John Rogers (1829-1904), artist. The Wounded Scout: A Friend in the Swamp. Painted plaster statue. (Patented) c. 1864. H: 23 1/2 in. Base w.  9 1/4 in. 

A fine painted plaster sculpture by John Rogers (1829–1904), The Wounded Scout: Friend in the Swamp. The composition depicts a barefoot Black man navigating a Southern swamp while attempting to escape enslavement. At great personal risk, he pauses to aid a wounded White Union soldier stranded behind Confederate lines. The two figures, battered and weary, are rendered in an intimate scene of shared struggle.

Rogers was celebrated in his day for producing affordable plaster groups that brought contemporary subjects into middle-class homes. His Civil War works, in particular, appealed to abolitionist audiences eager to display their sympathies. Yet these sculptures also reinforced entrenched racial hierarchies. Here, the Black subject is presented as serviceable to the White protagonist, a dynamic often mirrored in nineteenth-century literature.

The swamp setting alludes to landscapes of refuge for self-emancipated people who evaded capture in difficult terrain. In Rogers’s rendering, that history is reframed into a tale of loyalty to the Union cause, balancing an implicit recognition of Black agency with the era’s racialized expectations of subordination.

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[Art, Folk Art, Military Art, Etching, Engraving, Lithographs, Prints, Ephemera]

As shown. The white subject's hand is in need of restoration.