The whipping of women on plantations is in a different manner. Their
frock is turned up over their head, and they are made to lie down with
their face to the ground, their arms extended and tied to a stake. A
board is then taken which is prepared in shape like a shovel. The wide
part is bored full of small holes, and with this they are beaten on the
bare flesh, from twenty-five to two hundred blows. After these blows
are repeated a few times the skin tears away, and the blood and flesh
is forced through these holes with great force and flies several feet
from them; and yet this is very _modest_ and “moderate correction.”
Females are required to do as much work on a plantation as men, and
there are generally about thirty women to seventy men. The treatment
of slave women is so severe, and their labor so hard, that very few
children are raised on the sugar or cotton plantations; and if they are
alive at birth they grow up feeble and puny, and from neglect and the
want of proper cleanliness and care very few become men and women.
The relations and intimacy among slaves on plantations are managed with
great care, and every thing that is allowed to exist between the men
and women, is permitted with a view to degrade and brutalize them, and
destroy all moral sense, as well as self-respect. A rule or regulation
of any kind calculated to elevate the thoughts above the brute, or a
disposition on the part of the slave to cultivate the moral sense,
would be crushed at once, and an attempt on the part of a slave to do
so would meet with the most severe and cruel punishment. Hence kindred
ties, and parental affection, and the attachment between man and wife,
are among the first things to be broken up, as the permission of such
demonstrations would have a tendency to humanize the slave, and make
him, under such circumstances, somewhat an object of sympathy. A
connection among them as “man and wife,” in which the planter sometimes
officiates in a mock ceremony of marriage, is allowed under certain
rules, yet care is taken that such alliances do not continue for a long
time. When they are broken up they are allowed to seek other companions
for a short time. Thus they succeed in preventing anything like an
affection, or attachment, or respect for an alliance in the character
of “man and wife.”
The following extract of a letter from a highly respectable gentleman
in Galveston, has been kindly furnished me, and a more truthful
picture, to the life, cannot be drawn, and one too on which the good
people of this country can look, and stand rebuked by the lesson of
_moral sense_, which came up in the honesty of his soul from this poor
slave, in view of the life which he would have entailed upon himself
and kindred, had he fulfilled the marriage vow with poor Lucy. The
occurrence took place in December, 1848--
“Bob had agreed to be married, and on the night of the wedding did
not appear. His lady love came for him the next night after, and
the matter was thoroughly discussed between them. She, poor thing,
reproached him for his inconstancy with tears and sighs at a great
rate. Bob finally said to her by way of comfort--‘Lucy what is de
sense ob niggers marrying--it don’t mean any ting. When white folks
marry, dey say matches made in heben--when nigger marry children
all slaves--nigger dont own he wife--nigger woman dont own her
husband--more misery, misery, all come ob nigger marrying.’”
Alas! too true. How often we laugh when we ought to be ashamed that our
sensibilities are not more deeply shocked.