The Most HORRIBLE Punishments Primarily Used On Slaves

The overseer’s menacing scowl watched over all of you every moment, glance, and breath you took; you could be robbed of your clothes and paraded round town if the overseer said so, you could be beaten raw with leather or metal if the overseer demanded it, and you could be branded with a hot iron, a mark of shame as much as pain, at the overseer’s bidding. The antebellum era of the United States saw a country built, divided, and even go to war over the issue of slavery, through coercion, humiliation, and racial supremacy, slavery would cost the first African Americans and their descendants today. Welcome to history on fleek, today we examine the punishments used on slaves of the antebellum, for slaves in the antebellum, public humiliation was pervasive, punishments and humiliation were grimly intertwined, what could be a punishment for one individual could stand as a warning and threat to others, furthermore, so often physical punishment would be delivered to reassert the racial supremacist order, it is frankly a fallacy to present slave punishment and humiliation as separate matters. Slaves could be stripped naked and paraded through the streets following physical punishment, debasing the individual but also as a latent threat to their fellow enslaved, collars could be placed on slaves, a visible and loud act of debasement that ironically would not aid their all-important forced labor, shackling of the hands and feet of male slaves was rife in the antebellum, survivor accounts include instances of runaway slaves being captured and forced to wear a bell or pillory for a whole year, public humiliation was part of the very design of the antebellum and slavery-funded society, for enslaved persons it was inescapable.

From the earliest days of the thirteen British colonies starting in 1526, chattel slavery was practiced in what would become the United States of America, slavery of Africans and African Americans would take hold in large from the 1600s until the end of the Civil War in 1865, across this period slavery was a legally sanctioned practice with enslaved persons considered property, when the United States Constitution was drafted in 1789, the term slavery was not used, but the Three-Fifths Compromise provided slave owners with excessive political power, enlarging powers in many southern legislatures, the term three-fifths has become symbolic for many of the lessened legal views of the enslaved, that they were only seen in American law as three-fifths of a person, there can be no mistake, the conditions of slavery were brutal, and it would take an entire civil war for slaves to be granted rights or freedoms. The branding of enslaved persons was commonplace across the United States, an entire strand of the abolitionist movement was based on the practice of branding, that slaves were being branded and mutilated in the same vein as livestock, remarkably, the practice itself held two purposes, firstly, as a shaming mark of property that served to separate the enslaved from the master population, this branding would be done with a hot iron on the enslaved person’s skin, a scar for life, secondly, and predominantly from the nineteenth century onwards, as a form of punishment, chillingly, the mutilation of slaves through the removal of teeth or ears took place well into 1830, which sardonically made a marker for identification should they flee, many runaway slaves were subject to forms of branding as a punishment for the attempt, these would include dog bites and even shotgun blasts from their captors.

Following the American War of Independence from 1775 to 1783, divergent attitudes and views on slavery began to show across the formative nation, after the revolution, laws and movements for the abolition of slavery began to appear across northern states, while the expanding cotton industry in southern states meant the deep south remained a slave society, ultimately for the south, an entire economic system had formed through the forced labor of African slaves, even with the Atlantic slave trade’s abolition in 1808, the south’s economy had become heavily dependent on the enslaved labor force, most prominent in cotton production and agriculture, as a result, smuggling slaves and slave breeding would become regular in the United States until the 1860s, these Americas with polar opposite positions on the practice of slavery would divide the country into slave states and free states, come the 1850s, a cotton-growing enriched south that saw slavery as a positive good threatened to secede from the union, the American Civil War was right around the corner, some 180,000 African Americans fought for the Union in the war and not one enslaved person fought for the Confederacy. Physical punishment was a day in day out occurrence for the enslaved population of the United States, punishment could be given out for perceived disobedience or infractions, yet often the abuse was meted out for the overseer to impose their dominance, on any plantation, an overseer had the authority to commit violence upon enslaved people, typically this was done with a whip made of cow skin or a lash made of metal, coercion through beatings was a matter entirely at an overseer’s behest, working too slow, insubordination, leaving without permission, or for no reason at all, slaves who resisted their captivity, who ran away, should they survive, stood to have the most brutal of punishment, there are numerous accounts from the antebellum period of physical abuse of slaves leading to their deaths, as the country brimmed with polarization on the issue of slavery, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln would be elected President of the United States, his election campaign ran on a pledge of stopping any expansion of slavery, not an abolitionist campaign mind you, yet this was enough for several southern states to feel his presidency was a threat to slavery itself, outraged southern states led by South Carolina implemented plans to secede from the union, shortly, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas would join South Carolina to form their own sovereign nation, the Confederate States of America, the peace conference of February 1861 was an attempt to prepare the union, but its failure and the attack on Fort Sumter two months later meant civil war had arrived, over half a million Americans would die in the four-year conflict, yet during its course, the union would make gains on the very issue the war was born over, slavery, progressive laws were passed that in time meant permanent gains, the confiscation acts of 1861 and 1862 meant union forces could confiscate any property of the Confederacy, property meant slaves, yet it was in 1863 with the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation that legally freed enslaved African Americans from the Confederate states, arguably Lincoln’s vision and course of action cost him his life, but the union would come to victory and shortly afterward the Thirteenth Amendment would pass prohibiting slavery in the United States of America.

