 There's a breathless G.G. Barnhill just rushing in in time to introduce today's speaker, Bruce Laury. Bruce graduated from Rutgers, Phi Beta Kappa in 1965, and received his doctorate from UMass in 1972. He's a member of a number of prestigious organizations, including one I belong to, the American Antiquarian Society and Worcester. He's a prolific author, and his books include Working People of Philadelphia, 1800 to 1850, Artisans Into Workers, Labor in 19th Century America, Beyond Garrison, Anti-Slavery and Social Reform, which brings him closer to today's talk, and Rebels in Paradise, Sketches of Northampton, Massachusetts Abolitionists that was published in 2015 by UMass Press. The day after the Battle of Gettysburg ended, Harper's Weekly published A Typical Negro, which included the image of a tortured former slave. He was misidentified as Gordon, his real name was Peter, and the photo was accompanied by a narrative that bore little resentments to the facts. It did, however, provide readers in the North with some of the most powerful visual evidence of the wickedness of slavery and the abuses that slaves endured. Recent research by Bruce into two local men who fought for the Union Army during the Civil War era, Henry Aspere of Northampton and Marshall S. Stearns of Northfield, have provided new clues about the true identity of the former slave brought to national attention by Harper's Magazine. So please welcome Bruce Clark. Thank you, Gigi, and thank you for coming out. Who's not seeing this image? What was the question? Who has never seen this image? I've seen it. It's probably the most iconic image of a slave, ever done. It was taken in April, 1863. There are two. This was taken early in April, probably the fourth, maybe the second, we don't know for sure. The second was taken at the end of the month, April, 1863. If you study them carefully, you'll see there's a slightly different. This is, by the way, this is Mr. Peter. In the first, his back is turned slightly toward the camera. His hair is not fully grown in, and he's clean shaven, as best as we can tell. In the second, his hair is grown in, he's grown to go teeth, and his back is turned in a more acute angle to the camera so that the scars can be read more dramatically. It was a brilliant piece of anti-slavery propaganda, maybe one of the best ever. So that it became iconic pretty quickly. It circulated through the officer corps in Louisiana, where it was taken, made its way north. William Garrison, the head of the American Abolition Society, got it. And Garrison, who was the, I don't know, one of the great propagandists of the age, was offering it for sale for 75 cents, I think it was, and about a dozen for four bucks. So it got around. Garrison and his followers were such so good at demonizing slavery that the Northerners thought the movement was several times as big as it actually was. And the South, they thought that everyone in the North was an abolitionist. So it's an important, it was important in its day, and it's important to this day because no matter where you go, textbooks, museum exhibitions, TV shows, you're going to find a picture of Peter. I'll keep these, both of these images in mind as we move ahead. As Fiji said, Harbour's got a hold of it, and probably in late June, 1863, and they put this out under the heading of Typical Slave. It purports to tell the story of Peter and Peter's life. Peter, he's misidentified as Gordon here, for the sake of me. This is when he came into the camps, I'll get to the camps in a second. And he was ministered to by Medics, or the Medics, and this is when he became a distinguished soldier in North Carolina. So what we have here is a typical American story of someone up from the depths who made good. It's a great story, except it's nonsense. It was fabricated by someone who you don't need to know about from North Carolina who was an abolitionist himself, and Harbour's never bothered to check the narrative because they were really eager to get it out, and so there was no fact-checking done. Harbour's, mind you, is the most important magazine of middle-class America. Harbour's had been very skeptical of this war because by 1863, the North was getting beaten very badly on the battlefield, and most people were saying, you know, this really isn't worth it. We should really rethink this war. This came out copeterminously with Gettysburg, when all of a sudden, minds changed, and Harbour's publication of this is typically seen normally as its concession that the war was actually worth fighting. So this is an important moment in US history. I would say they got it right. Northern opinion in general shifted in the summer of 1863, not to say that Northerners were opportunistic, but in fact they were. So I got interested in this, not because of the Harbour's business, because a historian called David Silkenit had already shown that the story was fallacious. It was a fabrication. I was interested in Peter and how this image got to be made in the first place. So we know that Peter was from Louisiana, even though Harbour said he was from Mississippi. He was not from Mississippi, he was from Louisiana. So we know that. First, some context, since he was in Louisiana. Louisiana was a slave state, right? Divided actually over the war. The planters thought that if they made a deal with Lincoln, they could come back into the Union with their slaves intact. So this is an important political moment because Lincoln refused to compromise with his slaveholders in Louisiana. Sugar was one of two main products grown in Louisiana. The other was cotton. Sugar was much more important because that's where the money was. How many of you had sugar today with your coffee? Wow. Not Splenda, sugar. Sugar caught on like crazy. It was normally the dish was reserved for the best tables by 1800. Everybody was into sugar. By the way, also coffee, also tea. What else do you say, chocolate? Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. But those products of tobacco, sugar, coffee, what do they have in common? Huge demand. People had to have that stuff because they were addictive. And that's why sugar was so popular. And so there's a huge market for sugar. Southern planters knew it. And so their plantation by 1860 was some of the largest in the south. Now we have our image of slavery still from Margaret Mitchell. Gone to the wind. It applied to very few places. Most plantations in 1860 were mom and pop shops. With an average of 20 slaves each. Sort of small. Now averages can be misleading. As you know, Mark Twain once said, if I'm standing with one foot in the bucket of ice and the other in the bucket of boiling water, on average I'm feeling pretty good. The averages of sugar plantations were much higher. Hundreds to thousands of workers in five districts in and around Baton Rouge. And New Orleans. Planters had their business down to the science. They put out manuals on how to treat slaves. What do you call it? Order and discipline. Their operations were sort of like factories in the field. They were the cane fields. And then there were these rooms for boiling the cane sugar, the substance into sugar. In huge cauldrons fired by wood-fueled furnaces. So there were ample opportunities to get injured, harmed, and also broken. And also sugar making conformed to a clock. You could pick cotton almost any time because it wasn't perishable. Sugar was different. Once the harvest came in, in September and October, the cane had to be crushed but then boiled down. So there was a pretty strict regime that resembled sort of an industrial establishment. Planters in the south put out manuals on how to treat their slaves. And the most important of them had to do with discipline. You've got perquisites if you're an obedient slave. You can visit your family. Sometimes you were paid. Sometimes you got days off if you worked well. If you violated any of those prescriptions, you suffered punishment. Probably the latest, the easiest was called the Louisiana Shirt. Louisiana Shirt was a 55-gallon drum that it would cast the slave one into. It's only its head exposed. It had to walk around the plantation. It couldn't move except for its feet. It had to walk around the plantation as a sign of humiliation. If you acted out, this would be good to you. Perquisites would be withdrawn. If you slowed down in the field and especially if you violated the production regime in the harvest season, you got so many lashes for so many violations. These were laid out in these tables. Peter probably broke the code by running away, not once, but several times during the harvest season. Somebody, someday, is going to study those lashes to see how badly he violated the code. We know who Peter was, not through my work, but through the work of other historians in Uchiflaya, Louisiana, and Washington County. He was a slave of someone called John Lyon, and his overseer was a man named Aretyn Carrion. Now, what's interesting about these names is that they are English. Peter was a French speaker and a Catholic probably. Slaves in the southern rim of the sugar districts in Louisiana were often French speaking, and so was Peter. He probably was beaten in late October, early November, and he fled. Took several months for him to get to Baton Rouge. He arrived in Baton Rouge in late March, early April, 1863. He arrived in the middle of a social revolution in the South. It went like this. The Union Army marched into the southern districts. First, Virginia, and later, in 1862 and 1863, in and around Louisiana. In summer 1863, the Union Army took Port Hudson. It was a strategic location on the Mississippi River. Once the Union Army took Baton Rouge, it meant that there was no way for the South to move supplies. So this is an important strategic location at the time. Slaves would escape as the Union Army advanced. Word went through the slave quarters that it was time to leave, and so they did. So it raised the question, what do you do with these people? A Yankee soldier, Yankee general actually, devised the idea of calling them contraband, which meant that they could not be returned to their masters. So by 1862, through 1862, more and more slaves were escaping. They were held by the Union Army, in and around the Union Army encampments. And finally, the numbers got so big that specific areas had to be carved out for their safety. We would call them today refugee centers. In 1862 and 62, they were called contraband camps. A typical camp would have two to three thousand escapees coming in, often with their families. What's interesting is that one of the first things escaped slaves did was try to find their families, especially wives and children throughout the South. So these were moments of joy and also moments of great sadness. We don't know about the death rate in the Baton Rouge camp. We do know that the death rate is horrible in other areas because of communicable