Slavery wasn’t just chains and whips.
It was a sprawling industry that systematically designed, cast, and sold tools to control us like cattle.
Utterly and relentlessly so.
Iron gags to forcibly shut their mouths completely.
Masks that kept them from eating.
Spiked collars so no one could even lie down.
Over the next few minutes, we’re going to go through 40 of these objects that are kept in museums across the United States and throughout Brazil and from Africa.
Each one was specifically meant to hurt, scar, or humiliate someone.
Some of them honestly will keep you up at night.
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Number one, the speculum orus started as a medical instrument made to open the mouth of someone whose jaw was locked.
On slave ships, it became something else.
Captains used the device to force open the mouths of Africans who refused to eat in the hold.
It was a screw that pried the teeth apart by force and held the mouth wide open while they poured food down the throat.
The intention was never to heal.
It was to keep the cargo alive until the port of sail.
Many stopped eating on purpose.
The ship surgeons themselves recorded this.
They called it fixed melancholy, but today we understand it as the despair of someone ripped from everything they knew.
Some preferred to starve to death rather than arrive on the other side of the ocean as a slave.
The speculum existed to take away even that last choice from the person.
The device usually broke teeth when forced, and real specimens are preserved to this day.
The National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington has one in its slavery collection.
One detail says everything about the era.
Someone had to take a hospital tool designed to save and adapt it for use on a trafficking ship.
The same object that opened the mouth of a sick patient was now opening the mouth of someone who only wanted the right to die in peace at the bottom of the hold.
Number two, there was a heavy iron collar with three long prongs extending from the neck.
The abolitionist Theodore Weld recorded the case of a young seamstress near Charleston who could not bear slavery and kept running away.
Because of this, she was whipped again and again.
As punishment, they put this prronged collar on her neck.
The tips would catch on branches, fences, anything, making it impossible to run through the woods or lie down to rest.
But the coldest detail came next.
To be able to describe the woman in a runaway ad in case she escaped again, they pulled out one of her front teeth, perfectly healthy, just to serve as an identification mark.
The person became a living record.
The collar restrained the body.
The pulled tooth restrained the name.
It was punishment combined with the promise that if she fled, she would be recognized anywhere by her mutilated mouth.
Cruelty thought out calmly and recorded in writing by those who witnessed it.
Number three, the branding iron did to a person what was done to cattle.
It was heated in the fire and pressed against the skin to burn there forever the initials of the owner.
Branding a human being served two purposes at once, proving whose property they were and leaving a permanent mark that no escape could erase.
The scar stayed with the person to the grave.
When New Orleans fell to Union forces, dozens of enslaved people from a single plantation arrived at the military camp.
Of 105 who fled together, 30 had been branded with a hot iron, four of them on the forehead, in full view of everyone, the rest on the chest or arm.
These were not isolated cases from one cruel master.
It was routine on a single property, told by the soldiers themselves who received those starving and wounded people, and who were shocked by what they saw on those bodies.
The brand on the forehead was the worst of all because nobody could hide it.
Wilson Chin carried the letters V, B, and M burned above his eyes.
The initials of a sugar planter who had owned him.
When the abolitionists photographed him, they showed that branded face to the entire country.
The iron was cheap, simple, and fit in the palm of a hand.
It was one of the most widely used tools for turning a person into merchandise with a manufacturer’s name engraved in their own flesh.
Number four, ankle shackles were the foundation of everything in the trade.
An iron bar with two loops closed by a lock applied at the exact moment the person was seized.
What truly shocks are the sizes from the wreck of the slave ship Henrietta Marie sunk around 1700.
Divers recovered more than 80 sets of shackles.
A large portion of them were too small for an adult.
They were shackles customade to restrain children.
Think about what that means.
Someone sat at a forge, measured a child’s ankle, and hammered the iron to the right size.
It was not an accident.
It was a custom order.
