A recent book by UMass historian Bruce Laurie describes how the actions of two Civil War soldiers from western Massachusetts helped educate the public about the brutality of slavery.
The book is called "'Chaotic Freedom' In Civil War Louisiana: The Origins Of An Iconic Image." It tells the story of two men: Marshall S. Stearns from Northfield, and Henry S. Gere from Northampton.
When Gere went to war, he was the editor and co-owner of the Hampshire Gazette and Northampton Courier. And he wrote letters to the paper describing what he saw.
Stearns corresponded with his wife and mother.
Laurie writes that the two men collaborated on behalf of people escaping slavery.
Bruce Laurie, author and professor: They meet in October or November of 1862. These are older men, 28 and 36, in the Army unit with teenagers. So they're the old men of this unit.
They're both from Yankee families of long standing in the [Connecticut River] valley. But in any case, they became friends. Gere brings an abolitionist sensibility to this meeting. After all, he'd been an abolitionist for the greater part of his life. And it seems that he's working on Stearns, trying to make him aware of the condition of African Americans — which Stearns quickly picks up. He entered the war as far as we can see without any awareness of abolitionism.
So we have two men who come to the war from very different sensibilities and who wind up in the same place. And the place where they ended up was abolitionism.
Nancy Eve Cohen, NEPM: Could you describe the image that this book is about?
It's an image of an enslaved Black man with his back turned toward the camera, so that light picks up these lurid scars and bruises on his back.
He wasn't enslaved at the time the photo was taken?
He was not. He was what we call a fugitive slave. He had broken free of his master in southern Louisiana, wound up in a contraband camp. You might think of contraband camps as modern-day refugee centers where people on the run from injustice or exploitation find refuge.
Can you help us understand what led to this photograph and the role of these two men?
I'll read from a letter Henry Gere wrote in early April 1863:
"I saw last week one of the most hard and singular objects I've ever beheld. It was the bare back of a Negro who'd been beaten by an overseer. According to his story, it was last fall when he received the beating, and notwithstanding the long time intervening, his back was still a complete mess of blisters and scars. The site of which could hardly fail to make one shudder.
"The Negro said he was insensible as he was whipped and that all he knew about it was what his wife had told him. But for that unmistakable evidence, which bore upon his back, I would not have believed his story.
"Lieutenant Stearns took him to an artist and had a picture taken of his back."
That's the origin of this particular image.
So Marshall Stearns took this man to have his back photographed. What do we know about the man in the photograph?
We know next to nothing about the man in the photograph. He was enslaved, either on a cotton or sugar plantation, in southern Louisiana. We know he was beaten, as he said he was. He was probably beaten because he'd run away during the harvest season. So, Peter probably did something pretty egregious — he may have been a repeated runaway. We don't know that, but we do know is that he was married. He was a French speaker, which may indicate that the family originated in Haiti. Other than that, we don't know much about him at all.
You call him Peter. Was that his name?
That's his name. He responded to that name, to a Union medic —as far as we can tell, a man who'd ministered to him.
Did these two men collaborate in getting the photograph made?
Yes.
And what was their purpose? What was their goal?
Their purpose was to make local people aware of slavery. Stearns says at one point to his wife, "Look, I'm sending you this so that you can see what slavery was like." He says to his best friend, "This is so you can see it."
Gere included the image to a man named Bridgman who had a bookstore in town. The idea was to put this image in a bookstore on Main Street in Northampton. Other than that, I don't think he had any larger ambitions about this.
What impact on a regional scale or on a much bigger scale — what impact did this photograph have?
It had a huge impact in the region. We know that from other testimony. It had a huge impact in the North gradually. It had an impact on the South in a negative way because Southerners said this was a fabrication.
It became even more important as the war dragged on because abolitionists and Northern supporters sent it to Europe. And it was used as fundraisers for abolitionist societies in western Europe, certainly in England, probably in France and unquestionably in the United States.
