SOURCE: “The Driver's Lash,” in Many Thousands Gone: The Ex-Slaves' Account of Their Bondage and Freedom, E. J. Brill, 1963, pp. 62-70.

[In the following excerpt, Nichols analyzes several first-hand accounts of the physical systems of control of slaves, particularly that of punishment.]

“No more driver's lash for me,
No more, no more,
No more driver's lash for me,
Many thousand gone.”

Holidays, gifts, opportunities to work for wages, religious training, the hope of freedom all served to make slaves more contented and controllable. But to a considerable extent the master depended on physical controls: the driver's or overseer's whip, the patrols and the law. To be sure the slaves were not without means of bringing their masters to terms either. They resisted, pretended illness, loafed, petitioned, ran off to the woods (on “strike”), mutilated themselves, or ran away forever. These are, however, aspects of slave behavior which will be discussed in a succeeding chapter. Unpaid labor had to be constantly supervised and forced to work. Nearly all the travellers in the South and especially Lyell and Olmsted noticed the laziness and inefficiency of slave labor. The driver's lash was, there fore, an indispensable aid to the system's functioning. It seemed to Olmsted that Northern agricultural labor worked harder than the slaves, but the latter he, noted, were

constantly and steadily driven up to their work, and the stupid, plodding, machine-like manner in which they labour, is painful to witness. This was especially the case with the hoe gangs … I repeatedly rode through the lines at a canter, with other horsemen, often coming upon them suddenly, without producing the smallest change or interruption in the dogged action of the labourers or causing one of them, so far as I could see, to lift an eye from the ground … I think it told a more painful story than any I had ever heard of the cruelty of slavery. It was emphasized by a tall and powerful negro who walked to and fro in the rear of the line, frequently cracking his whip, and calling out in the surliest manner, to one and another, ‘Shove your hoe, there! Shove your hoe.’¹

James Williams and Solomon Northup were drivers, and both report that when a driver failed to do his cruel work, he was himself flogged. For eight years Northup was a driver on a Louisiana plantation where (in consideration for his fellow victims) he learned to handle the whip with marvellous dexterity and precision, “throwing the lash within a hair's breadth of the back, the ear, the nose without, however, touching either of them.”² And when the overseer appeared he would lash vigorously, and “according to arrangement” the slaves would “squirm and screech as if in agony.” Such humaneness and fellow feeling were not very common, for the narrators often found themselves under cruel drivers as well as overseers. Any slave who did not do his task or failed to be properly submissive was flogged. Nor were these whippings in any way comparable to the gentle chastisement given to school boys. The instrument employed for the purpose, the “bull whip,” is described by John Brown:

First a stock is chosen of a convenient length, the butt end of which is loaded with lead, to give the whip force. The stock is then cleverly split to within a foot or so of the butt, into twelve strips. A piece of tanned leather divided into eight strips, is then drawn on the stock so that the split lengths can be plaited together. This is done very regularly, until the leather tapers down to quite a fine point, the whip being altogether about six feet long, and as limber and lithesome as a snake. The thong does not bruise but cuts; and those who are expert in the use of it, can do so with such dexterity, as to only raise the skin and draw blood or cut clean through to the bone. I have seen a board a quarter of an inch thick cut through it, at one blow … It is also employed to whip down savage bulls or unruly cattle. I have seen many a horse cut with it right through the hollow of the flank, and the animal brought quivering to the ground. The way of using it is to whirl it round until the thong acquires a certain forward power, and then to let the end of the thong fall across the back, … the arm being drawn back with a kind of sweep. But although it is so formidable an instrument, it is seldom employed on slaves in such a manner as to disable them …³

All the narrators report that they were whipped at some time during their enslavement, and many displayed their scarred and stripped backs to amazed audiences at abolitionist meetings. At times the victim was tied to a tree, bent over a barrel or staked to the ground and whipped. Other slave were strung up on cross beams with their toes barely touching the ground and whipped in that position. Twenty-five lashes were considered slight correction. A serious infraction of the law of the plantation—stealing, running away, talking back to a white man—might merit the offender as many as three hundred lashes. Both men and women were whipped—usually on the bare back. That the whipping of a recalcitrant Negro might properly subdue the rest, all the slaves were called to witness whippings. Having run away Henry Bibb was seized and chastised. The sound of the overseer's horn brought all the slaves to witness his punishment. His clothing was stripped off and he was compelled to lie down on the ground with his face to the earth. Four stakes were driven in the ground, to which his hands and feet were tied. Then the overseer stood over him with the lash and struck him repeatedly as his master looked on. Fifty lashes were laid on without stopping. He was then lectured about going to prayer meeting without permission and for running away to escape flogging. Cut and bleeding, the victim's wounds were then washed in salt brine to prevent the putrefaction of the flesh.⁴ Runaways were also confined in stocks, collared or chained.