The children cross the ocean, shackled just like the adults, many chained in pairs to take up less space in the hold.
The Henrietta Marie shackles now fill an entire floor of a museum in Florida.
Anyone who walks across the reconstructed deck planks hears the wood creek beneath their feet.
Number five.
On the deck of slave ships, there was an object not made to injure, but to prevent a choice.
They were nets strung along the sides of the ship from one end to the other.
The function was singular, to prevent the Africans held on board from throwing themselves into the sea to drown.
Jumping into the water was a form of resistance, and many believed that by dying there, the soul would return home to Africa.
The net existed to deny even that way out.
The accounts from those who went through it are heartbreaking.
A man who escaped slavery left written, that if he had managed to get past the net, he would have jumped overboard, but he could not.
On that same deck stood the barricado, a wooden wall in the middle of the ship with a small cannon where the crew took cover and fired in case of revolt.
Everything was designed so that no exit remained.
Not to flee, not to die on their own terms.
Number six, the rawhide whip is the best known symbol of slavery, and that is no accident.
It was the everyday punishment tool used by overseer and master alike to enforce obedience through pure pain.
One of these whips is displayed to this day in the slavery and freedom gallery of the great African-American Museum in Washington.
It looks simple, a strip of leather on a handle, but in the right hands, it split the skin of the back and a few dry, well-placed blows.
The proof of the damage became one of the most famous photographs of the 19th century.
A fugitive man arrived at a Union camp with his back covered in thick, twisted scars, marks of old lashings that never healed properly.
Military doctors photographed that scarred back.
The image traveled the country and showed without needing a single word what the whip did.
The leather came off.
The flesh stayed.
The scars followed the person for the rest of their life.
Number seven, the sweat box was exactly what the name says, a tight closed wooden or metal box where the person was locked as punishment and left in the sun.
Little room to move, little air, and heat that only increased inside as the hours passed.
This confinement was used as punishment during slavery and continued afterward in prisons across the American South.
The Union Army also resorted to the same technique during the Civil War.
The logic of the box was cruel in its simplicity.
It did not require an overseer striking, nor did it leave the whip marks on a body that was worth money.
All they had to do was lock it and wait.
The heat, the thirst, and the immobility did the job on their own.
Because it left no visible scar, the box became one of the most convenient punishments for anyone who wanted to break a person’s will without damaging the merchandise they intended to sell or rent out later.
torture without a witness and without proof on the body.
Number eight, the thumb screw was small and fit in anyone’s pocket.
It clamped the person’s thumbs in two iron rings that slowly closed as a key was turned until the fingers were crushed.
The pain was used to extract confessions or simply as punishment.
In 1848, the abolitionist newspaper The North Star described the slave trading depots in Maryland as places well stocked with iron thumb screws and gags.
In Brazil, the same instrument earned a nickname of cruel irony.
Anjenhos, meaning little angels.
The iron rings clamped the thumbs and tightened by a key, crushing the victim’s fingers in the middle of a torture session.
They came from medieval Europe, where they were used to make criminals confess and cross the ocean to serve exactly the same role in slavery.
The sweet name did not match in the slightest what that iron did to a person’s hand.
Number nine, the catinetales was not an ordinary whip.
Instead of a single strip, it had nine leather strands coming from the same handle, often with knots tied right at the tip of each one.
Each blow opened nine cuts at the same time.
It was the preferred lash aboard slave ships.
And in the navies of the era, the knots existed for a very specific reason, to grip and tear the skin each time the whip came down on the back of the person tied up without any rush.
The idea of multiplying suffering in a single blow is quite ancient.
This type of multistrand whip was already used in ancient Egypt long before the Atlantic trade existed.
When slavery needed a tool to discipline people crammed into a hold, it turned to it immediately.
The nine strands gave the impression of controlled punishment, but they did the damage of many.
It was designed to hurt more and mark more, using the same arm strength as always.
Number 10.
