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Patrick Rael is a professor of history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick. He specializes in African-American history, the Civil War era, and the history of slavery and emancipation.
The Trump administration has ordered the National Park Service to remove from its sites materials related to slavery, including all images of “The Scourged Back,” a famous photograph of the scarred body of a self-emancipated slave.
During the Civil War, the Union army circulated reproductions of a photograph of the man known as “Gordon,” or “whipped Peter,” a fugitive who made it to Union lines. Appearing in media throughout the nation in April 1863, it illustrated the stakes of the conflict.
By then, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had freed enslaved people behind Confederate lines, welcoming them into Union ranks. They became armies of liberation, freeing slaves wherever they went. Ultimately over 90,000 freedmen swelled Union numbers, just as Confederate manpower began failing. Lincoln came to believe that black troops constituted “the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.”
Gordon was one of those soldiers. He fled a Louisiana plantation to join the Union army, reunite the nation, and abolish slavery. Now the nation he helped save wants to erase his memory.
It’s confusing. What did the National Park Service get wrong? Why intentionally remove a well-known and long-accepted history? Who should we look to for our understanding of the past, anyway? Is history just “a set of lies agreed upon,” as Napoleon said? Or “bunk,” as Henry Ford called it? Is MAGA’s revised history just as good as professional history?
The powerful always want to control history, because an understanding of the past can justify policies in the present. If the nation has denied its commitments to liberty — by, for example, ending slavery only to impose a white supremacist racial caste system — something should be done to redress the wrong. But if we can’t remember rights denied, there is no need to do anything.
During the Civil War, Gordon’s image countered pro-slavery lies, demonstrating that just as black people were not content in slavery, neither were they powerless to do anything about it. A year later, Gordon would have presented the image not of a lacerated bondsman but of a proud man in Union blue carrying a bayonet, the authority of the federal government behind him. Frederick Douglass understood the significance of this. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, ‘U.S.’, let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship,” he said.
It did not work out that way. Slavery died, but prejudice survived, in forms such as disenfranchisement and segregation laws, debt peonage, racial pogroms, and lynching parties. A prejudiced history helped a morally corrupt Supreme Court render worthless the rights guaranteed by new amendments to the Constitution.
With the denial of freedom came a denial of the past. History may often be written by the winners, but in this instance it fell captive to the losers. White southerners sympathetic to the Confederacy crafted the first professional histories of the war and its aftermath. One was Woodrow Wilson, the history professor and university president who went on to occupy the White House. There, he screened the new, deeply racist film “The Birth of a Nation,” which captured on celluloid the story he had told in books.
These stories argued that rights for the emancipated had been a mistake, for the end of slavery had led to a period of corruption and misrule that demonstrated freedpeople’s unfitness for civic equality. This was the work that forgetting did back then — it denied black people a legitimate past in order to deny their claim to rights in the present.
It took a century before another freedom struggle managed to wrest some of the liberties promised in the 1860s. Restoring African Americans’ rightful place in the past helped them claim their rightful place in the present. Now, with those twice-won gains at risk once again, history is playing its role.
Remembering the whole past is “divisive” only to those lacking the integrity to confront it. What makes professional history different from MAGA history? It wants people to understand the power of remembering the past; MAGA seems to understand only the power of forgetting it.
This, too, is now part of the story that can be read on Gordon’s back.