The great myth, was that the 300 year culture of racial sadism could be altered with the stroke of a pen. The ending of the civil war, was in theory, the dawn of a new age in race relations. Suddenly, slave owners, whose only concern was bringing in the largest crop, the greatest profits, were supposed to instantly embrace their black brothers and sisters as one of their own. Recognition of the "law" was supposed to pacify the notions of racial superiority. How? when God's law had been ignored in order to allow slavery in the first place?
Southerners were hardened to the cries, groans and lacerated backs of slaves. Families raped, torn apart and sold as animals. living quarters worse than hog pens. clothing, if it was given, of the coarsest kind. Flogged, beaten and whipped, for breaking dishes, not looking submissive enough, or answering too "curt".
One doctor, visiting the plantation of an acquaintance, witnessed an older, trusted house servant spoon a little too much molasses into the bowl of the slave master's son. For this offense, the master shot out of his seat and began to beat the woman viciously with his fists, elbows and hands. after a few dozen blows, the beaten slave naturally, instinctively raised a single arm in defense. This set the master's temper aflame anew, and he ordered another slave to hold her hands behind her back, while he beat her for several minutes until his hands hurt too much to continue. He paused to catch his breath, took off one of his shoes and commenced to beat her repeatedly in her face, ears, head and mouth with the heel of his shoe until he was too tired to continue. The blood flowed freely from her nose, eyes, face and mouth. By the doctor's testimony, the old slave's face was horribly swollen, torn and distorted, such that she was hardly recognized as human. Her ears were as swollen as large as a man's hand. And for the final stroke of indignation, when she hobbled out of the room dizzy from the blows, she had to say, "thank you massa." All of this occured within the full view of the slave master's young son, who seemingly took no notice of the violence.
For the vast majority of slaves, there was no respite from work, the elements, nakedness, sexual assault, the masters lash, or the slave hunters should they choose/or be forced to escape. Slaves hunters, who made their living on returning blacks to their suffereing, shot and killed with no more regard than the smoting of creatures that crawl into the rotten bowels of felled trees.
"Reconstruction" indeed! Post-confederate southern states "reconstructed" new constitutions between 1890–1908 with provisions that effectively disenfranchised most blacks legalizing many of the most outrageous "Black Codes". Between secret societies, poll taxes and terrorism, Blacks in the south effectively lost the vote. A condition which persisted until the landmark 1965 civil rights act, which has needed to be re-upped every few years, the last time in July of 2006, due to rampant disenfranchisement.
GOD BLESS THE ABOLITIONIST, The Quakers and the converted slaveowners who were forced by their consciences to rail and and focefully advocate for the overthrow of the system of slavery and then continued the fight to include women's rights and suffrage!!! Anthony Benezet, William Wilberforce, Rev. George B. Cheever, Rev. Beriah Green, Harriet B. Stowe, Rev. John G. Fee, Rev. Stephen S. Foster, Deacon James Birney, Rev. William W. Patton, Rev. Parker Pillsbury,Mary Birkett Card, Susan B. Anthony, The Grimke Sisters, Mary Louis Child, Frederick Douglass, William Garrison, Benjamin Frnaklin, John Quincy Adams, all politicians, activists, writers, artists and everyone else, from the most lowly to the most high, past present and future, that acknowledges the evil wrongs of slavery!
The idea, that an entire culture, could be altered over night, was as naive a dream, as could be imagined. with the death or Lincoln, five days after the end of the civil war, the resolve, the will, the persistence of the north, was abandoned to the southern drunkard, Andrew Johnson, who was rewarded with a vice-presidency for being the only southern representative, who voted against cessation of the south and did not abandon his seat.
Politically, reconstruction took the form of President Johnson swiftly granting pardons to all the slave holders and plantation owners for the price of a loyalty oath. Blacks who had been granted 40 acres, were told that their land, their crops, their homes and the seeds they had sown, were no longer their property, and if they wanted to stay on the land, they would have to sign labor contracts with their previous masters. Many wondered why the civil war had been fought, or indeed if it had truly been "won".
and all the while, the vast majority of northerners never truly believed that slavery was anything other than a paternalistic system of care for the benefit of slaves. And for the rest, that knew and believed in the horrors of slavery, (and this group includes Lincoln, who felt that Blacks should be sent back to Africa), the idea that slavery was morally wrong, was not synonymous with notions of Black equality, or the idea that they should mix freely in our cities, and societies and be in full, equal competition with Whites.
