Interchange – The Skin Off His Back: Exposing the North to Slavery’s Lash

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We open with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” performed by Odetta off of the 1959 album My Eyes Have Seen. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” also known as “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” is a lyric by the American writer Julia Ward Howe using the music from the song “John Brown’s Body.” The final stanza includes the line “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”

The lyrics were first published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862.

In November 2016 today’s guest, Bruce Laurie, published an essay called ‘”Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: The Origins of an Iconic Image.’ This image is of a badly abused enslaved man called variously “A Typical Negro,” “The Scourged Back,” “Gordon the Slave,” or “Poor Peter,” who is turned away showing his badly scarred back to the camera. Laurie reaches forward to compare it to the photograph labelled “Napalm Girl” from the Vietnam War in order to take the measure of its reach and value as abolitionist propaganda. Utilizing new photographic technology, the picture of “Poor Peter” quickly found its way into hands and homes all over the nation. It further gained wide exposure in the pages of Harper’s Weekly in the July 4th, 1863 edition.

The context of that image and the power of that image to affect those citizens living as if on a different planet from that of the Slave South is our subject for this Interchange.

We’ll begin with a brief history of Abolitionism and the way the North was deeply interested in the maintenance of the economic system that required the forced free labor of enslaved men and women.

GUEST
Bruce Laurie is an Historian and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst whose most recent work is devoted to abolitionism before the Civil War. This includes the books Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (2005) and Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists (2015).

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MUSIC
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” performed by Odetta
“J’ai fait tout le tour du pays” (I Went Around the Country) by Jimmy Peters recorded by Alan Lomax
“Get Off the Track!” (Hutchinson Family Singers)
“Rockaway” by Jimmy Peters recorded by Alan Lomax
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” performed by Jon Batiste

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin