Real history Shouldn’t be a mystery to anyone.
DID YOU KNOW?
The
ordinary mode of punishing the enslaved is both cruel and barbarous.
The masters seldom, if ever, try to govern their slaves by moral
influence but by whipping, kicking, beating, starving, branding,
cat-hauling, loading with irons, imprisoning, or by some other cruel
mode of torturing. They often boast of having invented some new mode of
torture, by which they have “tamed the rascals.” What is called a
moderate flogging in the south is horribly cruel.
The
master's whip for the smallest offenses, such as not performing their
tasks, being caught by the guard or patrol by night, or for taking
anything from the master’s yard without leave. For these, and the like
crimes, the slaves are whipped thirty-nine lashes, and sometimes seventy
or a hundred, on the bare back. One slave, who was under my care, was
whipped, I think one hundred lashes, for getting a small handful of wood
from his master’s yard without leaving. I heard an overseer boasting to
this same master that he gave one of the boys seventy lashes, for not
doing a job of work just as he thought it ought to be done. The owner of
the slave appeared to be pleased that the overseer had been so
faithful. The apology they make for whipping so cruelly is, that it is
to frighten the rest of the gang. The masters say, that what we call an
ordinary flogging will not subdue the slaves; hence the cruelest and
barbarous scourgings ever witnessed by man are daily and hourly
inflicted upon the naked bodies of these miserable bondmen; not by
masters and negro-drivers only, but by the constables in the common
markets and jailors in their yards.

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