A culture persists, intergenerationally. Ideas are passed from father to son. History, is whispered by mothers to daughters. memories, persist. legends endure. Myths as it were, are unassailable. This simple fact can be observed in vestiges of slavery that remain to this day. Only recently, did South Carolina exchange the confederate flag that flew at the State Capitol, for the "American" flag. It can be seen in the fact that Mississippi burned, a mere few years before man landed on the moon. Between 1882 and 1968 3,437 Blacks were Lynched. After the Berlin came down, in the 80's, Donald Byrd, a Black man, was tied and dragged behind a pick-up truck until he had been reduced to a torso, with a severe case of road rash down to the bone.
From the poisonous brew of slavery, which had been allowed to stew, unfettered and encouraged in the United States from 1619 until 1865, must be added the multi-generational sufferings of slaves, the moral degradation of their master's and the full hypocrisy of the Citizenry of the United States under the Bill of Rights, Constitution and Declaration of Independence. With all of this, It can be easily seen, how the Million lives of good White men that were lost in the Civil War, and the failure of Andrew Johnson and the United States Congress, quickly sprouted into the South's great "Lost Cause". A myth to rival Camelot, of a time of Great Mansions, simpler times, huge profits and everyone knowing their station in life.
I present to you 12 more stories, from 'American Slavery as it is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses'
1. Shoes filled with blood
"A negro was tied up, and flogged until the blood ran down and filled his shoes, so that when he raised either foot and set it down again, the blood would run over their tops. I could not look on any longer, but turned away in horror, the whipping was continued to the number of 500 lashes, so I understood; a quart of spirits of turpentine was then applied to his lacerated body. The same negro came down to my boat, to get some apples, and was so weak from his wounds and loss of blood, that he cold not get up the bank, but fell to the ground. The crime for which the Negro was whipped was that of telling the other Negroes, that the overseer had lain with his wife."
2. Collar around leg, causing putrefaction
"...Several men were attempting to detach from his ankle an iron which had been bent around it... The iron was a piece of a flat bar of the ordinary size from he forge hammer, and bent around the ankle, the ends meeting, and forcing a hoop of about the same diameter of the leg. There was one or more strings attached to the iron and extending up around his neck, evidently so to suspend it as to prevent its galling by the weight when at work, yet it had galled till the leg had swollen out beyond the iron and inflamed and separated, so that the leg for a considerable distance above and below the iron, was a mass of putrefaction, the most loathsome of any wound I had ever witnessed on any living creature. The slave lay on his back on the floor with his leg on an anvil which also sat also on the floor one man had a chisel used for splitting iron and another struck it with a sledge hammer to drive between the ends of the hoop and separate it so that it might b taken off. Mr. Lyman said that the man swung the sledge over his shoulders as if splitting iron, and struck many blows before he succeeded in parting the ends of the iron at all. The bar was so large and stubborn at length they spread it as far as they could without driving the chisel so low as to ruin the leg. The slave a man of twenty five years perhaps whose countenance was the index of a mind ill adapted to the degradations of slavery, never uttered a word or a groan in all the process, but the copious flow of sweat from every pore, the dreadful contractions and distortions of every muscle in his body showed clearly the great amount of his sufferings, and all this while such was the diseased state of the limb, that at every blow, the bloody corrupted matter gushed out in all directions several feet in such profusion as literally to cover a large area around the anvil. After various other fruitless attempts to spread the iron, they concluded it was necessary to weaken by filing before it could be got of, which he left them attempting to do"
3. Congress pauses for the slaves heading to market
"Mr. Giddings, member of Congress from Ohio, in his speech in the House of Representatives Feb. 13, 1839, made the following statement: "On the beautiful Avenue in front of the Capitol, members of Congress, during their session, have been compelled to turn aside from their path to permit a coffle of slaves males and females chained to each other by their necks to pass on their way to this national slave market."
4. Whipped until he smoked
"When asked by Mr. C. If he did not fear his salves would run away if he whipped them so much, he replied, they know too well what they must suffer if they are taken, and then said, 'I’ll tell you how I treat my runway niggers. I had a big nigger that ran away the second time; as soon as I got trek of his, I took three good fellows and went in pursuit, and found him in the night, some miles distant, in a corn house; we took him and chained him hand and foot, and carted him home. The next morning we tied him to a tree and whipped him until there was not a sound place on his back. I then tied his ankles and hoisted him up to a limb feet up and head down, we then whipped him until the damned nigger smoked so that I thought he would take fire and burn up. We then took him down, and to make sure hat the should not run away, the third time. I ran my knife in the back of the ankles and cut off the large cords, and then I gave to have put some lead into the wounds, but I forgot it."
