Note for scholars: the following may appear simplistic, relying on generalities and leaving out exceptions. However, it is not written with the scholar in mind so much as the lay reader with a high school or college education. Instead of extensive footnotes, reference is made within the text to author and title of a particularly relevant work for further reading.
It is impossible to give a full picture of American history and modern race relations without discussing slavery. Slavery allowed one group of people—the slave-owners—to control completely the lives of another group, their slaves. There were virtually no limits placed on the power of the slave-owner and the men they hired to enforce inhumane labor practices.
Indeed, the slave in America was barely considered a human being as we use the term today. The slaves were not citizens, entitled to vote, or in any sense considered equal to whites. They were not paid but forced to engage in strenuous manual labor through the threat of force and punishment.
Under slavery, there could be no talk of slaves having rights like other people born free. What was the slave, then? The slave was considered property as one might think of animals or household furnishings. Slaves are living beings, of course, but so are horses, cows, oxen, and mules. Unlike animals, the slave had a mind but the racism that tried to justify slavery still insisted that slaves were somehow vastly inferior to whites.
Though numerous examples of “the exceptional Negro” existed, the vast majority of slaves were seen as an inferior category of human being at best and barely above the animals at worst. In any event, the slave-owner had the right to buy and sell slaves—his “property”—whenever the need arose.
Slaves typically were not allowed to marry freely (of their own volition) and they had no guaranteed rights even if they married willingly. While slave marriages included ceremonies (such as jumping the broomstick), this was not a legally-binding arrangement the slave-owner had to acknowledge. Husband and wife could be separated if the owner wished it; he could sell one and keep the other.
The degree to which slave-owners tried to avoid breaking up slave families varied considerably across the south; there were a few slave owners who promised never to sell family members. However, even these men could not control a decline in their economic condition due to gambling, alcoholism, a year of bad crops, and the like. If it became necessary to sell slaves because of deep debt, they could do so.
Slave mothers and fathers, no matter how loving, were virtually helpless in trying to keep their children; they depended on the good will of their master. If they angered their masters or if financial considerations warranted it, the owner could sell their children or move them off to a different plantation. For that matter, as children got old enough to work in the fields, their parents would be unable to protect them if the slave-owner ordered one of them whipped–or any other family member for that matter, be it husband, wife, parent, grandparent, uncle, or aunt. (Frederick Douglass describes in graphic detail the whipping of his aunt in his autobiography.)
THE SLAVE HAD NO RIGHTS
Slaves had no right to go to court to bring a complaint or fight an injustice. They were not allowed to testify against a white person. Only the slave-owner could bring action against another white person accused of hurting one of his slaves; the slave-owner could actually press charges and sue to recover money for damages. In the north, with the help of white friends, a slave occasionally could sue and win a court case (see the life story of Elizabeth Freeman and Sojourner Truth’s recovery of her son Peter.)
Moreover, the southern states made it against the law for slaves to learn how to read and write. Indeed, it was even against the law—a crime—for any white person to teach a slave to read! When we learn of slavery, most people focus on two chief aspects of it: its pernicious racism and its physical brutality, and with good reason.
However, slavery was first and foremost a system of forced labor underpinning the South’s agricultural economy. Slavery is the most wretched form of labor exploitation: it is about selling a product (cotton, tobacco, sugar, indigo, rice) produced with unpaid labor to increase the slave owner’s profit.
The stunting of the minds of slaves was no doubt utterly devastating–to say nothing of the terrible harm it does to society in general. Yet one should never forget that the root cause of slavery is to be found in the insatiable greed of slave-traders and plantation owners.
Racism as a full-blown ideology came later, developed more slowly over time to justify the trade in human cargo that proved so profitable: first to ship owners and ship captains and next to the plantation owner or “the master”. Northern merchants benefited as well.
It was said that in a few years time the captain of a slave ship would become wealthy enough to retire comfortably. This claim is supported by a street near the port of Liverpool with a row of mansions, built by hard-hearted men who made their fortunes in just this way: trafficking in human cargo—“dealers in human flesh” as the phrase attests.
