‘Scourged Back’ exposed the horror of slavery. Now it’s embroiled in America’s censorship debate

By Oscar Holland, CNN

(CNN) — Depicting a crisscross of welts and scars streaked across the body of a formerly enslaved Louisiana man, “Scourged Back” is one of the 19th century’s defining photographs. The image was so widely circulated in America during the Civil War that it reshaped the abolitionist cause by laying bare the abominable cruelty of slavery to a largely oblivious northern public.

More than 160 years later, the influence of this visceral portrait — whose subject may have been called Peter or Gordon — continues to be felt. Musuems, libraries and universities across the US display historic prints of the image, which is often used to educate audiences in a country still reckoning with its past.

But amid growing political debate over how history is presented in America’s museums, the 1863 photo has become a flashpoint in the controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s efforts to eradicate what it calls “corrosive ideology” from federally owned sites.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that officials at an unidentified national park had ordered that the photo be taken down, along with other signs and exhibits related to slavery. Citing unnamed sources, the newspaper described the move as being in line with an executive order Trump issued in March directing the US Interior Department to do away with content that disparages “Americans past or living.”

The department, which oversees the National Park Service, has since denied the report. Spokesperson Elizabeth Peace told CNN via email that sites were not asked to remove the photo. She added: “If any interpretive materials are found to have been removed or altered prematurely or in error, the Department will review the circumstances and take corrective action as appropriate.”

By then, however, the story had already sparked concern among artists, activists and curators. The National Parks Conservation Association was among those voicing disapproval, with senior director of cultural resources Alan Spears saying that removing the photo would be “as shameful as it is wrong.”

The dust-up comes as Trump escalates attacks on museums, going so far as to slam the Smithsonian Institution for being overly concerned with “how bad Slavery was.” In turn, the furor around “Scourged Back” has also generated renewed interest in the story behind the photo and what it means today.

“I find it all very strange,” movie producer and The Black List founder, Franklin Leonard, told CNN’s Abby Phillip in response to the Washington Post report. “What more great American story is there than the survival and triumph over enslavement, Jim Crow and (its) repercussions?”

While there is limited historical consensus on Peter’s escape — or even his name — the pictured man is thought to have fled a Louisiana cotton plantation in early 1863. Traveling on foot to Baton Rouge, his clothes torn and muddy, he eventually reached Union lines, which under President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was enough to be considered permanently free and eligible to join the US army’s “Colored Troops.”

According to one written record of his testimony, the man said he was severely whipped by his former owner’s overseer after attempting to “shoot everybody” (though he had no recollection of the alleged incident). He was bed-bound for months following the beating.

After undergoing a medical examination, Peter seemingly sat for a series of portraits at a photography studio owned by William D. McPherson and J. Oliver. The studio produced at least three versions of the image, adjusting their composition and Peter’s pose as they went along, with the most famous variant — the third — taken some time after the other two.

To David Silkenat, a historian at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, this assiduous approach suggests that whoever took the photo understood how impactful it could be. “The most significant difference in the final photograph is that Gordon’s neck is twisted more to the left towards the camera, revealing his full profile and his beard, which is either totally or partially obscured by his shoulder in the other images,” Silkenat wrote in an influential 2014 research paper on the photo. “The combined effect of these minor changes in the photos’ composition made the final image subtly, but noticeably more arresting.”

The picture was originally produced as a “carte de visite,” a relatively affordable kind of small-format photograph commonly sold, shared and traded by Civil War soldiers. Unlike earlier forms of photography, the negatives could be easily reprinted on paper, meaning images could spread quicker than before (cartes de visite are often dubbed the “social media” of their day).

As the photo gained traction in the summer of 1863, abolitionist newspaper The Liberator recounted an enlightening example of its spread: A surgeon in an all-black regiment in the Union Army had sent a copy of “Scourged Back” to his brother in Boston along with a note reading, “I have seen, during the period I have been inspecting men for my own and other regiments, hundreds of such sights — so they are not new to me; but it may be new to you. If you know of anyone who talks about the humane manner in which the slaves are treated, please show them this.”

The Liberator also directly disseminated the portrait, which is also known as “whipped Peter,” to readers for 15 cents, or $1.50 for 12.

“If you look at abolitionist newspapers, they’re not only talking about what this image means, they’re also selling the image to subscribers,” said Matthew Fox-Amato, an associate history professor at the University of Idaho and author of “Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America,” in a phone interview. He added: “It goes viral, if you will, because it is that carte de visite technology that entails reproducibility.”

By July 1863, “Scourged Back” had found its way onto the pages of Harper’s Weekly, a more mainstream publication, where it appeared as part of a triptych in an article titled “A Typical Negro.” While the magazine claimed the three photos depicted the same man — whom they called Gordon — historians believe each picture showed a different individual. The magazine is also thought to have sensationalized the subject’s story and conflated his account with that of other escapees, writing that Gordon rubbed himself with onions to throw bloodhounds off his scent (academics have since struggled to independently corroborate details of his journey to Baton Rouge).

The hugely popular Harper’s Weekly was how many middle- and upper-class Americans stayed up to date with the Civil War. In an early demonstration of the power of photography as a medium, it was the image, not the story itself, that captured — and horrified — their imaginations. This was especially so in the north, where people had largely been spared visceral depictions of slavery.

“The image, in many ways, visually confirmed things that abolitionists — including formerly enslaved people — had been saying for the longest time: that violence was at the core of American slavery,” said Fox-Amato, adding “it also confirmed… what photography could do — that photography can serve as a tool of justice,” he added.

The sight of Peter’s scarred, beaten back continues to inspire and inform. In 2017, celebrated Black artist Arthur Jafa appropriated the photo for his sculpture “Ex-Slave Gordon.” Then, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the photo appeared in artist Kadir Nelson’s George Floyd-themed collage for the New Yorker cover, while also inspiring photographer Dario Calmese’s Vanity Fair shoot with Viola Davis, her back turned to the camera. The formerly enslaved man’s story was then retold in the 2022 movie “Emancipation” starring Will Smith.

Meanwhile, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of African American History and Culture are among several US institutions that still own prints of the photo. Both museums are part of the Smithsonian, which — according to a letter sent to its secretary, Lonnie Bunch III, by White House officials last month — is now obliged to present America’s heritage in ways that are simultaneously “historically accurate” and “uplifting.” The Trump administration has begun a wide-ranging review of Smithsonian museums’ content, and has signaled that it expects the institution to start implementing corrections around the end of the year.

Whether the resulting changes compromise the Smithsonian’s stated mission of presenting “the complexity of our past” will undoubtedly become a matter of debate. And what the president’s attempts to restore “truth and sanity to American history” mean for future displays of “Scourged Back” remains to be seen.

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CNN’s Jacqui Palumbo and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn contributed to this report.