5. Driven on foot hundreds of miles, naked, in the bare sun to the deep south, from state to state
" The sun was shining out very hot and in turning the angle of the road we encountered the following group: first a little cart drawn by one horse, in which five or six half naked black children were tumbled like pigs together. The cart had no covering, they seemed to have been broiled to sleep. Behind the cart marched three black women, with head, neck and breasts uncovered, and without shoes or stockings: next came three men, bare headed and chained together with an ox chain. Last of all came a white man on horseback, carrying his pistols on his belt and who as we passed him had the impudence to look us in the face without blushing. At a house where we stopped a little further on, we learned that he had bought these miserable beings in Maryland and was marching them in this manner to one of the more southern states. Shame on the state of Maryland! And I say shame on the state of Virginia, and every state through which this wretched cavalcade was permitted to pass. I do say that when they the slaveholders permit such flagrant and indecent outrages upon humanity as that I have descried, when they sanction a villain in thus marching half naked women and men, loaded with chains without being charged with any crime, but that of being black, from one section of the United States to another, hundreds of miles in the face of day, they disgrace themselves, and the country to which they belong. -James K. Paulding, esq., Secretary of the United States Navy 1817"
6. Child's hand plunged into boiling water, for a trifling offense
"I have not attempted to harrow your feelings with series of cruelty. I will however mention one of two among the main incidents than came under my observation as family physician. I was one day dressing a blister and the mistress of the house sent a little black girl into the kitchen to bring me some warm water. She probably mistook her message for she returned with a bowl full of boiling water, which her misses no sooner perceived, than she thrust her hand into it, and held it there until it was half cooked"
7. Whipped near death, hot tongs applied to body and neck until dead
" A young woman, who was generally very badly treated, receiving a more severe whipping then usual, and so, ran away. Ina few days she came back and was sent ion the field to work. At this time the garment next her skin was stiff like a scab, from the running of the sores made by the whipping. Towards night, she told her master that she was sick, and wished to go to the house. She went and as soon as she reached it, lay down on the floor exhausted. The mistress asked her what the matter was? She made no reply. She asked again; but received no answer. "I’ll see" she said, "if I can't make you speak' so taking the tongs she heated them red hot and put them upon the bottoms of her feet; then upon her legs and body, and finally in a rage took hold of her throat. This had the desired effect. The poor girl faintly whispered, "oh misses, don't. I am most gone" and expired."
8. Cats tied to back and whipped to compel a slave to work
" Mr. Brubeecker, who had a number of slaves among whom was one who would frequently avoid labor by hiding himself, for which he should get severe floggings without the desired effect, so that at last Mr. Brubeecker Would tie large cats on his naked body and whip them to make them tear his back, in order to break him of this habit of hiding"
9. Black Angels ascend to freedom and near to Heaven
" I almost daily see the poor heart broken slave making his way to the land of freedom. A short time since, I saw a noble pious distressed spirit crushed slave, a member of he Baptist church escaping from professed Christian blood hounds to a land where he could enjoy that of which he had been robbed during forty years. His prayers would have made us all feel. I saw a baptised sister of about the same age, her children had been torn from her, her head was covered with fresh wounds while her upper lip had scarcely ceased to bleed in consequence of a blow with the poker, which knocked out her teeth, she too, was going to a land of freedom. Only a very few days since, I saw a girl of about eighteen, with a child as white as myself, aged ten months; a Christian master was raising the child as well his own perhaps to sell to a southern market. She had heard of the intention and at midnight took her only treasure and traveled twenty miles on foot through a land of strangers. She found friends.
10. Laid in the field half frozen to die
"A slave boy ran away in cold weather and during his concealment had his legs frozen, he returned or was retaken, after some time the flesh decayed and sloughed, of course was offensive. He was carried out to a field and left here without bed or shelter deserted to die. His only companions were the house dogs, which he called to him. After several days and nights spent in suffering and exposure, he was visited by Dr.'s Meithei and Mitchell in the field of their own accord, having heard by report of his lamentable condition. They remonstrated with the master; brought the boys to the house, amputated both legs and he finally recovered."