A strange device that came into being in the nineteenth century, the penal treadmill would have a brief impact in antebellum America, designed by civil engineer Sir William Cubitt, the penal treadmill was a grand design of the Industrial Revolution, in appearance, it looked like an extensively wide grand paddle wheel, yet workers were expected to climb the paddles whilst holding on to a bar above, the initial idea of the treadmill, designed for English prisoners, was to generate power for mills, a shift on a penal treadmill would last eight hours, that is right, eight hours of involuntary stair climbing, yet it didn’t quite work out as they hoped, the output of 200 people couldn’t match the output of a single water wheel, the penal treadmill designed for English prisons was soon just a device for punishment, not capitalizing on human labor, curiously enough, they didn’t catch on in the United States, slave owners could rent one as a potential punishment for runaway slaves, yet toxically enough, the treadmill was seen as a waste of human labor in slave owner’s eyes, they didn’t want to waste the slave’s energy on punishment when it could be put into hard labor. While the defeat of the Confederacy and the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation led to a new dawn for African Americans, it wasn’t necessarily a bright one, the end of slavery did not immediately lead to equal rights for African Americans, and the eras following the antebellum were fraught with conflict and danger, the Reconstruction Era for the decade following the end of the Civil War was seemingly more focused on appeasing former Confederate states than protecting freedmen, infamously, the Reconstruction Era would offer former slave owners reparations yet not slaves, violence of the Ku Klux Klan was wanton, and violent assaults on persons of color were rife in the south, following the Reconstruction Era was the passage of Jim Crow laws, which racially segregated the southern United States from the 1870s to the 1960s, separating facilities and institutes made a mockery of emancipation with African Americans always receiving an inferior deal, in what many see as the nadir of America’s race relations, Jim Crow has come to be seen as an institutionalization of second-class citizen for persons of color, the civil rights movement of the 1960s would overturn Jim Crow and bring voting rights for African Americans, yet many challenges remained, to this day, many commentators see American schools as segregated today as they were before the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, the Black Lives Matter movement has shown the world that provincial safety is no guarantee to African Americans today, across its populace, politics, and culture, a country built on the forced labor of slavery shows its heavy burden to this very day.

Arguably the most profound of punishments inflicted on enslaved persons was not even a direct action, but an afterthought and byproduct of the system they were forced into, in a course of action that would separate millions of people and generations to come from their heritage, the separation of families was the norm for enslaved arrivals in North America, children would be separated from their parents, wives from their husbands on disembarking, and this practice would continue beyond, pregnant slaves were strikingly vulnerable to this, with enslaved persons being viewed as property so would their children, numerous accounts detail newborn babies born on plantations being taken from mothers at birth, this would only result in the children in question being sold or traded like commodities, slave owners had no legal ramifications to respect the family unit or a marital bed of slaves, any could be sold or transferred to new owners, taken as concubines against their will, arrival in the United States meant the loss of family and identity for those who survived the Middle Passage, this is history on fleek and we will see you next time.