diseases, especially malaria and fever of various kinds. This is the headquarters of the Baton Rouge camp. This is a really remarkable photo image. This was formerly a female seminary in Baton Rouge and the Union Army took it over. What's interesting is you can see the slave people down below. And if you look very closely, you'll see soldiers bearing arms, but in a very casual way, sort of leaning against poles. In other words, they're not armed to take care of people if there was any trouble. This is even more remarkable. This is one of the most moving photographs I've ever seen of a slave population. This is the field of the female seminary. Study is closely, and you'll see women and children only, some teenagers. The men were in the fields. As the Union Army took over areas, they would put the men to work in the fields, partly for political reasons and economic reasons. They got them back to work. It was punitive. It was punitive. They were not paid, but they were forced to work under arms of Union officers. This, by the way, is the camp I'm about to describe in some detail. So, my story, or at least my task, was to find out about Peter and who Peter was and how the image of him, the images of him came to be made. Let's start here. This is Henry Sherwood Geer. He's an old man in this picture, probably 75 or 80. He lived till around 90. He's one of the most remarkable people I've ever studied, and I've studied quite a few people in my time. Geer grew up in Williamsburg, Skinnerville, to be specific. At age 15, he became an apprentice, a printer's apprentice. I cover him in this book, Rebels and Paradise. It's a study of five abolitionists in the town of Northampton, not the people who found the commune in Florence, but talents. Talents people. At age 15, one of his patrons and a friend of the family called J.P. Williston, John Payson Williston. You're all familiar with Amherst College, Williston building. Williston gave money to almost all the important Protestant congregationalists. Excuse me, congregationalist churches in the north. He made a bundle of money, not as big as his brother. His brother was Sam Williston. Sam invented cloth-covered buttons. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. He's probably the wealthiest man in Massachusetts by 1860. Worth $300,000 in today's money, several millions. Samuel was sort of quiet. He stayed in the background. He had J.P., his brother, distribute the money. Because Williston gave money not only to congregational schools, but to the abolitionist movement. He was a devout abolitionist, but not a saint. In fact, he was simply a jerk. He was also a rabid prohibitionist who caused a liquor riot in Northampton in the summer of 1852. It was a horrible story, a really horrible story. He would sniff out people who were breaking the prohibitionist coat and turn them in. Northampton under the bridge, a block away, was an ice cream parlor that served pies and ice cream, said to be the best in Western Massachusetts. Till Williston found out they were selling hooch behind the bar. He turned them in. Ger knew the better side of him. J.P. Williston arranged for an apprenticeship with a printer at the Hampshire Herald. Hampshire Herald was the first abolitionist newspaper in Western Massachusetts, probably the first Western Worcester. Two years later, with Williston's money, he bought the Northampton Courier, which was a mildly abolitionist newspaper. He turned it into a rabid abolitionist newspaper. He and one of his fellow apprentices bought the Hampshire Gazette, also with the aid of Williston. Ger ran the Hampshire Gazette until right before his death in 1914. He was celebrated as the most important journalist in Western Massachusetts. Some would say in the nation. There were testimonial dinners left and right by 1905, 1906, 1907. He's all over the place. He had the biggest garden in Northampton, and it was said to be the tallest man in Western Massachusetts. He was six feet five as far as we know. He is skeptical of the Civil War in 1860. He's not so sure it's worth fighting over. But by 1862, he's nervous because not enough local lads signed up for the war. So at a special town meeting one day, he walked to the front of the hall and he signed his name. Henry S. Gehr. And the idea was to stimulate more sign-ups. He's not so sure that it worked. What is clear that in September, October that year, he ships off to Greenfield to the training base for the Massachusetts 52nd Regiment. So here he is. He's 34 years old. One of the oldest men in the regiment and probably the most literate. And so when he's at camp, he's told, no fighting for you, son. They make him the postmaster of the army of the Gulf. Postmasters were the candy men of their day because they got stuff from home all the time. Not simply letters, but Yankee sent barrels and barrels of apples, apple cider, not the hard stuff, turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas, eunaming, including correspondence and copies needless to say of the abolitionists, newspapers in the north, especially the Hampshire Gazette. So people loved him, but he also had a lot of time on his hands. And so what he does is he walks around Baton Rouge and he befriends African-Americans. They take him to church. He's just dazzled by the worship. He's one of the interesting people. And then he notices among them, they're not all field hands, he says. Some of them are mechanics, skilled workers, very smart, he