Gordon This photograph of Gordon, a runaway slave from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was taken on April 2, 1863. Frederick W. Mercer, an assistant surgeon with the Forty-seventh Massachusetts Regiment, examined four hundred other runaways and found many “to be as badly lacerated.” Publication of Gordon’s photograph in the popular Harper’s Weekly made him a symbol of slavery’s terrible brutality. © Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA / The Bridgeman Art Library.