Usually on these isolated plantations the overseer was judge, jury, prosecutor and executioner, and he often wielded his power like a medieval monarch. No slave could testify against any white person anywhere in the South so that no brutal act of an overseer could be brought before the courts unless it had been witnessed by a white person. Occasionally a slave might run off and appeal to his master. Other Negroes resisted and sometimes whipped the overseer. But overseers were armed and did not hesitate to kill a slave who was so bold, for the law supported his right to kill a Negro who struck a white man. One overseer told Olmsted, “I wouldn't mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog.”⁵ A Negro whom the overseer could not easily handle could be subdued by patrols, who committed him to jail and whipped him soundly. The ex-slaves were very much aware of the patrols, who often trounced a slave found off the plantation without a pass. John Thompson and Austin Steward tell of lively clashes with patrols. Masters in towns or cities might for a small fee have their naughty slaves whipped at the local jail. William Wells Brown was sent to jail with a note and a dollar to be whipped but cleverly sent another Negro in his place.

The following letter written in 1847 by Charles Manigault to his overseer on a Georgia plantation suggests the stealth and subtle reassurance by which he hoped to control a recalcitrant Negro:

With regard to Jacob (whom you say is the only disorderly one) you had best think carefully respecting him, and always keep in mind the important old plantation maxim—viz: ‘never to threaten a negro’ or he will run. But with such a one whenever things get too bad, you should take a certain opportunity, when, for instance, he is with the driver in the provision room, and you at the door, with a string in your pocket—then pull it out and order him tied—for if in such a case a negro succeeds in dodging or running from you, the annoyance is great—but having got him if you wish to make an example of him, take him down to the Savannah jail and give him prison discipline and by all means solitary confinement for 3 weeks, when he will be glad to get home again—but previous to his coming out, let them jog his memory again, mind then and tell him that you and he are quits—that you will never dwell on old quarrels with him—that he now has a clear track before him, and all depends on himself, for he now sees how easy it is to fix a ‘bad disposed nigger.’ Then give my compliments to him and tell him that you wrote me of his conduct, and I say if he don't change for the better I'll sell him to a slave trader who will send him to New Orleans, where I have already sent several of the gang for their misconduct, or their running away for no cause.⁶

All these punishments—whipping, chaining, selling, shooting—were legal and customary, but laws designed to protect the property of owners and court cases show that the mutilation, burning, smothering and torture alleged by the ex-slaves were not unknown. Many of the narratives contain accounts of such outrages. Moses Roper tells of a slaveholder who put his ill-behaved chattels into a barrel into which nails had been driven and rolled them down a steep hill. Thompson alleges that a neighboring slaveholder once put a slave girl's head under the fence and sat on the fence. Harriet Jacobs claims that a runaway slave was brought back and put between the screws of the cotton gin and crushed to death, while another, a woman, was shot through the head. Ben Simpson tells of his Georgia master who branded his slaves and never took off their chains. “When we work, we drug them chains with us. At night he lock us to a tree to keep us from running off.” This same owner took a coffle to Texas and shot a female slave who, exhausted, with raw feet and swollen legs, refused to go on.⁷ John Brown was, he says, the guinea pig for a sadistic doctor. Experimenting with the effects of sun and heat stroke, the doctor put Brown into a hot pit and kept him there until he fainted several times; then he tried bleeding the slave, gouging and blistering him to see how deep his black skin went.⁸ Olmsted records the burning of a Negro.

Such charges as these may be dismissed as incredible, but surely court cases detailing similar cruelties are reliable. In 1811 a prisoner was indicted for the “malicious stabbing of a slave” in Virginia.⁹ In 1827 a master was indicted for “maliciously and inhumanly beating a slave almost to death.” The court, however, decided it had no jurisdiction and presumably the defendant was freed although the court “deplored that an offense so odious and revolting as this, should exist to the reproach of humanity.”¹⁰ In the case of Souther vs. the Commonwealth (October, 1850) the deposition charged that Souther

after the tying, whipping, cobbing, striking, stamping, wounding, bruising, lacerating, burning, washing and torturing [the slave] as aforesaid, the prisoner untied the deceased from the tree in such a way as to throw him with violence to the ground; and he then and there did knock, kick, stamp … the deceased on the head, temples and various parts of the body. That the prisoner then had the deceased carried into a shed-room of his house, and there he compelled one of his slaves, in his presence, to confine the deceased's feet in the stocks—and to tie a rope about the neck of the deceased and fasten it to a bedpost in the room, thereby strangling, choking, and suffocating the deceased—and he again compelled his two slaves to apply fire to the body of the deceased—and the count charged that from these various modes of punishment and torture the slave Sam then and there died.¹¹

In this case the court convicted the master of second degree murder and sentenced him to five years in the penitentiary.

