Torture of slaves in the United States was fairly common, as part of what many slavers claimed was necessary discipline. Slaves in the United States were considered chattel, meaning they were legally treated as personal property, akin to livestock.
Torture of slaves in the United States was fairly common, as part of what many slavers claimed was necessary discipline. Slaves in the United States were considered chattel, meaning they were legally treated as personal property, akin to livestock.
Accounts of torture come from both slavers and the enslaved, although accounts from the formerly enslaved were historically mistrusted or discounted. In one famous such case, retold in a reconsideration of the WPA Slave Narratives by historian Rebecca Onion, "In Virginia, Eudora Ramsay Richardson, the state director, refused to believe a story that Roscoe Lewis, the director of that state's Negro Writers Unit (and a professor at the Hampton Institute), recorded during an interview with ex-slave Henrietta King. King told Lewis that she had taken some candy at age eight or nine, and that her slaveholder had punished her by holding her head under a rocking chair while she whipped her. The incident had resulted in a crushed jawbone and permanent disfigurement. (King said the violence gave her 'a false face...What chilluns laugh at an' babies gits to cryin' at when dey sees me.') Disbelieving Lewis's account, Richardson went to King's home to fact-check it, thinking it was a 'gross exaggeration'. She found instead that "[King] looks exactly as Mr. Lewis describes her and she told me, almost word for word the story that Mr. Lewis relates.'" [2]
In the testimony of Peter of the scourged back he mentions "salt brine, which Overseer put in my back". [3] This practice, sometimes called salting, was attested in many accounts of slave torture reported over many decades. [4] Other substances, including turpentine, hot-pepper juice, and dripping candle wax, were also used. [5] [6] An interview with Andrew Boone for the WPA's Slave Narrative Collection in the 1930 matter-of-factly described the practice: "By dis time de blood sometimes would be runnin' down dere heels. Den de next thing was a wash in salt water strong enough to hold up an egg. Slaves wus punished dat way fer runnin' away an' sich." [4] In an 1864 article about Nathan Bedford Forrest, a "Knoxville correspondent" of the New-York Tribune described whippings at the jail conducted by Bedford and John Forrest, including salting, and the secret burial of an enslaved man who had been whipped to death with a "trace chain doubled for the purpose of punishment". [7]
There was a form of whipping called hand sawing: "Jones figured that 'hand-sawing' probably meant 'a beating administered with the toothed-edge of a saw'." [8] In November 1838, J. R. Long reported that a slave who had runaway from his plantation had been caught. He added: "I gave him a real whipping and hand sawing and he has been a fine negroe ever since. I told him he might run off if he chosed and I would knock out one of his jaw teeth and brand him and I intend to stick to my promise." [9] [ page needed ]
There are also reports of a practice called cat-hauling, in which a cat's claws were the means of inflicting pain. [10]
In addition to whipping by owners and overseers, at least two slave traders are said to have engaged in systematic torture, reserving flogging rooms in their slave jails for this purpose: Theophilus Freeman of New Orleans, and the slavers of Poindexter & Little, where the lashes were administered by "Uncle Billy."
American slaves were commonly chained and restrained by various means. A fugitive slave named John or Jack was put in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi jail in 1850; when he was captured he had an iron collar with bell attached. [12] The Bullock Museum in Texas holds a belled slave collar. [13] The Henry Ford holds a hooked collar used on slaves; "Slaves known for running away might have had to wear an iron collar like this, for punishment or to prevent them from running away again. The hooks caught on bushes or tree limbs, causing a violent jerking to the individual's head and neck." [14] A runaway slave, named Henry (Hal for short) was picked up in Murfreesboro, Tennessee at which time he "had on his wrists a pair of negro traders' hand cuffs broken." [15] A runaway slave ad placed in a New Orleans newspaper in 1839 mentioned that the missing man, "WILLIAM, or BILL, a cook by trade...had a chain to his leg when he left the City Hotel, Common Street." [16] In Slave Life in Georgia John Brown described accompanying Bob Freeman when he took prisoners to and from the blacksmith to have shackles put on and removed. [17]
According to historian Michael Tadman, "Persistently troublesome slaves were often to be identified by whip marks, while reclaimed runaways were often identifiable by brandings, by cropped ears, or by the absence of front teeth." [19] For example a black man arrested in Alabama in 1839 had "a small piece out of each of his ears." [20] Branding of enslaved people was known. For example in 1832, a Mississippi county sheriff described a fugitive slave in his jail as "branded on the forehead with something like LB". [21] A man named Frank was branded on both cheeks "which is plain to be seen when said negro is newly shaved". [22] News reports of 1847 had it that an Englishman living at Cape Girardeau had branded a man named Reuben on the face with the words "A slave for life". [23] [24]
Harriet Beecher Stowe described an escaped preacher who had been branded on both breasts and had toes cut off on both feet. [25]
Sexual cruelty is documented: The 1853 case of Humphreys vs. Utz in the Louisiana Supreme Court awarded civil damages to a Madison Parish plantation owner whose overseer nailed a man's penis to a bedstead and then whipped him until he ripped his penis off the nail. The man, who was called Ginger Pop or Bob, was about 30 years old. He died shortly thereafter and was buried on the grounds of the plantation. [26] In June 1863, New York Times correspondent "De Soto" (William George) [27] reported witness statements describing genital burning and breast mutilation on a Black River plantation in Catahoula Parish, concluding his account "If any one, upon reading this...says he does not believe it, I have only to reply, I do." [28]
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
Peon usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over employment or economic conditions. Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, as well as the period after the end of slavery in the United States, when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means.