says, very smart and ambitious. Then he starts interviewing them and they find out what they want to do when the war is over. Most of them, he said, had the mistaken impression that the government was going to take care of them. What he did was tell them, be careful, be deliberate, and maybe in time you'll be fully free, but it's not going to happen overnight. So he's kind of a realist. As a newspaper editor, he was in tune with Northern Opinion and especially the opinion of locals in North Hampton. He run into trouble, in fact. In 1859, when John Brown's raid failed in Harper's Ferry, he called a special meeting in North Hampton. Normally, the place would have been filled to the rafters. Not then. People were really, really skeptical of Brown and especially of violence. But by 1862, as I've already noted, he comes around. So he enters the war as an abolitionist. Very, very few Northerners enter the war as abolitionists, although I would say more than most historians appreciate. Most scholars of the Civil War would say that by 1863 the emancipation proclamation, they run along. Not Gehr. He was for it from the very beginning. And also, he thought it was a good idea to arm soldiers. This was an important, black soldiers, this was an important test for your loyalty to the war and to the Union and against slavery. Most Southerners just recalled the idea of blacks and arms. It didn't compete for them. And that is for good reason. I found that soldiers, escaped slaves in the South who were declared contraband were in a never-never land. They were not slaves, but they weren't fully free either. And so when southern soldiers and snipers came across them, they shot them or they turned them to their owners. Or they lynched them in spring 1863. And one of the officers in Gehr's unit called Long was told to look at, to quiet a disturbance, a disturbance in New Iberia. Those of you who like hot sauce, know Iberia. It's the home of Franks and Louisiana hot sauce. In spring 1863, a disturbance was that blacks had armed and they shot it out with local militiamen. When Long arrived there, the excitement was over, but he looked at the railroad bridge and there were eight black bodies hanging from the railroad crest. So life was precarious in the south and Gehr was quite a railroad. So in his travels around the contraband camp, he comes across, this is April 4th, 1863, he says a body came into the camp and it revealed lurid scenes you've never seen. It was Peter. It was Peter. And then he adds, Lieutenant Stearns was so appalled that he took them to an artist to have an image made. Well, I knew Gehr was involved in this and then I had a clue. Lieutenant Stearns. Who is Lieutenant Stearns? So I got to the roster of the Massachusetts 52nd and sure enough, there was an entry for a man called Marshall Spring Stearns. Marshall Spring Stearns from Northfield, Massachusetts. Who was Stearns and who was his family? Well, if you go to Northfield today on the main street, you will notice these gorgeous buildings with four or six columns in front. Anybody seen these things? The Stearns family is responsible for them. The father and three of his sons. They were widely recognized as remarkable works of art and architecture. One just came on the market. If you were quick on the draw, you probably could have picked it up. No matter. The family was widely known for its expertise. Except for Marshall. Marshall went to California to the Gold Rush in 1849 or 50. Probably stayed there for about a decade. Don't know for sure. Except not as a prospector. He may have failed as a prospector, but what's clear is that he probably became a provisioner for the miners. And then his sister-in-law bails him out. She explains that the family home in Northfield is up for grabs. His brothers didn't want it, and he could have it if he wanted it. So sure enough, he comes home. Sort of liberates him. He's 38 at the time. Right around that time, by the way, here he is. He looks like a beer salesman. But we have a better picture of him that I just couldn't find. Someone found it, but there he is. He's 38 years old. Four years older than Henry Gare. And his sister, so he inherits the family home. When the war breaks out, right before the war, he married his childhood sweetheart, either Sula or Lulu Hillard. It's not clear from some of the correspondence. I call her Sula. So he married Sula, and two weeks before Katie, their daughter was born, and Katie ships out. Now, what's interesting about him is several things. First of all, he's not literate. His spelling is phonetic. So he's no Henry Gare. He's very different than Henry Gare. And second, he was not an abolitionist. He joined the war because of his loyalty to the Union. Now, if you were a man of local prestige and you recruited soldiers for the Union Army, you are normally rewarded with an officer commission. So he's commissioned as a lieutenant in the Army in 1860, 1862. He meets up with Gare, and the two of them strike up an important friendship. Early on in his correspondence, he's hard-stepped. He wets back to Sula. Oh, my God, dear, I'd like to take you in my arms and kiss your lips. This is not something that Yankees normally said. It's really salacious by Yankee standards. He starts counting the days when he can come back home. By the middle of March, he writes something like three months and 22 days, and I shall be with him again, my dear love, and Katie, who I wish to take in my arms. So he's