B A T T L E P A Y N E
One day in 1834, an enslaved woman gave birth in the nation’s capital. She named the child “Battle.” With his father’s surname, his full name was “Battle Payne.”
When he was just nine years old, Battle Payne was sold to a slave trader, Robert N. Windsor, who sent him to New Orleans aboard the brig Lancet, a domestic slave ship. Upon his arrival in New Orleans, Battle was sold again, this time by Windsor’s business partner, Thomas Boudar.
Payne spent the next two decades enslaved on cotton and sugar plantations in Louisiana. By the time the Civil War broke out, he was 27 years old.
In 1862, as Union and Confederate troops battled throughout Louisiana, Payne managed to escape his enslavers. He headed north.
Payne returned to Louisiana just months later--as a soldier in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of the Union Army. This, “from slave to soldier,” could be the entire arc of this film. It isn’t.
This is a film about everything Battle Payne did after the Civil War...
...about the promise and tragedy of Reconstruction...
...and what could and should have been…
A M O R E P E R F E C T U N I O N.
BASED ON ORIGINAL RESEARCH BY JENNIE K. WILLIAMS, PH.D.