The tin mask is one of the most well-known objects of Brazilian slavery.
It was made of tin plate, a very thin sheet of metal, and sometimes covered the entire face, fastened behind the head with a padlock.
It had only a few small holes to breathe through.
Whoever wore this mask was prevented from eating or drinking unless someone allowed it.
The punishment lasted entire days with the person sealed inside their own face without relief.
No food, no water, no end in sight.
It may seem like punishment for a serious crime, but it was not.
The mask was usually placed on enslaved people who stole sugarcane or brown sugar.
In other words, on someone who was hungry and tried to eat a little of the sugar they themselves helped produce.
In some accounts, it also served to prevent the person from eating dirt in a desperate attempt to take their own life.
The tin mask took away the food, the water, and the way out.
All at once, it sealed the mouth and sealed the fate.
Number 11.
The powder or parrots perch already appears described among the punishments of Brazilian slavery.
A wooden or iron bar was fixed behind the person’s knees with the hands and feet tied together.
Trapped like that, bent over the bar, the victim hung upside down, unable to move arms or legs.
The weight of the body itself made the pain grow minute by minute in the joints, the shoulders, and the head hanging below.
Minutes that turned into hours.
The name remained famous long after slavery in other dark chapters of Brazil’s history.
But the device was already there on the plantations centuries before.
It is a punishment of minimal engineering and maximum pain.
It requires no machine at all, just a bar and ropes.
The position forces the body to work against itself.
Whoever set up a parrot’s perch understood that the worst torture of a person hanging that way is time itself, passing slowly, far too slowly.
Number 12.
The jibet was an iron cage shaped like a human body.
After someone was executed, the corpse did not go into a grave.
It was stuffed inside the cage and hung on a post in a public place to rot there in front of everyone.
The function was to set an example.
In the Caribbean, this punishment fell on enslaved people accused of rebellion.
The body in the cage remained for weeks, sometimes months, as a warning to anyone who thought about rising against the owner.
The cage held the dead, but the message was for the living.
Every enslaved person who walked beneath that hanging iron understood the price of a revolt.
At the Institute of Jamaica, one of these cages was once displayed alongside branding irons, pieces of the same system side by side.
The object was also used against common criminals in other places, but in slavery, it became a tool of collective terror designed to haunt those who were still alive.
Number 13.
The iron muzzle was a frame that fastened to the head and covered the lower face with a perforated metal grate.
Unlike the mask that took over the entire face, this one left the eyes free and closed the mouth behind a grill.
The purpose was the usual one for this type of piece, to prevent the person from eating freely.
Alao, enslaved as a child, described one of these in the account he wrote about his own life.
Auano called the object an iron muzzle, and the word choice was no accident.
A muzzle is something you put on a dog.
Whoever wore the great on their face was being treated as an animal that cannot be left loose near food.
A specimen of this device survives to this day in the collection of the Soan Museum in London.
The great covered the mouth, but what it really wanted to cover was the idea that inside that mask there was a real person.
Number 14.
The treadwheel was an enormous wheel with steps on which people were forced to walk non-stop, like climbing a staircase that never ends.
In the houses of correction in Jamaica, enslaved people were placed on this wheel for hours, their wrists tied to a bar above the head.
Whoever fainted or missed a step was dragged by the steps that kept turning, scraping the legs against the wooden equipment.
The legs slowly became raw flesh.
An 1837 engraving circulated by British abolitionists showed the scene to the world.
And there was a detail that the governor of Jamaica himself denounced in writing.
Women were being whipped in those houses of correction.
He demanded action and said it was against the law.
The local assembly did nothing.
The wheel kept turning.
The mill that was supposed to grind grain had been repurposed to grind people hour after hour until the legs stopped responding.
Number 15.
The pomator looks harmless next to the irons and chains.
It is just a round wooden paddle, usually full of holes, but it was one of the most widely used punishment instruments in Brazilian slavery, precisely because it was cheap and within reach in any house or workshop.
