Slave Torture

Not long since one of these wretched victims came within our lines with an instrument of this description round his neck. It was securely riveted there, and required an hour's filing before it could be removed. This proved to be a very painful operation to the poor "contraband;" for his neck was so snugly incased by the iron band, and the instrument was of such a peculiar shape, as to render the operation difficult of accomplishment. The negro stated that he had worn it two months, and this statement has been corroborated by reliable Union men at the same county. The form of the instrument prevented him from lying down and taking his rest at night; and its weight and close fit rendered it very burdensome during the day. It consisted of a heavy iron ring, fitting closely round the neck, from which extended three prongs, each two feet in length, with a ring on the end. I suppose the design of the instrument was that a chain should be attached to it, and thus secure the victim beyond all possible hope of escape;

Photo #1~The rack was a particularly brutal form of slave torture. Equiano's friend John Annis died on a similar torture device in the West Indies in 1774. Equiano had tried to save his friend, who had been in England with his master. By the precedent of the Somerset case (which ruled that since Parliament had never established slavery in England, all slaves who set foot there should become free), Equiano hired a lawyer to petition Annis' freedom. The lawyer took his money but not his case. Equiano always blamed himself for his friend's death.

Photo # 2~English poet William Blake created this illustration to accompany an account of service to British planters in Surinam.

Pits Of Agony

Africans were kept in Dungeons/Pits before they were packed on the slave ships. Sometimes they spend many months in these torturous confinements chained up. Many of these slave dungeons/pits can still be found up and down the West African Coast today.

The African Slave Endured Boundless Suffering.
Below is an illustration of the every day suffering endured by people of African descent on the sugar, cotton or tobacco plantations of the western hemisphere.

Source: http://swagga.com/plant.htm

On Wednesday, work crews were preparing the ground outside the gate to recreate the fort’s sentry box. But while they were removing non-historic asphalt they instead made an even more startling discovery: a seven-inch-in-diameter hole ringed by halved yellow Danish ballast bricks.

But the innocuous looking hole once held the base of something dreaded and reviled by the island’s enslaved Africans – the town’s whipping post, said William Cissel, historian at the National Park Service’s Christiansted National Historic Site.

"Although this is a tangible reminder of a brutal part of Virgin Islands history, it brings to life all the eyewitness accounts" of whipping as early as 1744, Cissel said.

According to archival information, Cissel said the hole would have held a seven-foot tall post made of a tropical hardwood. Atop the post were metal rings used to secure the tethers of the person in the unfortunate position to receive anywhere from 25 to 500 lashes, the latter usually being a death sentence from the loss of blood.

"It’s a very sad and painful part of our history, but it’s still history," said Joel Tutein, superintendent of the historic site.

Cissel said that by 1838, arbitrary use of the whipping post was halted by Governor General Peter Von Scholten. After that, those accused of violating the law had to go through the Danish Court system.

Nonetheless, the hatred for the whipping post was still alive 10 years later when thousands of slaves stormed Fort Frederik in Frederiksted and threw that post into the sea during the revolt that forced their emancipation, Cissel said.

Any remnant of whipping posts at Fort Frederik or St. Thomas’ Fort Christian are likely gone for good because of changes made over the years, Tutein said. That makes it even more important for the Park Service to tell the story of the estimated 50,000 Africans that were brought through Christiansted as slaves.

Part of the Christiansted National Historic Site’s mandate is to tell the history of the area. The Park Service's management plan for the site, which includes Fort Christiansvaern, the Scale House, Customs House and Steeple Building, calls for the agency to recount the history of St. Croix between 1735 and 1917, when the Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark.

So far, military, religious and trade histories have been interpreted, but not that of the enslaved Africans, Tutein said.

The discovery of the whipping post site, Tutein said, makes his effort to acquire the 250-year-old Danish West Indies & Guinea Co. warehouse building, now owned by the U.S. Postal Service, even more important.

The Park Service wants to spend around $10 million to renovate the building and turn it into a museum chronicling the history of the enslaved Africans who were brought to Christiansted, herded into the courtyard and auctioned off to cane planters from the stairs of the building.

The Postal Service, however, has placed the building on the market for $1.2 million. The Park Service is holding the position that ownership should be transferred, a position supported by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.

Tutein and Cissel, meanwhile, said they knew about the existence of the whipping post site, but thought they would never find its whereabouts. Tutein said he plans to recreate the whipping post as a reminder of what once was and is asking the community for input.

He promised to recreate the harrowing piece of history with as much taste as the tasteless episode can be retold.

"Unless you know where you’ve been," Tutein said, "you’ll never know where you are going."

