Image ID: ATXM

Stauffer, Trodd & Bernier, <em>Picturing Frederick Douglass</em> says: Douglass probably sat for this photograph when attending celebrations of the Fifteenth Amendment ratification in Philadelphia on April 26, 1870. The nature of the occasion, the last of three Reconstruction amendments that tried to guarantee freedom and equality for African Americans in the wake of Emancipation, perhaps explains why he chose to hold Lincoln’s cane, Just visible in his hands. Mary Todd Lincoln sent Douglass the cane after her husband’s assassination in 1865. Thanking her, Douglass called the cane a symbol of Lincoln’s “humane interest [in the] welfare of my whole race.”