11. Whipped until delivered of a dead infant, then died
" An honorable friend, who stands high in the seat of this nation was present at the burial of a female slave in Mississippi, who had been whipped to death at the sake by her master, because she was gone longer of an errand to the neighboring town than her master through necessary. Under the lash she protested that she was ill, and was obliged to rest in the fields. To complete the climax of horror, she was delivered of a dead infant while undergoing the punishment."
12. Dismembered with an axe and burned in a locked room of slaves. perpetrator's wife in fear of her life. He takes his own life
"In the county of Livingston Ky. near the mouth of Cumberland river, lived Liburn Lewis a sister's son of the celebrated Jefferson. he was the wealthy owner of a considerable gang of Negroes whom he drove constantly, fed sparingly and lashed severely, the consequence was, that they would run away. Among the rest was an ill thrived boy of about seventeen, who having just returned from a skulking spell, was sent to the spring for water, and in returning let fall an elegant pitcher, it was dashed to shivers upon the rocks. this was made the occasion for reckoning with him. it was night, and the slaves were all at home. The master had them all collected in the most roomy negro house and a rousing fire put on. when the door was secured, that none might escape, either through fear of him or sympathy with George, he opened to them the design of the interview, namely that they might be effectually advised to stay at home and obey his orders. All things now in train, he called up George , who approached his master with unreserved submission. He bound him with cords, and by the assistance of Isham Lewis, his youngest brother, laid him on a broad bench, the meat block. He then proceeded to hack off George at the ankles. It was with the broad axe! In vain did the unhappy victim scream and roar! for he was completely in his master's power; not a hand among so many durst interfere: casting the feet into the fire, he lectured them at some length.-- he next chopped him off below the knees! George roaring out and praying his master to begin at the other end! He admonished them again, throwing the legs into the fire--then, above the knees, tossing the joints into the fire--the next stroke severed the thighs from the body; those were also committed to the flames--and so it may be said of the arms, head, and trunk, until all was in the fire! He threatened any of them with similar punishment who should in future disobey, run away, or disclose the proceedings of that evening. Nothing now remained but to consume the flesh and bones; and for this purpose the fire was brightly stirred until two hours after midnight; when a coarse and heavy back-wall composed of rock and clay, covered the fire and the remains of George. It was the Sabbath--this put an end to the amusements of the evening. The Negroes were now permitted to disperse, with charges to keep this matter among themselves and never whisper it in the neighborhood under the penalty of a like punishment.
"When he returned home and retired, his wife exclaimed 'Why, Mr. Lewis, where have you been, and what were you doing?' She had heard a strange pounding and dreadful screams and had smelled something like fresh meat burning. The answer he returned was that he had never enjoyed himself at a ball so well as he had enjoyed himself that night.
"Next morning he ordered the hands to rebuilt the back wall and he himself superintended the work, throwing the pieces of flesh that still remained with the bones behind as it went up. Thus hoping to conceal the mater, but it could not be hid, much as the Negroes seemed to hazard, they did whisper the horrid deed. The neighbors came, and in the presence tore down the wall; and finding the remains of the boy, they apprehended Lewis and his brother, and testified against them. They were committed to jail that they might answer at the coming court for this shocking outrage; but finding security for the appearance at court, they were admitted to bail!... Mrs. Lewis (his wife)... found, under her bolster, a keen butcher knife! The appalling discovery forced from her the confession that she considered her life in jeopardy. Messrs. Rice and Philips, whose wives were her sisters, went to see her and to bring her away if she wished it. Mrs. Lewis received them with all the expressions of Virginia hospitality... she said, "Thank you kind brother, I am indeed afraid for my life-- We need not interrupt the story to tell how much surprised he affected to be with this strange procedure of his brothers-in-law and with this declaration of his wife. But all his professions of fondness for her, to the contrary notwithstanding, they rode off with her before his eyes. He followed and overtook and went with them to her father's; but she was locked up from him, with her own consent, and he returned home.
Now he saw that his character was gone, his respectable friends believed that he had massacred George; but, worst of all, he saw that they considered the life of the harmless Letitia (his wife) was in danger from his perfidious hands... the proud Virginian sunk under the accumulated load of public odium. He proposed to his brother Isham, who had been his accomplice in the George affair, that they should finish the play of life with a still deeper tragedy. The plan was that they should shoot one another.... but forgetting, perhaps , in the perturbation of the moment that they gun was cocked, when he touched the trigger... the gun fired, and he fell and died in a few minutes and was with George in the eternal world, where the slave is free from his master.
"
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