Just as the slaves had no legal rights, they received no pay for their labor–with some exceptions, at least for those with a skill who could be hired out. A few slaves with such special skills (carpentry, brick-laying, ship-caulking, etc.) could make extra money for the master by being hired out as a laborer.
The master could claim all of this money if he so chose but sometimes slaves were allowed to keep part of this money; a few were even allowed to hire themselves out on Sunday and this money would belong to them with the slave-owner’s permission. It may sound strange to our ears to hear of instances of where a slave saved money in order to buy himself, but this is usually the context in which such stories occur: rare but not impossible.
A slave who had mastered a craft and was hired out to others could start saving money which one day might go toward purchasing his own freedom—assuming the master was willing to sell. Remarkably, a few stories do exist of slaves who successfully saved up their purchase price and bought their freedom. To say this was a rare exception to the norm is to engage in competitive-style understatement.
SLAVE LABOR IN THE OLD SOUTH
The most common form of labor involved long hours under a hot Southern sun during the summer months, planting, hoeing, weeding, and picking cotton or harvesting corn, tobacco, indigo and rice, among other forms of agricultural labor. Some slaves also worked in factories or mines, although their stories generally have received far less notice than those who worked in the fields. Those who worked in the master’s household had a different set of duties as well.
Such field work was nearly year-round, six days a week (excluding Sunday)–with a break at Christmas in which slaves were allowed to eat, drink, and make merry. The workday usually began in the early hours of the morning with slaves expected to get up before the sun had risen; hard physical labor often continued until sundown or later. One ex-slave talked of an owner who kept his slaves working almost to midnight during the harvest season! After a few hours sleep, slaves were required the next morning to be in the fields before the sun rose. If they failed to get up they could be punished, with whipping the most common form of punishment.
There were many infractions for which slaves could be punished, from relatively minor incidents such as damaging the cotton plant or breaking a tool, to the more serious offenses of insubordination, fighting, running away, or striking a white person. The slave could be imprisoned, branded, maimed, whipped, or even killed for such disobedience and resistance!
There was another punishment some dreaded even more; they could be sold even if it meant breaking up their family. They could be sold “down river” to the Deep South—where conditions of every kind were the worst of all. Lastly, they could be sold to men who had earned a reputation as “slave breakers”, noted for their cruelty and merciless whippings until they “broke” the spirit of the defiant slave. (See Douglass, Narrative of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass).
SHELTER
Slaves often lived in small huts or cabins with dirt floors for shelter. These buildings often began to deteriorate after a few years and had to be rebuilt or attended to periodically—stuffing straw into cracks to keep out the rain and wind. Otherwise, the icy wind and snow came through the chinks in the wall during winter.
A small hearth for cooking might be built into one wall (often a double-hearth when two cabins adjoined one another; one wall had a hearth on each side). They had very little to wear in the way of clothing; most went barefoot and young children might be naked. A discarded burlap sack used for transporting goods could be used as a dress or shirt by making holes for the arms and head. Slaves owned very few clothes and what they did possess was often in terrible condition, little better than rags.
The movies that show slaves comfortably dressed may speak to the movie-maker’s sense of decency and personal belief how people should be clothed, but the reality was seldom as reassuring as the movies make it seem. Perhaps we cannot yet come to terms with how awful the actual conditions were and so prefer to sanitize our images for ease of conscience. The reality was a thousand times worse than what is typically portrayed on the screen.
With poor food, shelter, and clothing, it comes as no surprise that slaves got sick. Medical attention was not widely available; slaves had to rely on their own knowledge of herbs and plants, knowledge brought from Africa or learned from Native American practices. In some few instances a worried slave-owner might bring a doctor for an especially valuable slave, perhaps a favorite house servant, but these stories tend to be the exception and not the common practice of slavery. (See U.B. Phillips, American Slavery).
