Peter (enslaved man)

Peter (fl. 1863) (also known as Gordon, or "Whipped Peter", or "Poor Peter") was an escaped American slave who was the subject of photographs documenting the extensive scarring of his back from whippings received in slavery. The "scourged back" photo became one of the most widely circulated photos of the abolitionist movement during the American Civil War and remains one of the most notable photos of the 19th-century United States.
The photo of the scourged back "spurred a number of different narratives, all of which were intended to illustrate the meaning of his portrait, and privilege his photograph as a means by which to picture slavery and dramatize the need for abolition". In 2013, Joan Paulson Gage wrote in The New York Times that "The images of Wilson Chinn in chains, like the one of Gordon and his scarred back, are as disturbing today as they were in 1863. They serve as two of the earliest and most dramatic examples of how the newborn medium of photography could change the course of history."
Many historians have repeated the account presented in an 1863 Harper's Weekly article which consisted of a triptych of illustrations (all said to be of Gordon) and a narrative describing Gordon's escape from slavery and enlistment in the Union Army as factual. However, while the historicity of the photograph of Peter's scourged back and the narrative of his life and escape are well-documented, the narrative that appeared in Harper's was a generalized legend dashed off by the staff as page filler, based on a combination of factual anecdote and convenient fiction. Harper's "Gordon" is a composite character, while the historical Gordon and Peter are almost certainly two different people who were combined by Harper's for narrative convenience. Peter or Gordon's service in the U.S. Colored Troops after emancipation is attested in news reports in Harper's Weekly and The Liberator but so far has not been verified through other records.
On January 29, 1863, Union major-general Nathaniel P. Banks issued his General Order 12, which affirmed that the Emancipation Proclamation applied in Louisiana, except in 12 parishes that had been specifically excepted. However, for the time being at least, the U.S. Army did not intend to interfere with specific plantations. That said, per Irwin's Promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation order, "Officers and soldiers will not encourage or assist slaves to leave their employers, but they cannot compel or authorize their return by force." Formerly enslaved people who reached the protection of the Union Army during the course of the war were called contrabands, and in some cases thousands-strong columns of freed slaves followed U.S. Army troop movements through the South. Eventually contraband refugee camps were set up alongside many Union military fortifications. Contrabands were ultimately recruited in large numbers to the U.S. Colored Troops, USCT units constituting approximately 10 percent of the Union Army manpower by war's end.
Peter departed for freedom on March 24, 1863, at midnight. Peter had been the legal property of Capt. John Lyons of Saint Landry Parish, Louisiana; Lyons owned a 3,000-acre (12 km) plantation and was recorded as being owner of 38 slaves at the time of the 1860 census. The Lyons plantation was located along the west bank of the Atchafalaya River in St. Landry Parish, between present-day Melville and Krotz Springs, Louisiana. As it happens, this was not far from the Red River district of Louisiana, which was the setting of both Tom's final dwelling place in the fictional Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the site of the Eppes plantation described by Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave. A newspaper writer of the 1850s commented on the tortures described by Northrup: "the nearest plantation was distant ... a half-mile, and of course there could be no interference on the part of neighbours in any punishment, however cruel, or however well disposed to interfere they might be."
According to the letter of "Bostonian" (dated November 12, 1863; submitted to Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New-York Daily Tribune; and intended to combat the feigned skepticism of Copperhead "Peace Democrats" about the photograph specifically and abolitionist claims of the abuses of slavery generally):
In this transcript Peter mentions "salt brine, which Overseer put in my back". This practice, sometimes called salting, was attested in many accounts of slave torture reported over many decades. Other substances, including turpentine, hot-pepper juice, and dripping candle wax, were also used. An interview with a man named Andrew Boone for the WPA's Slave Narratives project in the 1930 matter-of-factly described the practice: "By dis time de blood sometimes would be runnin' down dere heels. Den de next thing was a wash in salt water strong enough to hold up an egg. Slaves wus punished dat way fer runnin' away an' sich." Overseer "Artayon Carrier" may be a Saint Landry Parish resident named Pierre Arthéon Carrière, although there is no documentary evidence associating that person with either the Lyons plantation or employment as a slave driver.
Under the imprint "McPherson & Oliver, Baton Rouge", Louisiana photographers William D. McPherson and J. Oliver produced the original carte de visite photos of Peter showing his back. There are three variations of the "scourged back" picture, showing minor adjustments, which indicates that the photographers or their patrons were aware of the impact of the image and "revised" the pose to improve it. Negatives for the first two images may have been exposed on the same day, while the third photo was taken at a later time. The original images of Peter and Gordon, and at least two other known photos of contrabands photographed by McPherson & Oliver, were taken in a "makeshift studio with a hanging sheet for a backdrop and bare ground".
Samuel Knapp Towle, Surgeon, 30th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, wrote in a letter about meeting Gordon. He had expected him to be vicious due to the whip scars on his back. Instead, he said "he seems INTELLIGENT and WELL-BEHAVED" [Towle's emphasis]. Other physicians, like J. W. Mercer, Asst. Surgeon 47th Massachusetts Volunteers as well as a surgeon of the First Louisiana regiment (colored), said in 1863 that they had seen many backs like this, and that when people talked of humane treatment of blacks, the photo of Gordon's back told the true story.
On July 4, 1863, the 87th anniversary of American independence and the day after the high-water mark of the Confederacy and the crucial Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg, Harper's Weekly, the most widely read magazine in the United States during the Civil War, published an article called "A Typical Negro", that featured three photos of a man the magazine called Gordon. The unbylined "A Typical Negro" article in Harper's Weekly was composed of three parts: three wood-cut engravings, a three-paragraph biography of "Gordon", and a nine-paragraph excerpt from a front-page New York Times article published on June 14, 1863. Harper's Weekly created the "A Typical Negro" triptych ("Gordon as he entered our lines" – "Gordon under medical inspection" – "Gordon in his uniform as a U.S. soldier") out of what are now believed to be images of three separate individuals. In the Harper's telling, Gordon reportedly masked his scent from the bloodhounds that were chasing him, by carrying onions from his plantation in his pockets. After crossing each creek or swamp, he rubbed his body with the onion to throw the dogs off his scent, ultimately reaching refuge with the Union soldiers of the XIX Corps who were stationed in Baton Rouge.
The excerpted section of the New York Times article included information drawn from interviews with two pairs of married contrabands who had boarded the USS Lafayette (1848) near the mouth of the Red River in Louisiana. The refugees, interviewed by a New York Times war correspondent, described horrific torture on a plantation in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana, including various means of burning, and a form of whipping that used a hand saw instead of a livestock whip, wooden switch, or grain flail. The larger part of the July 4 issue of Harper's Weekly was devoted to Theodore R. Davis' sketches of the ongoing Siege of Vicksburg.
According to the "Bostonian" letter, Gordon and Peter are two different people from a group of four that had traveled together for at least part of the journey to Union lines, all of whom had previously been the legal property of either Capt. Lyons of the Atchafalaya Basin, or Louis Fabyan of Clinton, Louisiana.
Unlike with the photo of the scourged back, of which there are scores of copies and various reprintings in dozens of libraries and institutions across the U.S., there is only one known copy of the photograph on the left-most image in the Harper's triptych is based. The photo, which surfaced in 2008 and was sold at Cowan Auctions for US$1,527.50 (equivalent to $2,231 in 2024), was printed by McPherson & Oliver, Baton Rouge, the same photographers who are credited with making the photo of Peter. The carte de visite sold by Cowan had a note in ink on the back that read, "Contraband that marched 40 miles to get to our lines". The image of Gordon has been described as "confident and strong", and therefore somewhat at odds with the written narrative provided by Harper's: "in spite of his poor dress, and contrary to almost every other photograph in the genre, Gordon displays a sense of self-possession and self-awareness that is difficult to ignore. Directly facing the camera, [he adopts] a dignified seated pose popular in middle-class studio portraiture." Gordon's "poor dress" was likely because "Many slaves, especially the agricultural workers who made up most of the enslaved population, only owned one or two suits of clothing at any one time, so they did not arrive at the Union encampments with great satchels full of luggage but, rather, 'almost wholly destitute of clothing'." It was common for former slaves to arrive at contraband refugee camps wearing Negro-cloth garments that were already in "tatters"; finding adequate replacements was one of the responsibilities of quartermasters and camp administrators.