The blows landed on the palm of the hand and the sole of the feet, repeated until the skin burst into purple bruises.
The holes in the wood existed to strike with even more force and cause more pain.
What is frightening about the palmia is how long it lasted through time.
The same object that punished enslaved people continued in use well after abolition in rural Brazilian schools where getting hit on the hand earned the nickname bolos.
It even appeared in police stations in the 20th century.
It was cheap, common, easy to hide and did not leave the typical marks of other tortures.
The tool of the slave quarters simply changed addresses and kept striking other hands.
Number 16.
The pillery is that wooden frame with holes that locks the head and both hands, leaving the person bent forward and stuck standing.
It comes from the European tradition of public punishment and was also used against enslaved people, usually for offenses considered minor.
Locked there in the middle of the streets movement, the captive was exposed to humiliation, unable to move, unable to cover their face, at the mercy of anyone who wanted to mock or throw something.
The difference from the stocks is all in the position.
The stocks lock the feet and leave the person seated.
The pillary locks the head and hands and keeps the person standing bent in a posture that tires and hurts more and more as the hours pass.
The main punishment here was not physical pain.
It was shame.
Exposing the immobilized person in the center of the city served to degrade them in front of everyone.
There is photographic evidence of an enslaved person locked in exactly this position.
Number 17.
The whipping post was where the person was tied to be beaten.
The wrists were bound up high, leaving the body stretched and defenseless.
Back to the whip.
Immobilized like that, the victim could not protect themselves or fall to the ground, only received blow after blow.
The post appears again and again in the accounts of those who lived through slavery.
The same photo of the Alexandria slave pen records in the caption that the building had cells and a whipping post.
It was all there in writing.
The post made the whipping more efficient and more public.
Tying someone in the center of the yard turned the punishment into a spectacle for the other captives.
Each lash in full view of everyone was also a warning.
The object itself is nothing more than a piece of wood driven into the ground with rings to bind the hands.
But its function was clear to remove from the person any chance of defense and to ensure that nobody around would forget what happened to those who disobeyed.
Number 18.
The paddle was a flat wooden board often full of holes used to strike the person with force.
There is an old engraving from the 19th century titled Precisely the Common Method of whipping with the paddle.
It shows a man striking an enslaved person while others watched nearby.
The paddle came down on the body with violence, and the holes made the wood bite the skin with each blow, leaving blisters at the exact spot where the paddle struck.
There was a cold reason behind hitting with a paddle instead of a whip.
Some owners held back the lash for fear of opening wounds too large and damaging property that, to them, was worth money.
The paddle and the stocks served as punishment that hurt plenty, but theoretically damaged the body less.
the body they intended to sell or rent out later.
The cruelty there walked hand in hand with the calculator.
Heard enough without devaluing the merchandise.
That was the math they did.
Number 19.
The cuffle chain was used to move many people at once.
The people were chained in a line, one fastened to the next by the neck or wrists, forming a column that walked together.
This was how traffickers moved captives from northern Virginia to the deep south, all on foot.
The firm Franklin and Armfield out of Alexandria had groups walk roughly 1,000 miles to the markets of Mississippi and New Orleans, all chained.
Months of walking, chained to strangers, not knowing where you’re going or whether you will ever see anyone from your family again.
Whoever fell slowed the entire line.
The chain turned separate people into a single block dragged down the dirt road.
It was the cheapest form of transport, cheaper than a wagon or coastal ship.
That is why it was so common to see these columns of chained people passing along the country’s roads in full view of everyone in broad daylight.
Number 20.
The Pellerinho was a stone column driven into the public square, an ancient inheritance that came from Portugal to Brazil.
At the top, it had curved iron spikes.
The column had several uses, and one of them was tying enslaved people sentenced to whipping.
The person was bound there, right in the center of the city to be whipped in front of anyone who passed by.
