The American Way

Abridged from source. 

Source in title.

The Scourged Back

The Guardian: 4 Jul 2026

Little is known about the man some sources call “Peter” whose wounds galvanised the abolitionist cause – only that he escaped a Louisiana plantation, that his back bore the scars of savage beatings and that he enlisted in the Union Army in 1863. When “The Scourged Back appeared in Harper’s Weekly on 4 July 1863, it was a “visualisation of just how violent and inhumane the institution of slavery was” and “changed northern understandings” of its inhumanity.

I bet that's where JD got it--chesterfields!