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. Such people are also called freedom seekers to avoid implying that the enslaved person had committed a crime and that the slaveholder was the injured party.
Slave patrols—also known as patrollers, patterrollers, pattyrollers or paddy rollers—were organized groups of armed men who monitored and enforced discipline upon slaves in the antebellum U.S. southern states. The slave patrols' function was to police slaves, especially those who escaped or were viewed as defiant. They also formed river patrols to prevent escape by boat.
Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. This hypothesis centered around the belief that slavery was such an improvement upon the lives of slaves that only those suffering from some form of mental illness would wish to escape.
Thomas Thistlewood was an English-born planter and diarist who spent the majority of his life in the British colony of Jamaica. Born in Tupholme, Lincolnshire, Thistlewood migrated to the western end of Jamaica where he worked as a plantation overseer before acquiring ownership over several slave plantations. During his time in Jamaica, he kept a diary in which Thistlewood recorded numerous aspects of his life. Eventually spanning over 14,000 pages, the diary detailed the brutal mistreatment of the slaves he held authority over, first as an overseer then as a plantation owner.
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of slave mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property.
The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, were a series of laws enacted by the Colony of Virginia's House of Burgesses in 1705 regulating the interactions between slaves and citizens of the crown colony of Virginia. The enactment of the Slave Codes is considered to be the consolidation of slavery in Virginia, and served as the foundation of Virginia's slave legislation. All servants from non-Christian lands became slaves. There were forty one parts of this code each defining a different part and law surrounding the slavery in Virginia. These codes overruled the other codes in the past and any other subject covered by this act are canceled.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
Anti-literacy laws in many slave states before and during the American Civil War affected slaves, freedmen, and in some cases all people of color. Some laws arose from concerns that literate slaves could forge the documents required to escape to a free state. According to William M. Banks, "Many slaves who learned to write did indeed achieve freedom by this method. The wanted posters for runaways often mentioned whether the escapee could write." Anti-literacy laws also arose from fears of slave insurrection, particularly around the time of abolitionist David Walker's 1829 publication of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which openly advocated rebellion, and Nat Turner's slave rebellion of 1831.
Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
The iron bit, also referred to as a gag, was used by enslavers and overseers as a form of punishment on slaves in the Southern United States. The bit, sometimes depicted as the scold's bridle, uses similar mechanics to that of the common horse bit. The scolds bridle however, is almost always associated with its use on women in the early 17th century and there are very few accounts of the device as a method of torture against black slaves under that particular name. As opposed to the whip, the iron bit lacks the historic, social, and literary symbolic fame that would make information on the use of the iron bit as accessible. Its use throughout history has warranted some attention though, mostly from literary texts. Even earlier, slave narratives and publications of newspapers and magazines from the 18th century on give evidence of this device being used to torture and punish slaves.
Peter or Gordon, or "Whipped Peter", or "Poor Peter" was a self-emancipated, formerly enslaved man who was the subject of photographs documenting the extensive scarring of his back from whippings received in slavery. The "scourged back" photo became one of the most widely circulated photos of the abolitionist movement during the American Civil War and remains one of the most notable photos of the 19th-century United States.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic Slave Trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practised on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
Edwin Epps was a slaveholder on a cotton plantation in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. He was the third and longest enslaver of Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. in 1841 and forced into slavery. On January 3, 1853, Northup left Epps's property and returned to his family in New York.
Slave markets and slave jails in the United States were places used for the slave trade in the United States from the founding in 1776 until the total abolition of slavery in 1865. Slave pens, also known as slave jails, were used to temporarily hold enslaved people until they were sold, or to hold fugitive slaves, and sometimes even to "board" slaves while traveling. Slave markets were any place where sellers and buyers gathered to make deals. Some of these buildings had dedicated slave jails, others were negro marts to showcase the slaves offered for sale, and still others were general auction or market houses where a wide variety of business was conducted, of which "negro trading" was just one part.
Forrest's jail was the slave pen owned and operated by Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. Forrest bought 87 Adams Street, located between Second and Third, in 1854. It was located next to a tavern that operated under various names, opposite Hardwick House, and behind the still-extant Episcopal church. Forrest later traded, for fewer than six months, from 89 Adams. Byrd Hill bought 87 Adams in 1859.