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A photograph of an enslaved man who survived a vicious flogging that left his body mutilated and scarred helped reveal the brutality of slavery in America.
The recently released movie “Emancipation” starring Will Smith tells the story of that slave, nicknamed “Whipped Peter” (also known as Gordon).
Although his skin had been torn numerous times by the lash and had healed, Gordon, an enslaved man who had managed to escape, posed defiantly for a portrait in 1863.
At the height of the US Civil War, when the horrors of slavery were often denounced as false propaganda, the chilling photograph revealed the undeniable truth.
Abolitionists dubbed the man in the photo “Whipped Peter”, and although historians have debated his real name, there is little doubt regarding the impact his image had on the American psyche.
“The photograph showed that these were real people with real experiences. It was taken to present a visual narrative of the horror of slavery during the Civil War,” Barbara Krauthamer, a leading historian of slavery, told BBC journalist Chelsea Bailey. and the emancipation of the USA and dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Will Smith stars in the film.
“What is often lost is the focus on the man himself: the story of this man who understands that the Civil War is an opportunity to literally take possession of his body and his life.”
The film starring Smith and directed by Antoine Fuqua was inspired by Gordon’s true story.
“This is not another slave movie. This is a movie regarding freedom,” Smith said during the premiere. “I think it’s a story we all need to see, hear and feel.”
Leak
In April 1863, a few months following the slaves were declared free in the Emancipation Proclamation, Gordon came across a camp of Union soldiers outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Exhausted, starving and clad in scant rags, he collapsed at the sight of freed black soldiers fighting to end slavery in the country, according to a December 1863 column in the New-York Daily Tribune. He immediately asked to enlist.
During a medical exam, Gordon told officers he decided to escape following surviving a brutal beating that left him near death and in a coma for two months.
After being hunted for 10 days by bloodhounds and slave catchers in the Louisiana swamps, Gordon finally made it to the Union camp…and his freedom.
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Whipping was a form of daily punishment for slaves.
He then revealed his “whipped back” as evidence. Photographers accompanying the soldiers took the now infamous photo of Gordon posing, bare-backed, hand on hip.
The Tribune noted that the sight of his mutilated body “caused a shudder of horror in all the whites present, but the few waiting blacks… paid little attention to the sad spectacle, the scenes so terrible yet painfully familiar to all of them.”
According to the National Gallery of Art, a New York journalist said the image should “be multiplied by 100,000 and spread across the states.”
And that was exactly what happened.
The horrors of slavery go viral
Gordon’s portrait was taken at a time when the country was debating whether the war efforts were worth it and whether black men, enslaved or freed, should be allowed to enlist as soldiers.
In their book “Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery,” Professor Krauthamer and her co-author, photography historian Deborah Willis, describe how advances in photography allowed the image of Gordon’s backlash to be reproduced affordably on small cards and shared widely.
Abolitionists sold reprints of the image to raise money for their efforts. But, as Krauthamer explains, the Reactions to the portrait were mixed.
“It was very common for people to say, it’s false, I don’t believe it,” he says. “Whites did not believe that blacks were reliable witnesses, even to their own experiences.”
On July 4, 1863, the popular “Harper’s Weekly” magazine reprinted an engraving of Gordon/”Peter Whipped” along with pictures of Gordon in Union uniform. The accompanying article was titled “A Typical Negro” and described Gordon’s harrowing escape from slavery and courageous record of service in the Union army.
Even for an article criticizing slavery, historians noted the shades of racism when the author takes pains to describe Gordon’s “unusual intelligence and energy”.
The legacy of “Whipped Peter”
The Civil War was the first conflict to be documented through photography, but very few images capture the horrors and brutality of slavery as clearly as the image of “Whipped Peter.”
image source, Getty Images
Maime, Emmett Till’s mother, falls to her knees upon receiving the body of her murdered son.
Although his images became an effective tool for anti-slavery messages and propaganda, Krauthamer notes that very little is known regarding Gordon’s life and legacy following he joined the Union army.
“It must be argued that [el retrato] it was just another way of objectifying a black body,” he explains, adding that modern discussions of Gordon’s portrait underscore the power of photography to document the truth.
Less than a century following Gordon’s portrait was taken, Emmett Till’s mother, Maime, held her son’s open-casket funeral following he was brutally kidnapped, tortured and lynched. As she put it, she “wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.”
That photo of Till’s mutilated body also shocked the American conscience and revealed the enduring legacy of racism en EE.UU.
Krauthamer says that as a historian, she tries to focus not only on the pain but also on the joy of the African-American experience in her work.
“I think a lot (…) has been regarding ‘what’s the real story?’ And I just want to know, what was his life like? Who did he love? What did he hope to achieve?
“My hope is that this is what Will Smith’s film and this photograph do: open a portal into our ability to imagine that history and that humanity.”