Food was given out at different intervals—sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly–in quantities meant to last until the next distribution but often proved inadequate nourishment. Food had little flavor or variety although Black women became ingenious at cooking meals from seemingly nothing. Parched corn, salt, and flour were staples and part of a typical allotment; sometimes a little salt pork or dried fish was included.
Here we are talking of the average kinds of food used to sustain the slaves. In the narratives of ex-slaves, when asked about food, they often listed a wide variety of foods. Chances are, however, they are remembering those rare feasts that remained most vivid in their memories. When people are underfed and constantly hungry, a special occasion where they can eat all they want will stand out in their memories for a long time.
Solomon Northup describes in detail such a feast at Christmas during his twelve years in slavery, but he was not describing what the slaves had for food the rest of the year. According to Solomon, the daughter of the slave-owner apparently did not share her father’s views about the necessity of slavery and so she created a magnificent Christmas feast for the slaves (see Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave).
If slaves were caught stealing food, they could be severely punished. Conditions varied from place to place: cold salt pork was sometimes eaten in the fields during the day during a short lunch break. During different seasons of the year, the slaves could sometimes get food in other ways: by gathering wild berries, nuts, edible roots, plants, and herbs, learned in part from Native Americans. Where allowed they could set traps for fish and small game; they might also have small garden plots in which to grow additional food.
Overall the diet was usually poor and, at best, inadequate to meet the needs of people forced to work so hard–at worst, the amount of food given out was barely enough to keep slaves alive. This may sound counter-intuitive to us today—if their owners wanted to get maximum work out of their slaves they should at least feed them enough to make that possible but such was not the case. The slave-owner kept costs down by skimping on what he provided to his slaves.
Frederick Douglass said in his autobiography that food was more important than the cruelty or kindness of the master; that when slaves compared masters they had known, the slave owners who gave them enough to eat could be considered a good master–and that this concerned them more than the frequency or kind of punishment inflicted. Only people who have known intense hunger could put food ahead of physical punishment as a better measure for judging the up or down character of the “massa”.
On certain holidays—most notably Christmas—the slaves did better and sometimes got to feast or “pig out” as we say today. Yet they suffered great want and deprivation throughout the year and had to endure terrible living and working conditions. Slaves often went barefoot, even in winter. Douglass talks of the skin on the bottom of his feet cracking from the severe cold during the winter months, with crevices so deep one could lay a pen inside one of the cracks!
He also came to believe that the feasting at Christmas was actually an artful trap as opposed to an act of kindness. He came to see the day as a form of psychological control—the slaves, allowed to eat and drink as much as they wished, often engaged in excesses; many would get drunk as they tried to celebrate the holiday and forget their wretched condition at the same time. When the feasting and drinking was over, however, Douglass felt the slaves were more wretched than ever, more beaten down, with less hope and less spirit—that they turned sunken eyes and lowly spirits back toward another year of unrequited labor.
In short, physically and psychologically, they sunk even farther and remained at the mercy of their owners. In Frederick Douglass, slave-owners found a man who would not be tricked in such a manner and whose stubborn spirit would never submit to slavery. In due course, he makes good his escape to the north and freedom. (See Douglass, Narrative of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass).
ABUSE
Besides their lack of legal rights and their terrible living and working conditions, slaves also had to suffer a great deal of verbal and physical abuse. Hatred of Black people became an obsession with many whites who hurled the most vicious insults at them. Racists argued that Negroes (Blacks) were an inferior race with little or no capacity for learning and that even adults could only reach the emotional or intellectual capacity of a ten or twelve year old child. In short, they were only suited to be slaves and needed to be ordered about by their masters. Closely tied to this view was the idea that the Bible had ordained that Blacks be slaves and that slavery was a way to civilize and perhaps Christianize this “inferior” race of people.
Every kind of vulgarity, obscenity and epithet imaginable dripped from the lips of white racists whose racism often reached a pathological condition—a kind of racial psychosis in which they were unable to see Black people as human beings with capabilities similar to their own and that of any other race. For the most extreme racists, Blacks were to be cursed and damned every single day and the very thought of a Black person ever being considered “equal” to a white person was unimaginable.