Those who are familiar with lynching in the South know that extralegal punishment upon troublesome Negroes is part of the Southern backwoods tradition.

The ante bellum South lived in constant fear of servile rebellion especially after the Turner insurrection of 1831. The Negroes resisted individually and collectively attempts made to punish them. John Thompson, Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup whipped their overseers. Northup was himself involved in two near-rebellions. The narratives are full of accounts of servile resistance. The patrols and little armies of the slave states were, therefore, everywhere in evidence and apparently needed to protect the slave system. In many states every white man was expected to do patrol duty or furnish a substitute. When an insurrection was feared these men went into action indiscriminately whipping, beating, lynching and terrifying Negroes. About the time of Nat Turner's uprising Harriet Jacobs witnessed proceedings of this kind.

Every day for a fortnight, if I looked out, I saw horsemen with some poor panting negro tied to their saddles, and compelled by the lash to keep up with their speed, till they arrived at the jail yard. Those who had been whipped too unmercifully to walk were washed with brine, tossed into a cart and carried to jail.¹²

According to Henry “Box” Brown after Nat Turner's insurrection, great numbers of slaves were loaded with irons; some were “half hung”—that is, suspended from some tree with a rope about their necks, adjusted so as not quite to strangle them—and then pelted by men and boys with rotten eggs.¹³ The murdering and maiming of Negroes were so long continued after the uprisings of Vesey in 1822 and of Turner in 1831 that the masters themselves implored the states to put a stop to this indiscriminate slaughter.

The fear of servile rebellion prompted the slave states to make more and more stringent laws in regard to the Negro. Slaves were defined by the laws as “chattels personal” to be disposed of at their master's pleasure, except that for cruel and unusual punishments a master was liable to prosecution under the law. But the laws established the supremacy of the white group as thoroughly as possible. Should a slave refuse

to submit to and undergo the examination of any white person, it is lawful for such white person to pursue, apprehend, and moderately correct such slave, and if such slave shall assault and strike such white person, such slave may be lawfully killed.¹⁴

The slave had, of course, no political or civil rights. He could not testify in court except against another slave, nor could he hold property, contract marriage, (or enter into any other contract) or assemble with other slaves where no white person was present. There were laws restraining persons from teaching him to read or write. In short, the law provided that “the slave lives for his master's service. His time, his labor, his comforts are all at his master's disposal.”¹⁵

The legislation of the Southern States with regard to slaves [wrote de Tocqueville] presents at the present day such unparalleled atrocities as suffice to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted, and to betray the desperate position of the community in which that legislation has been promulgated … In antiquity precautions were taken to prevent the slave from breaking his chains; at the present day measures are adopted to deprive him even of the desire for freedom … But the Americans of the South who do not admit that the Negroes can ever be commingled with themselves, have forbidden them under severe penalties to be taught to read or write; and as they will not raise them to their own level, they sink them as nearly as possible to that of the brutes.¹⁶

Judicial decisions in regard to the Negro sustained this general concept that he was merely a chattel. Such decisions culminated in the well-known pronouncement of Roger Taney in the case of Dred Scott: The Negro had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”¹⁷

Olmsted felt that the public guard of Virginia was in direct violation of the constitutional provision forbidding the states to keep troops in time of peace. Yet the slave states were never really at peace, for the Negro population had to be kept in subjection by force.

In Richmond and Charleston and New Orleans, [he writes] the citizens are as careless and gay as in Boston or London, and their servants a thousand times as childlike and cordial, to all appearance in their relations with them as our servants are with us. But go to the bottom of this security and dependence, and you come to police machinery such as you never find in towns under free government: citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public whippings for accidental infractions of police ceremonies. I happened myself to see more direct expression of tyranny in a single day and night at Charleston, than at Naples [under Bomba] in a week.¹⁸

Nor was this tyranny in the Old South confined to the Negro. The white population had its freedom sharply limited by the exigencies of the slave system. The white citizen was compelled to do patrol duty; he was sharply limited in the literature he could read and circulate. Indeed the slaveholders went so far as to open the mails and burn abolitionist or incendiary publications. By 1840 it was clear to many northerners that the South was fastening the shackles of its peculiar institution on the entire nation. The “gag rule” prohibited the discussion of the question of slavery in the House of Representatives; anti-slavery petitions lined the halls of Congress, but it was some time before anyone dared read one in the House. John Quincy Adams, who did yeoman service in breaking the gag rule, was no abolitionist. He was anxious to save some vestige of representative government and did so in the teeth of tremendous opposition. And in 1850 every American citizen was compelled by law to be a slave-catcher.

