A Man Named Abraham

One day while staff members were looking over a collection of carte-de-visites to be displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in the Nation's Capital, they came across an image of an African American man named Abraham. After some research here is what they found: It was discovered that he was a slave who was literally blown to freedom. Union soldiers tunneling below Confederate defenses in the siege of Vicksburg (1863) had detonated powerful explosives that buried in debris seven enslaved workers used by Confederates to dig counter shafts, but lofted an eighth—identified only as Abraham clear across the Union lines, where he recovered from his injuries and joined the Union war effort.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Photographer unknown. (1863)