The overseer’s menacing scowl watched over all of
you: every movement, 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.
You could be branded with 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 punishments used on slaves of the antebellum.
Public humiliation 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 re-assert 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 and 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.
Slavery in the United States 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 early 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.
Branding 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 19th 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.
Two Americas, one original sin Following the American War of Independence
from 1775-1783, 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
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 two 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.
Violence and physical abuse 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 this 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 cowskin, 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.
The End of Slavery 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 succeed
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 repair 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 4-year conflict, yet during its course the Union would make
gains on the very issue the war was borne 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 13th Amendment would pass prohibiting
slavery in the United States of America.
The Penal Treadmill
A strange device that came into being in the 19th 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 a extensively wide, grand paddle wheel, yet workers were expected to climb the paddles
whilst holding onto a bar above.
The initial idea of the treadmill designed for English prisons was
to generate power for mills.
A ‘shift’ on a penal treadmill would last eight hours… that’s 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 went one
as potential punishment for runaway slaves.
Yet, toxically enough, the treadmill was seen as
a waste of human labor in slave owners eyes.
They didn’t want to waste their slaves energy on
punishment when it could be put into hard labor.
Slavery Legacy
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 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
citizenship for persons of color.
The Civil Rights movement of the ’60s would overturn Jim Crow
and bring voting rights for African Americans, yet many challenges remain 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 populous, politics, and culture,
a country built on the forced labor of slavery shows its heavy burden to this very day.
Families, pasts, and heritage dismantled Arguably the most profound of punishments
inflicted on enslaved persons was not even a direct action, but an afterthought and by-product
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 were their children – numerous accounts detail newborn babes 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 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’ll see you next time!
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