The infamous “n” epithet was a commonplace of everyday speech; indeed there was virtually no other word used among racists when referring to Black people. Occasionally we see the word “colored” or “black” (“that black devil!”) used but the “n” word predominated everywhere and went unchallenged. Even Black slaves themselves used the term—it was that common a part of everyday language. The terms Negro, African-American, and Black (not as an insult) remained far in the future.
In the meantime, the Southern economy (and the rich slave-owner’s style of life) became ever more dependent on Black labor as the foundation for all agricultural production and profits. To free the slave would have meant an overturning of the planter class and an attack upon racist ideas that had begun to take deep root over the years.
To insult, degrade, dehumanize, and humiliate the slave was a normal part of the process of propagating racist lies in order to keep this most extreme form of labor exploitation in place, all so the planter class could live in comfort and luxury. Can you imagine being called every filthy racist insult day after day? The psychological harm must have been tremendous.
All human beings need a sense of self-worth and some way to validate their intellectual abilities and emotional feelings. Imagine growing up with little or none of that save what your fellow slaves could provide—imagine not being allowed to use your mind to develop your potential as a human being?
Racism was an evil cancer that turned in on itself so that the prejudices of whites frequently worsened, becoming even more vicious and violent over time in both expression and action. Unfortunately, the slave-owners were too blind, stubborn, and greedy to stop their exploitation. Racists, believing their own lies, entered a descending spiral where the most violent emotions and brutal actions dominated their lives when it came to dealing with slaves.
In truth, in dehumanizing Black people they were also dehumanizing themselves; like blind men, they could not see the truth of their destructive fury.
This mistreatment Black people had to endure in silence. To argue or get angry enough to strike a blow could mean the most terrible consequences: jail, a beating, a maiming, a branding, even death. This pernicious racism had no checks to it, nothing to slow it down or moderate its enveloping psychosis. To the contrary, racism only spawned more racism in an ever downward spiral where basic notions of decency and kindness were virtually obliterated from the lives of white slave-owners, at least insofar when it came to dealing with their Black slaves. No matter how awful, these racist insults usually had to be suffered in silence.
Black slaves were not expected to look a white person in the eye; they were to keep their eyes pointed downward towards the ground. Answers were expected to be “yes massa” and “no massa”. Slaves were not expected to speak freely or give voice to their own opinions unless questioned. The slave’s opportunity to speak freely was rigidly circumscribed and they were never expected to argue or disagree.
In the slave quarters at night they could express themselves but in the presence of owners, overseers, white family members and visitors, they always had to remember “their place” at the bottom of the pecking order. They had to keep silent or say as little as possible; they were expected to appear docile, meek, and submissive. Anything else would lead to trouble such as physical punishment or being sold away from their family to an even worse master.
Physically, too, the life of the slave, man, woman, or child–was in the hands of the plantation owners and their hired men. There was an overseer who was in charge of disciplining the slaves while they worked; he rode up and down the fields on horseback, typically with a whip in hand. He could deliver a lash at any time for almost any reason—and sometimes he needed no reason. Lashes from cat-o-nine tails and bullwhips, made from cowhide, could open up a slave’s back and draw blood. The record of slavery is chock full of bloody episodes, especially whippings. It is impossible to read any narrative of any ex-slave who escaped to freedom without coming across such descriptions of physical chastisement. Douglass writes:
“I have had two masters. My first master’s name was Anthony . . . . He owned two or three farms, and about thirty slaves. His farms and slaves were under the care of an overseer. The overseer’s name was Plummer. Mr. Plummer was a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster. He always went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I have known him to cut and slash the women’s heads so horribly, that even master would be enraged at his cruelty, and would threaten to whip him if he did not mind himself.”[i]
Thus Douglass’ brief picture of the overseer; as to the master himself, he writes:
“Master, however, was not a human slaveholder. It required extraordinary barbarity on the part of an overseer to affect him. He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.”[ii]
Overseers, also called drivers, varied in temperament and character but their job was to use whatever force necessary to make the slaves work. The overseer tried to get as much work out of them as possible, and he enforced obedience through both the threat and actual use of force. Frederick Douglass and other ex-slaves often described how the cruelest overseers had a penchant for liquor and when drunk became brutally violent.