The name stuck so well it became the name of a neighborhood and a square in several Brazilian cities.
The name ended up sounding nice.
The origin did not.
The choice of location said everything.
The whipping did not happen in hiding.
It happened at the busiest spot at the foot of the column.
So the punishment would be seen by the greatest number of people.
It was punishment and propaganda at the same time.
Whoever watched learned to be afraid.
Today many people walk through a Pelarinho without knowing the name comes from that stone column where people were whipped while tied up.
The pretty postcard square was once the stage of one of the harshest rituals of slavery.
Number 21.
The bell collar was an iron ring with curved prongs rising from the neck.
And at the tips of those prongs hung small bells.
It was placed on anyone who had already tried to escape at least once.
The logic was simple and perverse.
If the person tried to flee again through the woods, the sound of the bells would give away every movement, and the tall prongs would catch on branches.
The weight of the whole assembly further hindered any attempt at running.
There was one more detail.
designed to break the person from the inside.
But with those prongs and bells on the neck, the person simply could not lie down properly to sleep.
Rest became punishment, too.
Day and night, the iron reminded whoever wore it that they had tried to be free and were caught.
One of these collars is kept at the historic New Orleans collection.
It did not have a cell lock, but it restrained the person in a way that followed them with every step and every ring of the bell.
Number 22.
Not every restraining iron was used directly on the body.
Many were fixed to the floor, the wall, or the ship’s deck.
The iron ring, or staple was driven into the wood or stone, and to it was fastened the chain that held the person.
It was precisely by recognizing these rings fastened on the inside, that they confirmed an old building in Kentucky had been a slave prison.
The captive was not chained to themselves.
They were chained to the place itself.
Number 23.
The auction block is a stone, and just looking at it, it seems like nothing much.
But it was on top of it that a human being was forced to climb to be sold.
The person stood there exposed higher than the circle of people around them so that buyers could examine them better.
While the auctioneer called the price, parents were separated from children up there.
The same block also served to hire people out for the year, handed over to whoever made the highest bid, like livestock at a fair.
In Fredericksburg, Virginia, one of these blocks sat for decades on a street corner.
The last recorded sale on it was in 1862.
The stone weighs nearly 900 lb.
In 2020, after much fighting in the city, the block was removed from the sidewalk and taken to the local museum.
There are old photos, postcards from the 1920s, showing a formerly enslaved man named Albert Crutchfield standing beside the same stone where people like him had been sold.
Another block from Hagerstown is now at the Great African-American History Museum in Washington.
It has a plaque stating that two heavyweight names in American politics, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, gave speeches from on top of it in 1830.
The same platform from which a man gave a speech was the platform where on any other day a child was auctioned off.
The stone has nothing special about it.
The monstrous part is what they did with it.
Number 24.
The stocks are one of the oldest punishment devices in existence.
a heavy wooden frame with holes that locks the person’s ankles and keeps them stuck in the same spot for hours or days on end.
It was used in both Brazil and the United States to punish everyday infractions.
Some owners came to prefer the stocks over the whip, fearing the lash would injure too much a body they treated as property.
An account given to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 shows how far this went.
A master told, as if it were cleverness, that he had grown tired of whipping, and instead began locking the enslaved man in a seated position with his hands tied above the head and his feet locked in the stocks, unable to move at all.
He left the man like that through the night.
In the early morning hours, they were awakened by the groaning.
They found the captive covered in cold sweat, nearly dead.
He would not have lasted another hour.
Number 25.
The gargallera was an iron collar fastened to the neck of an enslaved person in Brazil.
It had a cast iron body with arcs joined by elongated links.
It was placed on anyone who had committed some infraction and functioned as a public mark of punishment.
Walking with that iron on the neck in full view of everyone immediately showed that the person was being punished.
The shame was as much a part of the punishment as the weight and the discomfort of the metal on the body.
