A slave -“on average”- was whipped every 4.56 days. Three slaves were whipped every two weeks. Among them, sixty (37.5 percent) were females. A male was whipped once a week, and a female once every twelve days.
Whipping was a brutal practice that was employed in the years before the war in the South and was used by owners of large plantations in order to impose and strengthen their authority over their slaves.
The punishments took many forms, including whippings, torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and being sold away from the plantation. Slaves were even sometimes murdered. Some masters were more "benevolent" than others, and punished less often or severely.
As historian Michael Dickman notes, whipping was a common punishment on Southern plantations, though there was a debate about whether to use it sparingly to keep enslaved people from revolting. “Masters desired to maintain order in a society in which they were in unquestionable positions of authority,” he writes.
Demotion. A common punishment was demoting an enslaved person to a less desirable work assignment, such as sending a house slave or craftsman to work in the fields.
Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, rape, and imprisonment.
Slaves often found themselves rented out, used as prizes in lotteries, or as wagers in card games and horse races. Separation from family and friends was probably the greatest fear a black person in slavery faced. When a master died, his slaves were often sold for the benefit of his heirs.
Mothers were taken from their own children to nurse the offspring of their masters. And slave children were torn from mothers and brought into the house to be raised alongside the master's sons and daughters.
Slave collar. Slave collars made of iron were used to discipline and identify slaves who were considered risks of becoming runaways.
Escaped slaves often faced harsh punishments after being captured, such as amputation of limbs, whippings, branding, and hobbling. Individuals who aided fugitive slaves were charged and punished under this law. In the case of Ableman v.
The whip that was used to do such damage to the slaves was called a “cat-of-nine tails”. It was a whip that was woven and flowed into nine separate pieces. Each piece had a knot in the middle, and broken glass, and nails at the very end.
What did slaves fear more than physical punishment? Separation from their families.
During the winter, slaves toiled for around eight hours each day, while in the summer the workday might have been as long as fourteen hours.
At the age of sixteen, enslaved boys and girls were considered full-fledged workers, tasked as farm laborers or forced into trades.
During their limited leisure hours, particularly on Sundays and holidays, slaves engaged in singing and dancing. Though slaves used a variety of musical instruments, they also engaged in the practice of "patting juba" or the clapping of hands in a highly complex and rhythmic fashion.
The oldest known slave society was the Mesopotamian and Sumerian civilisations located in the Iran/Iraq region between 6000-2000BCE.
As a symbol of subordination
In ancient Greece and much of Babylon, long hair was a symbol of economic and social power, while a shaved head was the sign of a slave. This was a way of the slave-owner establishing the slave's body as their property by literally removing a part of their personhood and individuality.
The branding of African American slaves was widespread and was performed either for identification purposes or as a punishment. The bodily areas branded varied in location, such as the back, shoulder, or abdomen, with the face being a favorite site for punishment.
It should be mentioned that not only did enslaved Blacks process and dye the cotton denim that became blue jeans, they also wore them because they were the only fabric sturdy and durable enough to be worn while engaging nonstop in brutal “slave” labor.
It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children.
While some women attempted not to become mothers, and a minority were unable to reproduce, most women negotiated childbirth and raising children within the confines of the slave regime, and they took a lot of care in raising their daughters to survive enslavement as females.
The risk of sale in the international slave trade peaked between the ages of fifteen and twenty five, but the vulnerability of being sold began as early as age eight and certainly by the age of ten, when enslaved children could work competently on the fields.
Slaves might attempt to run away for a number of reasons: to escape cruel treatment, to join a revolt or to meet with friends and families on neighbouring plantations. Families were not necessarily kept together by those who bought and sold them.
Running away carried heavy risks. If runaways were caught, they would be physically punished, usually by whipping, and might be made to wear chains or handcuffs to prevent them from running again. But if an escape was successful, they did not just gain their freedom.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."