This elaborate system of control maintained by the slaveholders, indeed the slave system itself, rested on one widely accepted ideological foundation: the notion of Negro inferiority. The idea that the African race was savage, uncivilized and innately incapable of high cultural development obtained all over the land. The editors of the North American Review had asserted, “It is not slavery that is the curse of the South; it is Africa.” The majority of the American people were deeply sympathetic with the South in its attempts to keep the black population from slaughtering them in their beds. The author of The Laws of Race maintained as a first principle that “the white race must of necessity, by reason of its superiority, govern the negro wherever the two live together.” Dr. J. H. Van Evrie produced a book, in which he essayed to prove the physical, mental, and moral inferiority of the black race. He insisted that Negroes could not stand erect, that the color of a man's skin was an index to his character, that no Negro could “speak the language of the white man with absolute correctness,” that the African was not educable, and was, in short, mercifully held in slavery by a wise creator.¹⁹ John Quincy Adams told Fanny Kemble “with a serious expression of sincere disgust” that all the misfortunes of Desdemona were “a very just judgment upon her for having married a ‘nigger.’”²⁰

Fitzhugh and the fire-eaters, Calhoun and all the apologists had a rationalization made-to-order which most of America accepted without question. The idea of the Negro's inferiority, however, was not propagated only by the self-interest of slaveholders. The degradation of the Negro in America was a realistic, observable fact. The brutish field hand, the degenerate, poverty-stricken Negroes in Northern cities were there for everybody to see. Even the Negroes themselves accepted the idea of their inferiority. A few observers recognized that slavery and caste status had degraded the Negro, but their voices were lost in the general hue and cry.

The slaveholder, however, was not satisfied to use the concept of inferiority as a rationalization. The idea had to be dramatized in the personal etiquette of his servants so that each passing day would reinforce society's awareness of the Negro's subordinate caste, and the Negro himself, his self-esteem shattered, would accept slave status. Redpath, Olmsted, Kemble, Lyell, and Martineau noticed with embarrassment the fawning and obeisance accorded them by Negroes in the South, forgetting that the master class enforced its caste etiquette with the lash. William Grimes was flogged for referring to a slave woman as “Miss.” John Brown says of John Glasgow: “His brave look, when spoken to, offended his master, who swore he ‘would flog his nigger pride out of him.’”²¹ “Ten years,” writes Solomon Northup, “I was compelled to address him [the master] with downcast eyes and uncovered head—in the attitude and language of a slave.”²² The whip was the antidote to any infringement of this caste etiquette:

Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he speak loudly when spoken to by his master? Then he is getting high-minded, and should be taken down a button-hole lower. Does he forget to pull off his hat at the approach of a white person? Then he is wanting in reverence, and should be whipped for it. Does he venture to vindicate his conduct when censured for it? Then he is guilty of impudence,—one of the greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty. Does he ever venture to suggest a different mode of doing things from that pointed out by his master? He is indeed presumptuous and getting above himself.²³

The caste etiquette was designed to transform the Negro into a cringing serf. “Every distinction should be created,” wrote the memorialists to the South Carolina legislature, “between the whites and the Negroes, calculated to make the latter feel the superiority of the former.”²⁴ The conflicts of personality occasioned by the caste status are difficult to discover, but this is the burden of the next three chapters, the consideration of the mind of the slave.

The “inside view” of slavery may not be the whole view, but it is certainly an indispensable, though almost neglected, phase of the subject. A realistic understanding of the economic and social aspects of slavery—the slave trade, the plantation system, and the controls by which each was maintained—is of vital importance to our knowledge of the socio-economic framework of our country. The extent to which the shadow of slavery falls on present-day America will be shown in a later chapter.

Notes

1. Cotton Kingdom, II., p. 202.

2. Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 226-227.

3. Slave Life in Georgia, p. 131.

4. Narrative of Henry Bibb, p. 132.

5. Cotton Kingdom, II., p. 203.

6. Documentary History of American Industrial Society, II., pp. 31-32.

7. B. A. Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 75.

8. Slave Life in Georgia, pp. 45-52.

9. Judicial Cases, I., p. 122.

10. Ibid., I., pp. 150-151.

11. Quoted by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Dred, pp. 347-348.

12. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, p. 103.

13. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown,

14. Industrial Resources, II., p. 285.

15. Ibid., p. 278.

16. Democracy in America, I., pp. 379-380.

17. Judicial Cases, V., p. 199.

18. Seaboard Slave States, I., pp. 22-23.

19. Negroes and Negro Slavery (N. Y., 1861).

20. Journal, p. 86.

21. Slave Life in Georgia, p. 37.

22. Twelve Years a Slave, p. 183.

23. Narrative of Frederick Douglass, p. 79.

24. Documentary History of American Industrial Society, p. 113.