heart-sick. He's homesick. And then he gets a surprising offer. The head of his unit makes him the head of this contraband camp. He's not happy about it. He's grown. He's his righteous life. I have no managerial skills, and especially these people are very difficult to handle and to deal with. And early on, his letters are spiked with expletives from African-Americans. He used the N word freely. But by January 1863, it's not a change in his language. He drops the N word for darky and the more respectful negro. What's gone on? What's gone on is that he's heard these stories from people like Peter, and he begins to develop, he becomes simpatico. So simpatico that by April, March and April 1863, but he says something like this. Invariably, plantation heads come into the contraband camp, and they ask me, pick out my slave, pick out my fieldhand, pick out my house servant. And he does. He calls him over, and he says, look, he's standing between the slave and the owner. He says, now what do you want to do? You want to go with him or her, or do you want to stay here with me? And the very leaving answer is, they want to stay. They voted with their feet. So he's become a one-man liberation squad. The same day, a couple of days later, a couple of days after Gaia wrote his letter on Peter, he wrote to Sula. And he said, Sula, I've sent S-C-E-N-T, a photograph, F-O-T-E-R-G-R-A-F, a man that was mutilated. You can see from this that he was very badly treated. And then he writes to someone he calls my best friend, and he repeats that. What really got him angry about slavery was the same thing that anger can regare. Miscegenation, rape of slave women by plantation masters. It's easy for us to just damn that. This is sort of a real violation of norms. It was especially violative for Protestants, Evangelical Protestants of the period, who saw this as a cardinal sin of losing control of yourself. It defiled the reputation of plaintiffs like nothing else. So I put together these clues, these elusive clues, and found that it was these two men who took this slave to a photographer. Who was the photographer? Well, I had no clue until I went through some early photographs of images of Peter. On one of them, it's signed by, as the studio stamp of a guy named William D. McPherson, of McPherson and Oliver. Who was McPherson? Well, the record, he left a very thin record. We think he started out in New Hampshire, but then he became what we call a camp follower. He followed the Union Army into Baton Rouge, snapping these images. These images, by the way, they're not as sharp as daguerreotypes, which was the previous technology. This new technology that produced these things called carte-de-viste, carte-de-disease, excuse me, couldn't be reproduced easily and sold. What soldiers would do is they would take a picture of Peter and then scratch a note on the other side of it and mail it off. This is from a medic. His name is Mason. This is one way that these images got around. McPherson, it turns out, I found his photos, a cache of his photos in the Louisiana Historical Society. While in Baton Rouge, he took cityscapes at the town, really beautiful things, storefronts, wagons, et cetera, but also images of southern encampments, which means he was probably a spy in the service of the Union Army. And finally, most important, I've never seen anyone do this before, he took images of slaves, slaves at work, and plantations. More than a hint that he was an abolitionist, and that is why he was the one who probably took the images. That's what motivated him to take the images of Peter. And so what we have here is a story, not often told, because most historians will tell you that the men who fought for the Union Army were basically loyalists, unionists, and non-abolitionists. What we find from Gehr is that his experience in the South reinforces politics. For his comrade-in-arms, Stearns, he's converted by his experiences on the ground, some of whom saw slavery close up and in person. So that is an important finding because it should give us a sense that the Civil War on the ground was far more informative than we've been led to believe. Let me end on this note, because I've done later work on Amherst College soldiers who fought in the war. His Ebenezer Dyer Day, Class of 1863. He served probably a Christian, not a particularly devout one, but probably a Christian. He served in South Carolina, Buford, at a place called Button Hill Plantation. He was in charge of this plantation of liberated African-Americans. He set up a school for them. He arrived there as a skeptic, and laid it in his middle way through his tenure there. He said, you know, it's just not working for these people. I can understand why some of them needed the lash. Why? Because he was seen as the arbiter of family disputes. He winds up in the Middle East, terrible family disputes, theft, all kinds of things that drove him crazy. But by the end of this day, he says, you know, I know these people to be not only devout Christians, but really interested in self-improvement. If you look at the students and the scholars in my school, you will find them superior to northern kids of the same age in school. And as he leaves, he says, I am convinced that they will have a better life than their fathers, if we're patient. We have to be patient. We have to learn how to work with these people. His classmate, Joseph Lynch, Leach, I'm sorry, Leach was really devout. Jesus, every other word in his letters is how much he loves Jesus. So he was stationed in Virginia. He's a chaplain. One day, he goes to a plantation, and he finds a nursery. And he looks in the nursery, and he faces mixed blood. Very clearly mixed blood. He says, you know how that happened. There's only one way to handle these people, violence or war. People criticize him for that. And he writes back a little later. Some people think these people are not Christians because of their eccentric enthusiasm when it comes to worship. I know them to be some of the sweetest Christians I've ever met. So he, like Stearns, gets converted on the ground. And that is something I think we need to think about when we think about the Civil War, because it was more than guns and cannons. It was also about human experiences and how people came around on the basis of their context and experiences with African-Americans. Back to our two main characters, Gare and Stearns. Gare returned home in 1863, and he resumes his post at the handshake. He never gave up. Never gave up on the promise of liberation or a better life afterwards. When in 1872, Yankees are talking about withdrawing the troops from the south and in the name of home rule, living in the south, running south, he says, listen, we've not, oh, and the south complain that they've been abused by the north. And he writes back, no, we've not been abused. We've been too lenient. We have to keep the troops there to keep everyone else in mind. In 1892, when an Irish candidate, Man for Mayor of Northampton, he says this is perfectly fine. A man who comes here and claims citizenship is a citizen. That's what the Fourteenth Amendment says. So he fought all his life, by the way, against nativism. In 1854, the nativists, Trump types, took over the Massachusetts legislature. It was a landslide like no other. Every member of the House, 497, were nativists who ran on the American, no nothings, American independent party, no nothings. Except for people around Northampton. Why? Because Henry Gaer campaigned against him. And he delivered Northampton to the Republican Party when it was a serious party. Stearns. Stearns was always a modest man. We know he had no celebrity that we know of. But he had a heart. And as he's shipping out from Baton Rouge in 1863, a woman, a light-skinned woman so described, came to see him. She said, Mr. Stearns, how about taking me home with you? And he says to her, well, I don't know about that. It's against rules to have civilians on military transport. Now the reason that she asked him for that was that she volunteered when he was heading the contraband camp to make clothing for the contraband. Now if you look at this image closely, they're not dressed. It's cheap ordinary clothing. But it ain't slave clothing. This is the clothing of freedom. She organized, she would get these bolts of cloth, and she would organize these women into selling groups. And so they made their own clothes. She also took over the commissary to make sure that everyone was fit. Stearns got home, thought it over, and he sent her the money to come north. She came north to Northfield with her son, Joseph, probably in 1863. She stayed there for around six years, probably as a family servant and nurse. Then she decided, you know, I've had enough of this Yankee weather. I'm going back home. So she went back home with Joseph. Joseph wrote back to Stearns, look, I'd like to come back again because I can't make any money in Louisiana. They don't pay us much. And so Stearns invites him back. He lives with Stearns for a while. They get him a job in a factory in Orange. He meets a black woman. They fall in love and she says, I can marry you, but you have to give up chewing tobacco. So he decides to chew on a rag instead of tobacco. Unfortunately, it was laced with something and he up and died. That's one of the last things we hear about him until this. In 1920, just before his death, there's a typical Memorial Day service in Northfield, and there's a reasoned old soldier leaning on a cane in the church. And he finds out that two more of Stearns' daughters are in town for the celebration. And he says, come over to me, please. And somebody called him over and said, I want to tell you something. I was wounded severely in Baton Rouge in the summer of 1863 just before he shipped out. I tried to get to the hospital, but the hospital was filled to the seams. There was no place for me. So your father put me on a ship and he ministered to me and he saved my life. Your father saved my life. Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn't. We don't know because we have no evidence. But my point is this, people like Stearns and Joseph Leach are local people we pay no attention to, but maybe we should start. The deeper you dig into these people, you discover that sometimes ordinary people are far ahead of their leaders. We have that today. Poll Americans on arms control, poll Americans on the environment and you'll see they're way ahead of their leaders on this. I would say the same thing that was happening in the United States, in the leader states of the war and also afterwards. It's another way of saying that the period was like an inverted bottle of milk. The cream was on the bottom. That's enough for me. If anyone has to leave, please feel free, but those who want to stay and extend the conversation, please. You said that the Florence about white men raking black women and girls was about losing control. It