Portrait of John Leighton Wilson. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, c. early 1850s. Author’s collection.

In my activities as a collector of antiques, I have long been interested in old photographs. In particular, daguerreotypes from antebellum days have always fascinated me, perhaps for their exact recreations of persons now lost in the mists of time—most of them forgotten and many of them unidentified. Such was the case with a purchase of mine, the daguerreotype reproduced here. I was intrigued at my first view of this striking portrait: a handsome man in early middle age, a man who appeared to have been “somebody” in his day. But who was he?

I have done research on other nameless figures like this one, and I have found that the process has been remarkably improved by the internet. So I took a picture of the daguerreotype, digitized it, and did an image search. Although this process often finds other images that identify the subject, in this instance they did not. My next step was to remove the daguerreotype from its frame in order to examine it for identifying details. Here I found the name and location of the daguerreotypist, Edward Jacobs, who was active in New Orleans from about 1844 to the Civil War.

Even more interesting was a faded newspaper clipping enclosed in the original slip case beneath the daguerreotype. It is titled: “Honored Memory of Dr. J.L. Wilson—Centennial of Great Missionary’s Birth Observed.” A quick internet search identified the subject of the newspaper article as John Leighton Wilson, an early Presbyterian missionary to Africa in the antebellum period. Wilson was born in 1809, so the newspaper piece must have been published in 1909. But why was it connected to the daguerreotype portrait a half century after it was made?

The obvious surmise would be that the figure in the gilt frame was Dr. Wilson. Yet propinquity alone was not proof, so additional sleuthing was in order. First I researched the life and work of John Leighton Wilson, who was indeed a “Great Missionary” as the newspaper headline asserted. Born in Sumter County, South Carolina, he graduated from Union College in upstate New York, perhaps the source of his later Abolitionist leanings. After further study at Columbia Theological Seminary, he embarked on his first mission trip to West Africa in 1833. Returning home the next year, he married a Georgia girl with Abolitionist sympathies; they spent almost two decades together at many African missions, with several trans-Atlantic journeys as well.

Mrs. Wilson’s health forced their return to America in 1853, and Dr. Wilson became the Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions headquartered in New York City. Yet when the Civil War erupted they returned to the South, settling in Charleston, near his family home. The Wilsons had freed their own slaves and resettled them in Liberia decades earlier, so it is hard for us to reconcile their religious beliefs and their support for the Confederacy. Wilson soon became head of missionary work with the newly created Southern Presbyterian Church during and after the conflict. The “Great Missionary” died in 1885, at his family’s plantation home where was born.

Wilson was an important enough figure that my research quickly presented the outlines of his life and work. More importantly, it suggested that his daguerreian portrait could have been taken by Edward Jacobs. When the Wilsons had returned to Africa in the early 1840s it was by way of New Orleans, and it seems likely they returned the same way during the early 1850s—when Jacobs was active as a daguerreotypist there. Most notably, my online research also revealed two other photographs identified as Wilson. I find their resemblances close enough to close my case, even though they were taken much later in his life.

Have I solved the mystery of this nameless daguerreotype portrait? At least to my satisfaction, I have. I must admit that much of my evidence is circumstantial, but the application of Occam’s Razor seems appropriate...