Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/167

 From the above accounts, there are no less than sixteen sorts of extraordinary punishments, which the imagination has Invented in the moments of passion and caprice. It is much to be lamented that there are others in the evidence not yet mentioned. But as it is necessary to insert a new head, nnder which will be explained the concern which the very women take, both in the ordinary and extraordinary punishments of the slaves, and as some of the latter, not yet mentioned, are inseparably connected with it, it was thought proper to cite them under this new division rather than continue them under the old. It will appear extraordinary to the reader, that many women, living in the colonies, should not only order, and often superintend, but sometimes actually inflict, with their own hands, some severe punishments upon their slaves, and that these should not always be women of a low order, but often of respectability and rank.

Lieutenant Davison, Captain Smith and Dr. Jackson, all agree that it was common for ladies of respectability and rank to superintend the punishments of their slaves. Conformably with this, we find Dr. Harrison stating to the committee, that a negro, in Jamaica, was flogged to death by her mistress's order, who stood by to see the punishment. Lieutenant Davison also states, that in the same island he has seen several negro girls at work with the needle, in the presence of their mistresses, with a thumb-screw on their left thumbs, and he has seen the blood gush out from the ends of them. He has also seen a negro girl made to kneel with her bare knees on pebbles, and to w r ork there at the same time; a sort of punishment, he says, among the domestics, which he knows to be in common use.

On the subject of women becoming the executioners of their own fury, Dr. Jackson observes, that the first thing that shocked him in Jamaica was a Creole lady of some consequence, superintending the punishment of her slaves, male and female, ordering the number of lashes, and, with her own hands, flogging the negro driver if he did not punish properly.

Capt. Cook relates that two young ladies of fortune, in Barbadoes, sisters, one of whom was displeased at a female slave belonging to the other, proceeded to some very derogatory acts of cruelty. With their own garters they tied the young woman neck and heels, and then beat her almost to death with the heels of their shoes. One of her eyes continued a long while afterwards iu danger of being lost. They, after this, continued to use her ill, confining and degrading her. Capt. Cook came in during the beating, and was an eye witness to it himself.

Lieutenant Davison states, in his evidence, that the clergyman's wife at Port Royal, was remarkably cruel. She used to drop hot sealing wax on her negroes, after flogging them. He was sent for as surgeon to one of them, whose breast was terribly burnt with sealing wax. He lived next door, he states, also, to a washer-woman at Port Royal, who was almost continually flogging her negroes. He has often gone in and remonstrated against her cruelty, when he has seen the negro women chained to the washing-tubs,