Public support for the Civil War in the North was at a nadir in 1863 when the abolitionist magazine Harper’s Weekly published in a special July 4 edition an engraving of a photograph of an escaped slave with a horribly scarred back. The photograph itself was widely circulated, became known as “the scourged back” or “whipped Peter,” and helped renew Northern public support for the war, months after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had failed to do the same. As with much else about enslaved people, though, reliable details about the subject of the photo are hard to come by. Nevertheless, “whipped Peter” has inspired the big-budget movie “Emancipation,” starring Will Smith as the escapee, who was photographed in Baton Rouge, La., after an arduous journey through swampland. A legend that began with the (probably fictional) Harper’s text accompanying the image, and two other images in the magazine that are said to be of the scourged escapee but clearly depict a different and much younger black man, has it that Peter joined the Union Army and fought bravely, though historians such as David Silkenat of the University of Edinburgh have argued that this was simply one of many wartime tall tales used for propaganda purposes.

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