By Jamie Bate

Source: http://swagga.com/whipping.htm

Photo:

Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman

Whipping post

This whipping post from what was called the "negro jail" in Portsmouth, Virginia, was taken to upstate New York as a war trophy by Private Charles C. Miller of Company I, 148th New York Volunteers.

A committed abolitionist, Miller wrote in his Civil War diary, "I will pour hot oil into anyone's bowels that upholds slavery."

Miller first mentioned the whipping post in his diary entry for April 2, 1863. On seeing the post he made an oath to destroy it and got several escaped slaves to help him. They sneaked out of camp and made their way to Portsmouth, but found they could not detach the post from its platform without a saw. They had to return to camp to get a saw, then sneak out a second time. Finally, they sawed the post off, disassembled it into smaller pieces, and shipped them off to Miller's brother "to be preserved as a relic of barbarism."

Based on what he had heard, Miller believed that at least a thousand blacks had been whipped at the post. During a campaign parade when Ulysses S. Grant ran for president in 1868, the post was paraded through the streets of Penn Van, New York, on a hay rigging as a black man received a mock whipping. Miller gave this relic to the Sloan Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, a union veterans organization, which in turn gave it to the Yates County Historical Society, which generously donated it to the Virginia Historical Society.

"Marks of punishment inflicted upon a colored servant in Richmond, VA"; shows the back of woman with burn marks. The victim was thirteen years old when, for reasons unexplained in the article, she annoyed or upset her mistress. She was locked in a room by herself for over a week, during which time the mistress repeatedly burned her back.

The mistress was arrested, but released on $ 5,000 bail. The original photograph is located in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (Wendell Phillips Papers, [bMSAm1953(942)]. In a letter from Richmond, dated July 6, 1866, which enclosed this photo, John Oliver wrote Wendell Philllips that although the photograph "is a very poor one . . . from it you will be able to see quite well the barbarism of Slavry [sic] as it now exist[s] in King William Co, Virginia in 1866. This girl with a twin Sister and their morthe [sic] lucy [sic] Richardson were Slaves to a Mr Henry Abrams, his wife, one of the most cruel tyrent [sic] read of in any age put out the left eye of the mother, and her constent [sic[ habit has been to take the Childr[e]n and burn their backs in the man[n]er which this picture explains, this chil[d] is now 16 years old and when brought to me, at the freedmen's Court was too weak to walk with me 4 square to gete [sic[ something to eate[sic]."

Caption, "Gordon under medical inspection". Shows the scars resulting from severe lashings; this slave was able to escape his master and get across Union lines during the civil war.

Source
Harper's Weekly, July 4, 1863, p. 429. (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library)

Titled, "Chatiment des Quatres Piquets dans les Colonies" (Punishment of the Four Stakes/Pegs). Lying on his stomach, the victim's hands and legs are tied to stakes while he is being whipped on his back by the black overseer; other slaves witness the scene and the planter's family is shown on the left. This painting, dated 1849, has been often reproduced in books dealing with New World slavery, but it is not based on the young French painter's own observations, although "this form of punishment had been described in the abolitionist literature"

Source
Painted by Marcel Verdier and published in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Menil Foundation, Harvard University Press, 1989), vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 153, fig. 91; original painting is held by the Menil Foundation, Houston, Texas

Ilustration shows three slaves, one wearing a log and chain around his neck, another an iron collar; the third wears a tin mask. The first two items "denote runaways," but the mask is placed on city slaves to prevent them from drinking strong liquor and on the "country-slave" to prevent "eating clay, to which many of the field-negroes are addicted" (p. 132). The same illustration appears in later editions of Kidder's work, e.g., 1866

Source
Daniel P. Kidder, Brazil and the Brazilians, portrayed in historical and descriptive sketches (Philadelphia, 1857), p. 131. (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library)

The Mode of Training Bloodhounds in St. Domingue and of exercising them by Chasseurs." The author writes:

 " As they [the dogs] approached maturity, their keepers procured a figure roughly formed as a negro in wicker work, in the body of which were contained the blood and entrails of beasts. This was exhibited before an upper part of the cage, and the food occasionally exposed as a temptation, which attracted the attention of the dogs to it as a source of the food they wanted. This was repeated often, so that the animals with redoubled ferocity struggled against their confinement while in proportion to their impatience the figures was brought nearer, though yet out of their reach, and their food decreased till, at the last extremity of desperation, the keeper resigned the figure, well charged with the nauseous food before described, to their wishes. While they gorged themselves with the dreadful meat, he and his colleagues caressed and encouraged them. By these means the whites ingratiated themselves so much with the animals, as to produce an effect directly opposite to that perceivable in them towards the black figure; and, when they were employed in the pursuit for which they were intended, afforded the protection so necessary to their employers