I found your email fascinating, Kevin, and it brought to mind the
18th and 19th century navies, particularly the British Navy, where
flogging — from whence we get the phrase "the cat is out of the bag"
to refer to the cat-o-nine-tails normally stored in a red felt bag —
was a regular Sunday occurrence aboard ship. If plantation flogging
was limited to one or two major events in a year, then being a
Virginia slave was a much less violent life than being an impressed
British seaman. A 40 year old sailor could be flogged, and many were,
for not raising his knuckle to his forehead showing obeisance to a
12 year old midshipman. There is some scholarly literature on this,
The Wooden World, comes to mind, and the Patrick O'Brien novels about
the British navy have flogging, doing it, and not doing it, as one of
the continuing narrative threads.
-- Stephan
On 8 Oct 2008, at 12:08, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> While few of the people interviewed in the WPA slave narratives
> recollected being subjected to beatings or other forms of violent
> cruelty, a great many of them recorded *witnessing* other slaves
> being subjected to violence. A lot of them fit the pattern "my own
> Master was OK, but wow! You should have seen what happened to the
> slaves on the next plantation over." Some of the accounts are
> quite chilling to read. So, contrary to Mr. South, the WPA
> narratives do in fact demonstrate that to be a slave was to live in
> an environment in which you knew you could be whipped or beaten,
> and that pretty much everyone who experienced slavery over any
> length of time did in fact witness or experience violence.
>
> Which raises the interesting question, how much violence was there?
>
> We know that slavery *had* to entail some systemic violence,
> because under slavery, the primary incentive for slaves to work was
> negative. In other economic ways of organizing labor, positive
> incentives are the primary way to motivate workers. Work hard and
> good things happen for you. Under slavery, the primary incentives
> are negative--fail to work hard, and bad things will happen to you.
>
> So how many slaves have to get beaten in any given year, to drive
> the point home to the rest of the slaves? Fogel and Engerman, in
> their book TIME ON THE CROSS, consulted plantation records to
> answer that question. I no longer remember their precise findings,
> but very roughly, what they found was that on large plantations
> (more than 50 slaves, if I recall correctly), it was one or two
> beatings a year. Is that a few, or a lot? They had anticipated
> finding that there were more beatings. But as Herbert Gutman
> pointed out, in response, that is in fact a large number. Any
> given slave faced a quite real chance that, at some point in his or
> her life, he or she would be brutally beaten. A sizable number of
> slaves did in fact experience violence, over the course of their
> lives. And pretty much *every* slave witnessed it.
>
> All best,
> Kevin
> Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
> Department of History
> James Madison University
>
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