The body of the piece was cast iron with arcs joined by rounded links and it closed around the neck without the person being able to remove it alone.
The historical museum of Campos in Rio de Janeiro keep specimens of these irons used to brutalize enslaved people.
Collars, chains, handcuffs, and padlocks.
Hanging a collar on someone is something you do with an animal.
That was the point.
The gargalera treated the person as a creature that needs a collar so it will not run.
Number 26.
Not every restraint instrument was made of iron.
In captures within Africa, wooden yolks were widely used.
It was a pole of hardwood about 6 and 1/2 ft long and nearly 15 lb with a forked end that clamped the neck of the person secured by an iron bar.
The other end was tied to another yolk or to the person behind.
This way the captives were linked and aligned one behind the other on the long march on foot to the coast.
Days and days through dense forest.
The choice of wood over chain was pure economy.
A wooden yoke cost almost nothing compared to iron and it did the job.
With the captives locked in a long line, few guards could control many people crossing the forest.
Often they tied family members to the same yoke because a man would hardly flee, leaving his wife or child locked behind him.
Affection became one more chain and the hardest of all to break.
Number 27.
In 1807, a London press printed a book that on the outside looked like any Bible.
On the inside, it was a tool of control.
It was made to catechize the enslaved people of the British colonies in the Caribbean, probably by a missionary society created for that purpose.
But someone cut the entire Bible before having it printed, leaving only what served the master’s interests.
It became known as the slave Bible, and what they removed from it tells the whole story.
The cutting was surgical.
A regular Bible has 1,189 chapters, and this one had only 282.
Nearly 90% of the Old Testament disappeared along with half of the New.
They cut Exodus with Moses demanding from the Pharaoh the liberation of the enslaved people.
They cut all the Psalms and the entire book of Revelation.
What remained was precisely what commanded obedience.
Servants, obey your masters.
Today, only three copies of that first edition survive in the world.
Proof that they already edited the word of God to keep people enslaved.
Number 28.
The veramundo appears in the lists of iron instruments used to punish and restrain enslaved people in Brazil alongside the stocks, the labambo, the handcuffs, and the shackles.
It was a restraint iron designed to force the body into immobility.
Even classified as a capture instrument, in practice, it became torture.
Keeping someone restrained and immobile by force for hours on end is a torment in itself without needing anything more.
The curious name hides a very simple reality.
These irons turned the body into a locked package, unable to react, protect itself, or rest.
The torment came precisely from the forced immobility combined with the weight of the metal.
Restraint instruments and torture instruments were nearly the same thing in Brazilian slavery because binding the body in an unnatural way without any relief already caused enough pain to serve as punishment on its own.
Number 29.
The libomba was an iron chain fastened to the neck used to immobilize the head of the enslaved person.
Along with the gargalera and the golha, it was part of the group of irons designed to restrain precisely that part of the body.
By restraining the neck, they controlled the movement of the entire person.
The chain could link one captive to another or fasten them to a fixed point, and the constant weight on the neck turned any simple task into a doubled effort.
Number 30.
The ball and chain is perhaps the most recognizable image of imprisonment that exists.
And in slavery, it also had its place.
A heavy iron ball was attached by a chain to the person’s ankle.
It did not lock anyone in a cell, but it made escape nearly impossible.
To take a step, you had to drag the weight along.
Whoever wore the device continued working, only now with the iron hanging the entire time, reminding them that running was no longer an option.
Number 31.
Aboard slave ships, the most widely used iron was the bilbo, an old type of leg shackle.
It was an iron bar with rings that locked the ankles, usually joining two captives by the same piece.
Shackled like this in the hold, the Africans could not fight back or properly stand up.
From the wreck of the Henrietta Marie came many of these bilos, now the largest known collection of irons from a ship of the early slave trade.
Number 32.
The wrist manicles locked the captives hands closed by a small bolt with a padlock.
