SOME OF THE EVIL EFFECTS OF FLOGGING.
There are incidental considerations touching this matter of flogging,
which exaggerate the evil into a great enormity. Many illustrations
might be given, but let us be content with a few.
One of the arguments advanced by officers of the Navy in favour of
corporal punishment is this: it can be inflicted in a moment; it
consumes no valuable time; and when the prisoner’s shirt is put on,
_that_ is the last of it. Whereas, if another punishment were
substituted, it would probably occasion a great waste of time and
trouble, besides thereby begetting in the sailor an undue idea of his
importance.
Absurd, or worse than absurd, as it may appear, all this is true; and
if you start from the same premises with these officers, you, must
admit that they advance an irresistible argument. But in accordance
with this principle, captains in the Navy, to a certain extent, inflict
the scourge—which is ever at hand—for nearly all degrees of
transgression. In offences not cognisable by a court-martial, little,
if any, discrimination is shown. It is of a piece with the penal laws
that prevailed in England some sixty years ago, when one hundred and
sixty different offences were declared by the statute-book to be
capital, and the servant-maid who but pilfered a watch was hung beside
the murderer of a family.
It is one of the most common punishments for very trivial offences in
the Navy, to “stop” a seaman’s _grog_ for a day or a week. And as most
seamen so cling to their _grog_, the loss of it is generally deemed by
them a very serious penalty. You will sometimes hear them say, “I would
rather have my wind _stopped_ than _my grog!_”
But there are some sober seamen that would much rather draw the money
for it, instead of the grog itself, as provided by law; but they are
too often deterred from this by the thought of receiving a scourging
for some inconsiderable offence, as a substitute for the stopping of
their spirits. This is a most serious obstacle to the cause of
temperance in the Navy. But, in many cases, even the reluctant drawing
of his grog cannot exempt a prudent seaman from ignominy; for besides
the formal administering of the “_cat_” at the gangway for petty
offences, he is liable to the “colt,” or rope’s-end, a bit of
_ratlin-stuff_, indiscriminately applied—without stripping the
victim—at any time, and in any part of the ship, at the merest wink
from the Captain. By an express order of that officer, most boatswain’s
mates carry the “colt” coiled in their hats, in readiness to be
administered at a minute’s warning upon any offender. This was the
custom in the Neversink. And until so recent a period as the
administration of President Polk, when the historian Bancroft,
Secretary of the Navy, officially interposed, it was an almost
universal thing for the officers of the watch, at their own discretion,
to inflict chastisement upon a sailor, and this, too, in the face of
the ordinance restricting the power of flogging solely to Captains and
Courts Martial. Nor was it a thing unknown for a Lieutenant, in a
sudden outburst of passion, perhaps inflamed by brandy, or smarting
under the sense of being disliked or hated by the seamen, to order a
whole watch of two hundred and fifty men, at dead of night, to undergo
the indignity of the “colt.”
It is believed that, even at the present day, there are instances of
Commanders still violating the law, by delegating the power of the colt
to subordinates. At all events, it is certain that, almost to a man,
the Lieutenants in the Navy bitterly rail against the officiousness of
Bancroft, in so materially abridging their usurped functions by
snatching the colt from their hands. At the time, they predicted that
this rash and most ill-judged interference of the Secretary would end
in the breaking up of all discipline in the Navy. But it has not so
proved. These officers _now_ predict that, if the “cat” be abolished,
the same unfulfilled prediction would be verified.
Concerning the license with which many captains violate the express
laws laid down by Congress for the government of the Navy, a glaring
instance may be quoted. For upward of forty years there has been on the
American Statute-book a law prohibiting a captain from inflicting, on
his own authority, more than twelve lashes at one time. If more are to
be given, the sentence must be passed by a Court-martial. Yet, for
nearly half a century, this law has been frequently, and with almost
perfect impunity, set at naught: though of late, through the exertions
of Bancroft and others, it has been much better observed than formerly;
indeed, at the present day, it is generally respected. Still, while the
Neversink was lying in a South American port, on the cruise now written
of, the seamen belonging to another American frigate informed us that
their captain sometimes inflicted, upon his own authority, eighteen and
twenty lashes. It is worth while to state that this frigate was vastly
admired by the shore ladies for her wonderfully neat appearance. One of
her forecastle-men told me that he had used up three jack-knives
(charged to him on the books of the purser) in scraping the
belaying-pins and the combings of the hatchways.
It is singular that while the Lieutenants of the watch in American
men-of-war so long usurped the power of inflicting corporal punishment
with the _colt_, few or no similar abuses were known in the English
Navy. And though the captain of an English armed ship is authorised to
inflict, at his own discretion, _more_ than a dozen lashes (I think
three dozen), yet it is to be doubted whether, upon the whole, there is
as much flogging at present in the English Navy as in the American. The
chivalric Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, declared, in his place
in Congress, that on board of the American man-of-war that carried him
out Ambassador to Russia he had witnessed more flogging than had taken
place on his own plantation of five hundred African slaves in ten
years. Certain it is, from what I have personally seen, that the
English officers, as a general thing, seem to be less disliked by their
crews than the American officers by theirs. The reason probably is,
that many of them, from their station in life, have been more
accustomed to social command; hence, quarter-deck authority sits more
naturally on them. A coarse, vulgar man, who happens to rise to high
naval rank by the exhibition of talents not incompatible with
vulgarity, invariably proves a tyrant to his crew. It is a thing that
American men-of-war’s-men have often observed, that the Lieutenants
from the Southern States, the descendants of the old Virginians, are
much less severe, and much more gentle and gentlemanly in command, than
the Northern officers, as a class.
According to the present laws and usages of the Navy, a seaman, for the
most trivial alleged offences, of which he may be entirely innocent,
must, without a trial, undergo a penalty the traces whereof he carries
to the grave; for to a man-of-war’s-man’s experienced eye the marks of
a naval scourging with the “_cat_” are through life discernible. And
with these marks on his back, this image of his Creator must rise at
the Last Day. Yet so untouchable is true dignity, that there are cases
wherein to be flogged at the gangway is no dishonour; though, to abase
and hurl down the last pride of some sailor who has piqued him, be
some-times the secret motive, with some malicious officer, in procuring
him to be condemned to the lash. But this feeling of the innate dignity
remaining untouched, though outwardly the body be scarred for the whole
term of the natural life, is one of the hushed things, buried among the
holiest privacies of the soul; a thing between a man’s God and himself;
and for ever undiscernible by our fellow-men, who account _that_ a
degradation which seems so to the corporal eye. But what torments must
that seaman undergo who, while his back bleeds at the gangway, bleeds
agonized drops of shame from his soul! Are we not justified in
immeasurably denouncing this thing? Join hands with me, then; and, in
the name of that Being in whose image the flogged sailor is made, let
us demand of Legislators, by what right they dare profane what God
himself accounts sacred.
Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman? asks the
intrepid Apostle, well knowing, as a Roman citizen, that it was not.
And now, eighteen hundred years after, is it lawful for you, my
countrymen, to scourge a man that is an American? to scourge him round
the world in your frigates?
It is to no purpose that you apologetically appeal to the general
depravity of the man-of-war’s-man. Depravity in the oppressed is no
apology for the oppressor; but rather an additional stigma to him, as
being, in a large degree, the effect, and not the cause and
justification of oppression.