What Did The Northerners Make Money Off Of

An escaped enslaved man named Peter showing his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863.

Library of Congress

By the time he made it to a Spousal relationship encampment in Baton Rouge in March 1863, Peter had been through hell. Bloodhounds had chased him. He had been pursued for miles, had run barefoot through creeks and across fields. He had survived, if barely. When he reached the soldiers, Peter's vesture was ragged and soaked with mud and sweat.

But his x-day ordeal was nothing compared to what he had already been through. During Peter's enslavement on John and Bridget Lyons' Louisiana plantation, Peter endured non just the indignity of slavery, but a brutal whipping that nearly took his life. And when he joined the Union Army afterward his escape from slavery, Peter exposed his scars during a medical examination.

Raised welts and strafe marks crisscrossed his back. The marks extended from his buttocks to his shoulders, calling to mind the viciousness and power with which he had been beaten. It was a hideous constellation of scars: visual proof of the brutality of slavery. And for thousands of white people, it was a shocking prototype that helped fuel the fires of abolition during the Civil War.

A photo of Peter'due south back became one of the most widely circulated images of slavery of its time, galvanizing public opinion and serving equally a wordless indictment of the establishment of slavery. Peter's disfigured back helped bring the stakes of the Civil War to life, contradicting Southerners' insistence that their slaveholding was a matter of economic survival, non racism. And information technology showed just how important mass media was during the state of war that nearly destroyed the United States.

Not much is known about Peter aside from the testimony he gave the medical examiners at the camp and the image of his back and the keloid scars he suffered from his beating. He told examiners that he had left the plantation ten days agone, and that the man who whipped him was the plantation'south overseer, Artayou Carrier. After the whipping, he was told he had go "sort of crazy" and had threatened his wife. Every bit he lay in bed recovering, the plantation owner fired the overseer. But Peter had already determined to escape.

READ More: How Emerge Hemings and Other Enslaved People Secured Precious Pockets of Freedom

Peter and 3 other enslaved people escaped by cover of night, only one of their companions was murdered by slave hunters who came in pursuit of Lyons' property. The surviving escapees rubbed onions on their bodies to escape the bloodhounds the slave catchers used to pursue them. But after days of pursuit did they reach the Union encampment, weeping with joy when they were greeted by Blackness men in uniform. They immediately enlisted.

The white soldiers who inspected Peter were horrified by his wounds. "Suiting the action to the discussion, he pulled downwardly the pile of dirty rags that one-half concealed his back," said a witness. "It sent a thrill of horror to every white person nowadays, but the few Blacks who were waiting…paid just piffling attending to the sad spectacle, such terrible scenes beingness painfully familiar to them all."

But though Peter's experience was shared by thousands of enslaved people, it was foreign to many Northerners who had never witnessed slavery and its brutality with their own eyes. Mass media was still relatively new, and though escaped slaves and other eyewitnesses brought stories of whippings and other punishments north, few had seen the evidence of the oppression of slaves.

McPherson and Oliver, two afoot photographers who were at the camp, photographed Peter's back, and the photograph was reproduced and distributed as a menu-de-visite, a trendy new photographic format. The small cards were cheap to produce and became wildly pop during the Civil War, providing a well-nigh-instant look at the war, and its players, every bit it unfolded.

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Peter's photo quickly spread beyond the nation. "I take plant a large number of the 4 hundred or and so contrabands [people who had escaped slavery and were now protected by the Spousal relationship Ground forces] examined by me to be equally badly lacerated as the specimen represented in the enclosed photograph," J.W. Mercer, a Union Army surgeon in Louisiana, wrote on the dorsum of the card. He sent it to Colonel L.B. Marsh.

"This Menu Photograph should be multiplied by 100,000, and scattered over the States," an bearding announcer wrote. The prototype was a powerful rebuttal to the lie that enslaved people were treated humanely, a common refrain of those who didn't think slavery should be abolished.

READ MORE: The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Merely Surfaced

Three illustrations showing Peter later his escape, the welts from existence whipped upon his dorsum, and in compatible later he had joined the Union Ground forces, featured in McPherson and Oliver in July, 1863.

Library of Congress

Peter was non the just delinquent slave whose paradigm helped stoke anti-slavery sentiments. As soon as the carte de visite was introduced in 1854, the applied science became popular in abolitionist circles. Others who had escaped from slavery, like Frederick Douglass, posed for popular portraits. Sojourner Truth even used the gain from the cartes de visites she sold at her speeches to fund speaking tours and help recruit Blackness soldiers.

But Peter's strafed back was perhaps the most visible—and pregnant—photograph of a erstwhile enslaved person. It was sold by abolitionists who used information technology to enhance money for their crusade, and gained the proper noun "The Scourged Back" or "Whipped Peter." When information technology was published in Harper's Weekly, the most popular journal of its solar day, it reached a massive audience. The spread also stoked confusion when Peter's name was listed instead every bit "Gordon."

The photograph was also decried equally fake by the Copperheads, a nickname for a faction of Northerners who opposed the war and was loudly sympathetic of the South and of slave ownership. An unnamed Matrimony Army soldier who had taken the photographs shot back with a long business relationship that upheld the veracity of the photograph. "All the logic of the bullheaded and infatuated believers in Human being Slavery cannot arrest or thwart the progress of truth, whatsoever more than they can prevent the evolution of the positive flick, when aided by the silent and powerful procedure of chemic action," he wrote.

Though Peter'southward trunk was used equally proof of the cruelty of slavery, accounts of his ordeal are saturated with the racism that pervaded American society, even amidst sympathetic white Northerners. The Harper's spread referred to Peter every bit possessing "unusual intelligence and free energy," laying bare stereotypes of Black people every bit stupid and lazy. A surgeon who was present at his examination noted that "nothing in his appearance indicates any unusual viciousness," as if anything could justify a whipping.

READ MORE: How Many Presidents Owned Enslaved People?

Despite the racism of the mean solar day, though, Peter's portrait did galvanize even those who had never spoken out against slavery. "What began equally a very local — even private — image ultimately achieved something much grander considering it circulated so widely," historian Bruce Laurie told the Boston Globe.

Information technology's unclear what Peter did during the rest of the war, or what his life was like after the Ceremonious State of war came to an cease. Though slavery had been abolished, he—and the others who had been subjugated, browbeaten and demeaned during hundreds of years of slavery in the Americas—withal bore the scars of enslavement.

As historian Michael Dickman notes, whipping was a common punishment on Southern plantations, though there was a debate about whether to use it sparingly to keep enslaved people from revolting. "Masters desired to maintain order in a guild in which they were in unquestionable positions of authority," he writes. "They used the whip as a tool to enforce this vision of club. Slaves, on the other manus, through their victimization and punishment, viewed the whip as the physical manifestation of their oppression under slavery."

For white Southerners and enslaved Blackness people, the sight of a dorsum like Peter'south was chillingly commonplace. For white Northerners, though, Peter's scourged body fabricated slavery'south brutality impossible to deny. Information technology remains one of the era's best known—and most bloodcurdling—images.

Source: https://www.history.com/news/whipped-peter-slavery-photo-scourged-back-real-story-civil-war

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