They appear in the old plates showing the instruments of the middle passage alongside the leg shackles and the thumb screws.
With the hands bound, the person could not defend themselves, could not work against the owner’s will, could not fight back.
It was the most basic control of all, applied at the moment of capture and maintained throughout the crossing.
Number 33.
The barrac was the warehouse where captured Africans were held while awaiting the ship that would take them to the other side of the ocean.
They were enclosed structures near the boarding ports where many people were crammed into little space, sometimes for weeks.
Calibar in Nigeria was one of those major departure points.
It is estimated that about 200,000 people were sold into slavery from there over the course of two centuries.
Today, a museum operates inside a former barracale complex had a barractory jail along with a kitchen and a morg.
The barrac was the anti-chamber of the trade, the last stop on solid ground before the ship’s hold.
And for many people, the last patch of their homeland’s soil.
Number 34.
Not every object of the trade was made to injure directly.
Some served only to keep the cargo alive until the sail.
And that alone says a lot about how those people were seen.
The copper cauldron from the Henrietta Marie was an enormous pot where the food served to the Africans in the hold was cooked.
The rule was simple and cruel.
Feed as many people as possible at the lowest cost in the cheapest way possible throughout the entire Atlantic crossing.
Nothing beyond that.
The cauldron sums up the cold logic of the business.
The imprisoned African was not seen as a person who needs to eat, but as merchandise that needs to arrive intact to turn a profit.
Bad food, little of it in a collective pot, just enough to not die before the time came.
It was on the same ship that the more than 80 shackles and the Bilbo later recovered were found.
The cauldron and the irons tell the same story.
Keep alive and keep restrained.
Alive only to be sold at the end of the voyage.
Number 35.
The slave tag was a small metal plate that certain captives were required to wear hanging from their person.
In Charleston, when an enslaved person was hired out to work away from the owner’s property, they had to carry this plate, which functioned as a tax paid to the city and as a public marker.
The tag showed that the person had permission to be working there.
One of them, made of copper, is engraved with the number 248 and the word mechanic.
Number 36.
Even clothing was a tool of control.
The enslaved were dressed in a coarse and cheap fabric known in the United States as negro cloth made of tough and very rough fiber.
Those who survived slavery remember the feeling of wearing it against the skin as needles pricking constantly.
It was not clothing meant to give comfort to anyone.
It was clothing meant to last, cost little, and mark at a distance who was a slave and who was not.
The clothing also accused.
A South Carolina law from 1735 went so far as to dictate that enslaved people could only wear the cheapest and roughest fabrics available and prohibited anything better.
On plantations like George Washington’s, they bought this fabric by the yard and the enslaved seamstresses had to meet a quota of garments per week under threat of punishment.
The rough cloth on the body was the last reminder from dawn to dusk that the person did not own even their own skin.
Number 37.
Before being sold, the enslaved person was held prisoner.
For this purpose, there were slave pens, buildings that functioned as private jails of the human trade.
One of them survived intact, a wooden structure from 1830 in Kentucky that belonged to a trafficker named John Anderson.
He kept captives there before taking them to the Mississippi market.
It is the only known rural slave jail that has survived to the present day.
The building was nearly lost.
For decades, it sat hidden, used as the frame of a tobacco barn on a farm.
In 1999, the property owner noticed the iron rings fastened on the inside and the stories the old-timers told.
They alerted a museum.
The structure was carefully dismantled and reassembled in 2004 inside the center dedicated to the Underground Railroad in Cincinnati.
The rings where people were chained are still there fixed to the old wood.
Pens like these existed in many cities.
In Alexandria, Virginia, the firm Franklin and Armfield maintained one of the largest in the country at number 1315 Duke Street.
Thousands of people passed through there on their way to the Deep South.
A photograph from the era held at the Library of Congress shows the facade with a Union soldier at the door and carries the inscription that the building had several cells and a whipping post.
Jail, warehouse, and torture at the same address.
