Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [55]
The courts, like slave-owners on their plantations, made liberal use of whipping and other forms of bodily punishment. The statutes, particularly in the early years of the nineteenth century, prescribed such punishments richly: branding, cropping, or even pinning a slave’s ears to posts. This last, for example, was the punishment for false testimony in Florida Territory; the slave had to stand this way for an hour.13 More and more, however, whipping became the punishment of choice. Imprisonment was not really an option. Slaves were supposed to work; and a slave in prison was a dead loss to his owner. In some southern states, there were virtually no slaves in the prisons. In South Carolina, 94.7 percent of the slaves convicted of crimes were whipped; 10 percent received some other or additional punishment.14 As Thomas R. R. Cobb put it, the slave “can be reached only through his body.”15 This meant the whip—or, in extreme cases, the gallows.
The gallows was by no means sparingly used. In Virginia, between 1785 and 1831, thirty-nine slaves were executed for raping white women; nineteen more were executed for this offense between 1832 and 1865. Rape was a serious crime in any event; but in the context of slavery and black-white relationships, it was something more: “an intolerable attack against slavery and white supremacy.”16 (Black-on-black rape, or white-on-black, were obviously not “intolerable.”) Capital punishment was an important pillar of the southern social-control system. Hanging a slave from the gallows was a useful “ritual” to impress blacks with the futility of violence against whites; at these hangings, whites “made sure most blacks were in attendance.”17
But slaves were pieces of property, and valuable ones; when a slave swung from the gallows, a chunk of his master’s investment swung with him. Hence statutes in the South routinely provided for compensation to the owners of slaves put to death. Otherwise, owners would be tempted to cover up for slaves. So, for example, in Louisiana, the “public treasury” would pay the appraised value of “slaves sentenced to death or perpetual imprisonment,” up to a maximum of $750 per slave.18 In South Carolina in the 1830s, the legislature’s Committee on Claims handled claims for compensation for slaves put to death. As a rule, they recommended a standard $122.45 per slave.19
For what offenses could punishment be imposed on slaves? The answer is, basically, for all crimes whites could be punished for, and then some. The extra crimes were those inherent in the status of slavery (running away, insubordination, insurrection), and those necessary to keep the slave population in its place. Any act of insolence, even the use of “provoking language or menacing gestures to a white person,” was a crime.20 A wide range of activities was forbidden to slaves. Under the Georgia slave code, for example, slaves were not allowed to “enjoy the privilege of laboring, or otherwise transacting business, for ... themselves, except on their own premises”; an owner who allowed violations could be fined. Slaves could not rent houses or rooms; could not buy, sell, or trade any goods; could not keep “any boat, periagua or canoe,” or raise any horses and cattle. “Any person” could seize these contraband items and take them to a justice of the peace for public sale.21
Moreover, slaves (and “negroes” generally) were not to “administer any medicine or pretended medicine to any other slaves,” except at the “instance or direction