WASHINGTON — The photo of an escaped enslaved person with scars covering his back has been one of the most influential images in American history, almost since the moment it was taken in Baton Rouge during the Civil War.

Hundreds of thousands of 2½ by 4 inch cartes de viste, the social media platform of the 1860s, were credited with helping persuade the North to make ending the South’s peculiar institution a war goal.

A largely oblivious Northern population saw for the first time the brutality described in books like the fictionalized “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which took place on the Red River, and “Twelve Years a Slave,” a nonfiction account that took place in Avoyelles Parish.

Since then, “The Scourged Back,” also called “Whipped Pete,” has been used on magazine covers, in movies and

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