In March 1863, two months after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a Black man known as Peter (other accounts name him as Gordon) escaped a Louisiana plantation, endured 10 days in alligator-infested marshes and found his way to Baton Rouge, where he received medical attention and soon enlisted in the Union Army. His survival alone is an astonishing story, but what immortalized him was a photograph of the raised welts and scars crisscrossing his back, brutal evidence of a lifetime of whippings. The widely circulated image, variably referred to as "Whipped Peter" or "The Scourged Back," is credited with fueling the abolitionist movement at a crucial Civil War midpoint, igniting the outrage of Northerners who had never seen the horrors of Southern slavery up close.
Director Antoine Fuqua and his star, Will Smith, reenact the shooting of that photograph toward the end of "Emancipation," their swampy, sloggy action-movie treatment of Peter's journey. Fuqua doesn't show us the lashings that produced those scars, leaving them to the imagination of an audience presumably acquainted with, and likely exhausted by, the many grueling depictions of racist violence in movies and TV series. The pointedly titled "Emancipation" means to focus on acts of physical and spiritual defiance, and it dramatizes the apparatus of chattel slavery primarily to show that apparatus being subverted or overthrown. Here, even a cotton gin can be repurposed as an instrument of resistance, albeit resistance of an especially cruel and painful kind.
Little is known about the details of Peter's life, which serves the purposes of William N. Collage's narrowly focused screenplay just fine. We first see Peter (Smith) kneeling in prayer just before he is separated from his family, thrown into a cage and transported from the plantation to a labor camp, where he and other male prisoners are forced to lay railroad track. The heat is unendurable, the work exhausting and deadly. But despite the scars on his back and the metal collar around his neck, Peter remains more alert and hopeful than the others. He's overheard whispers that Lincoln has declared all enslaved people free and that Union troops have made it to Baton Rouge, a blessing from a God he fervently believes in.