According to the Bostonian, he brought the photos of both Peter and Gordon from Louisiana to New York in June 1863; he describes Gordon as the "sable youth clad in variegated and torn garments" and recounts that Gordon, Peter, John (who was killed en route), and a fourth unnamed man traveled together, moving only at night, rubbed "onions and strong-scented weeds" on themselves after fording watercourses, "twice swimming the turbid waters of the Amite River in their wanderings."
According to one study of images of African-Americans during the American Civil War,
The third illustration in the Harper's Weekly article was captioned "Gordon in his uniform as a U.S. soldier". There are no known copies of a photograph on which the illustration might have been based. The Bostonian letter to the New-York Tribune profers extensive backstories on the first two images in the triptych but pointedly ignores the etching of the enlisted man. Illustrator Vincent Colyer later recycled an identical image in the book Report of the Services Rendered by the Freed People to the United States Army, in North Carolina with the caption "Sergeant Furney Bryant, 1st North Carolina Colored Troops". According to Harper's Weekly, Gordon joined the Union Army as a guide three months after the Emancipation Proclamation allowed for the enrollment of freed slaves into the military forces. On one expedition, he was taken prisoner by the Confederates; they tied him up, beat him, and left him for dead. He survived and once more escaped to Union lines.
In July 1863, the country's most important abolitionist periodical, William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, reported that Gordon had fought bravely as a sergeant in the Second Louisiana Native Guard during the Siege of Port Hudson in May 1863. The siege was the first time that African-American soldiers played a leading role in an assault during the American Civil War. However, the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard Infantry Regiment did not participate in the battle at Port Hudson. Also, the Louisiana Native Guard units that did fight so gallantly at Port Hudson (the 1st Louisiana Native Guard (Union) and 3rd Louisiana Native Guard Infantry regiments) were recruited and mustered in 1862, well before Peter or Gordon were said to have arrived in Baton Rouge in April 1863. There were five regiments known as the Corps D'Afrique Engineers, recruited by Gen. Daniel Ullman, that participated in the Port Hudson campaign, primarily digging trenches and contributing to the force strength of the 20,000 Union troops facing the 12,000 Confederates. The Corps D'Afrique Engineers is also credited with building Bailey's Dam, which saved the Union navy's Mississippi River Squadron. On May 20, 1863, the Detroit Free Press reported, "Colonel Sharps, from General Banks' department, states that General Ulmann's brigade is more than filled, and the new country just opened by Banks' campaign, will furnish two or three divisions of negroes, in response to Banks' call for a Corps D'Afrique. No doubt the rebels are engaged in raising negro regiments, as it is only from such material they now, in extreme Southern States, recruit their ranks. Negroes are not backward in adopting a uniform, which is now their death warrant if taken by the rebels."
Theodore Tilton, editor of The Independent in New York stated in 1863:
The image was indeed duplicated and widely distributed; copies were printed by Mathew Brady, McAllister & Brother of Philadelphia, and Chandler Seaver Jr. of Boston.
In 2015, Frank Goodyear, a former curator of photographs at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery said, "Photography mediates our understanding of the world ... many Americans had never seen what a beating literally looked like." The Atlantic's editor-in-chief James Bennet in 2011 noted, "Part of the incredible power of this image I think is the dignity of that man. He's posing. His expression is almost indifferent. I just find that remarkable. He's basically saying, 'This is a fact.'"