Like other natural historians of the 19th century who sought to classify human racial types, Louis Agassiz avidly collected visual evidence to support his work. In 1850 he commissioned J. T. Zealy to photograph at least five slaves from different regions of Africa and two of their American-born children, who lived on plantations outside of Columbia, South Carolina. These images, rediscovered in the Peabody Museum in 1976, are rare daguerreotypes of African Americans taken before the Civil War.