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Journalism of Courage
Peter walked barefoot from Saint Landry Parish to Baton Rouge in Louisiana in the United States. A painful journey, the walk lasted 10 days. For a while, he was also chased by his master, John Lyon. When he reached the Union Army encampment along the Mississippi River, his clothes were torn and dirty from his long and distressing trek. At the encampment, the Union Army conducted a surgical examination. It was during this time that the physical scars on his back were discovered and photographed. The year was 1863, and the photograph was titled Whipped Peter.
Shirtless, Peter is seated on a chair, with his left hand placed on his hip, facing the wall. While only half of his face faces the camera, it is his back—criss-crossed with a network of scars—that draws the attention of the viewer. To the onlooker, the scars appear to be the aftermath of ruthless whipping or even burns. Yet, it is this brutality that becomes the focal point of the photograph. Today, the portrait is caught amid a storm of controversy.
According to recent reports, the Trump administration has ordered the removal of the portrait of Whipped Peter from a National Park Service display. Critics argue that this is an attempt by Trump’s government to erase American history. A look at the portrait of Whipped Peter and what it represents:
Peter, also known as Gordon, was an enslaved Black man who self-emancipated in March 1863 from the 3,000-acre plantation of John and Bridget Lyons in Saint Landry Parish, Louisiana. The portrait of Gordon, also known as The Scourged Back or Whipped Peter, was reproduced as a popular carte de visite (a close-trimmed portrait photograph) in the American North and publicly circulated to condone both slavery and racism in the South.
“On Saturday, July 4, 1863, the “scourged back” portrait and two others of Gordon appeared as wood engravings as a special Independence Day feature in Harper’s Weekly, paired with a brief narrative about Gordon as well as an excerpt from a letter that had been published in the New York Times recounting the treatment of enslaved people on an estate situated on Louisiana’s Black River,” notes archivist Tonia Sutherland in Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (2023).
Slavery in the American colonies became apparent in the 16th century. “Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries so many African slaves had been imported into America that every European Christian had a negro slave for chopping wood and fetching water,” write Hukam Chand Jain and Krishna Chandra Mathur in A History of the Modern World: 1500-2000 AD (2021). The English, Spanish, and Portuguese all profited from this.
In 1776, Jain and Mathur note, America had around 5 lakh negro slaves whose numbers rose to 40 lakh during the Civil War. Most, like Peter, lived in South America and worked on cotton farms.
Studying the period of 1820s-1850s, Joseph P Reidy, in From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South (1992), notes that despite the abundance of yeomen (cultivators) during the settlement period, planters exerted influence far beyond their modest numbers. “This power,” he writes, “rested upon command over the premier resource of the southern agricultural economy: slaves.” Slaves raised the cotton, the profits of which made possible the purchase of additional labourers, who in turn cleared more land for cultivation, raised more cotton, and generated more profits.
The Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs at the Library of Congress comprises more than 3,000 portraits and cartes de visite that document both the Union and the Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Among these is the image of Peter.
A similar carte de visite, dated April 12, 1863, was sold by Boston-based auction house Skinner Auctioneers for $7,995. On the backside, the card displayed a testimony cited by Sutherland: “Ten days from today I left the plantation. Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after I was whipped; he discharged the overseer…I did not shoot any one; I did not harm any one. My master’s Capt. JOHN LYON, cotton planter, on Atchafalya, near Washington, Louisiana. Whipped two months before Christmas”.
Sutherland notes that the words were those of Peter, documented when his pictures were being taken. “This text is the documented written record of oral testimony given by Gordon, known also as Peter, as he was photographed during a medical examination conducted in April 1863 by a Union Army doctor with the XIX Corps along the banks of the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” she writes.
While the Trump administration’s actions are framed as an effort to promote a more positive view of history, critics argue that this is yet another attempt to whitewash American history and dismiss the centrality of slavery.