wasn't about rape, basically. No, I know it was rape, but you say that they were important about it because it was the loss of control and they were good residents. And not about the violence. That too. It's all part of something. It's both abstract and immediate. But the race thing, I found here's Stearns, if I may, deeply moved by the authentic and squalid state of his charge of the slaves who came into the camp. It was a question of color that shook his conscience when I'm talking here about Stearns. He immediately noticed that not all contraband had dark skin right in the early January 1863 that some 1250 had come into his camp. It was a sight to behold of the real African Americans, seven, eight children with hair and blue eyes and fair and complexed. He explains to Suley, he's got a servant who is white. He's whiter than you are, dear. It's that kind of thing that got them really, really angry. You didn't have to be educated to afford that. You just had to be a decent person. How do we know about the rest of Peter's life? Ha! That's a story. Peter, script writers, love Peter. Everybody is dying to write a story about Peter and do a film, film script. There is, I won't repeat his name because I'm going to be unfavorable to him, but there is a script writer who's won the Academy Award and who wanted to do a story about Peter based on the cryptic, on the original story in The Heart. So he hired a prominent historian and she looked into it and she said, the story is false. It's fake. There's no way to resurrect this. And so she sent him to me. God bless her. And he said, could you do research for me? I said, to what end? I played dumb. He said, well, you know, I want to do this story about Peter, the slave, and I need the stamp of a historian. I said, so, he said, well, I will pay you to do this. I said, you don't have to pay me because the story you're pursuing is false. You're just going to perpetuate a lie. And he kept me on the phone for 45 minutes trying to convince me that the story was true. And I said, I don't think we have anything to say to one another except this. I said, what I will do, I will look up, I will dig deeper into the records and see if I can come up with anything on like Peter. Now I had his name, Peter, and I had his speech preference. And I assumed he had a French last name. So I went through the records of the USCI, the United States Colored Infantry. There were six companies in Batman Around Baton Rouge. And I found one with a French sounding last name. And so I said, look, this guy, Peter Willett, I think it was, he could be your man, but don't quote me. And I've never heard from him again. But I suspect he found someone to do what he wanted them to do. The short answer is we don't know what happened to Peter. Except this. The casualty rate for black soldiers was several times the white man. Some 40% died. So he did during the military, was he? Yes. Well, no. There is a Peter with a French sounding last name who joined the military. What happened to the real Peter? He may have been killed, I don't know. If you didn't die from bullets, there's a pretty good chance you're going to die from disease. In 1867 there was a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans. Not Baton Rouge, New Orleans. And it took down McPherson. So many people died that they couldn't even do, didn't have time to do obituaries. There are lots of accidents in this story, and that's one of them. And it deprived us of greater information about McPherson. Yeah. I think there's a later picture of Peter. I think he's still called Gordon after that period in uniform. No. I'll have to look that up. You can look it up. I'd be surprised if it's anything like the image in Harper's, it's a fabrication. Doesn't mean it didn't happen. Yeah. Doesn't mean there's an outside chance that it is he, but only an outside chance. Mind you that Peter had a last name probably because he was a Catholic. Most slaves had one name, their first name. So through happenstance, he may have inherited or invented his own last name. But I don't know if this guy Peter will let. I looked through, let's see, about three of six regiments, and I found one Peter. So there's no conflict there. It's either him or it's not. On a very limited basis. Yeah. Speaking about that, thinking about that French-Black connection. Yeah. Of course all the way up to Red River, there are these colonies and settlements of mixed race, French and Black that, you know, produced in a number of people in New Orleans. There was much freer between French and Spanish even and Black until the United States. Yeah. There are about 20,000 people of color, free people of color in the South, 18,000 of them are in Louisiana. Right. One of the great tragedies here, well, one of many, is that the WPA that interviewed slaves after the 1930s, most historians dismiss those records as useless. They haven't read them. If you read them really carefully, you get some really keen and nuanced insight into slave life throughout the South, except Louisiana, for some reason. The WPA people never got to Louisiana, but they did do Texas and Arkansas. So if you read the records for Texas and Arkansas, you will find slaves who were born in Louisiana and migrated out just as you say. And their stories are really, really fascinating. I thought of doing something on them, but I'm too old for Michigan. I understand that. Of your generation. Well, thank you so much. Thank you.