PUNISHMENT: WHIPPINGS AND OTHER CRUELTIES
The threat of punishment hung over the slaves’ lives in the air like a deadly pestilence spreading its poisonous germs everywhere. There was virtually no relief from these long days and long years of forced labor; many thousands of Black men and women would be born into slavery and die in bondage as well.
This was an institution that lasted for many generations, kept in place by an eager willingness to resort to these horrific punishments of every kind; the whipping of a disobedient or rebellious slave became synonymous with slave punishment but there were many other kinds of brutal punishments employed as well. A deliberate maiming of a slave is so repugnant to our modern sensibilities that it is frequently skipped over, but the punishment did exist. In Roots: The Saga of an American Family (based on Alex Haley’s 1976 book) Kunta Kinte has part of his foot chopped off to prevent him from running away.
The “disobedient” slave could be given a whipping at any time. For a major whipping, the overseer would order the other slaves to line up and watch. The slave’s clothing was removed to expose the bare skin. His hands were tied together so he could not resist or run away. He (or she) was taken to the whipping area and tied into place.
Each lash of the whip would cut into the slave’s back and would draw blood as it sliced into the skin of the slave’s back. The number of lashes was commonly measured by the dozen. Even the slightest infraction of plantation rules—like breaking a branch on the cotton plant while pulling off its cotton bolls—could result in a dozen lashes. Usually, a slave was punished with at least several dozen lashes of the whip. The number of lashes depended on a number of factors and could go quite high.
Slaves were sometimes whipped until they lost consciousness, their backs a bloody mess. Some received dozens of lashes; some were whipped to death; some survived but were broken in both health and spirit. Sometimes no one kept count; the slave was whipped without let-up for as long as the whip-yielding overseer could stand.
There are descriptions of slaves being whipped until the whip-holding arm grew tired, that being the only reason for stopping (sometimes more than one man administered the whipping, so that if the first man grew tired another could continue). Even whippings involving hundreds of lashes are known to have occurred. Solomon Northup gives the details of a terrible whipping given to a young slave woman named Patsey in his book Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup (see pp. 366-69). She survives but is broken in spirit.
These firsthand accounts are difficult to read as they cause within the reader a state of emotional disturbance that is not normally experienced in literature and has no easy or quick remedy. Anger and outrage will come boiling to the surface, mixed with dismay and shock. It doesn’t seem possible that such terrible events could have occurred but these are eyewitness accounts being penned by ex-slaves who escaped to freedom and lived to tell the tale.
There is no need to doubt the truthfulness of what they are describing. There are some few dozens of these narratives available and all of them include similar stories of the most brutal treatment imaginable, either to themselves or to others. Such stories can freeze one’s blood and leave one emotionally benumbed–or raise one’s blood to the boiling point, every fiber of one’s being crying out against such injustice in righteous indignation.
However the reader reacts, whether with numbness or anger or a combination of the two, the cold hard truth remains: whippings were a common part of the lives of slaves and such punishment was gruesome and bloody in the extreme. The poison of racism corrupted the soul of the slave-owners as well as the white men they hired charged with enforcing the “rules” of slavery–and some turned into bitter, angry, brutal, vindictive, murderous monsters.
Whippings of Black slaves are part of the long history of slavery in America—a truth which, however much we might wish it to be otherwise, cannot be buried in neglect or falsehood and which simply will not and cannot go away. It is part of our nation’s story—and part of our national consciousness. When we discuss modern race relations today, we would do well to develop a greater understanding of slavery before we offer our opinions as to the way forward.
[i] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 15. First published in 1845.
[ii] Ibid., pp. 15-16.
