[The following takes place during the American Civil War, in the Confederate States.]
Frederick Law Olmsted witnessed slaves at their labors on a sprawling Mississippi cotton plantation: “They are constantly and steadily driven up to their work, and the stupid, plodding, machine-like manner in which they labor, is painful to witness. This was especially the case with the hoe-gangs. One of them numbered nearly two hundred hands (for the force of two plantations was working together), moving across the field in parallel lines, with a considerable degree of precision. I repeatedly rode through the lines at a canter, without producing the smallest change or interruption in the dogged action of the laborers, or causing one of them, so far as I could see, to lift an eye from the ground… I think it told a more painful story than any I had ever heard, of the cruelty of slavery.”
In Holly Springs, Mississippi, a planter punished his slaves by slitting the soles of their feet with his bowie knife. In Rankin County, a slave named Vinnie Busby watched her master, one Colonel Easterling, throw her mother across a barrel and whip her unmercifully. He also beat her father to a pulp on a regular basis for trying to visit his family from a neighboring plantation. “When he would ketch him he would beat him so hard ‘till we could tell which way he went back by de blood. But pa, he would keep a comin to see us an a takin de beatins.”
On one occasion, Easterling punished a slave by hitching him to a plow “and plowed him jes’ lak a horse. He beat him an jerked him ‘bout til he got all bloody an sore, but ole Marse he kept right on day after day. Marse kept on a plowin him till one day he died.”
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “Home.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 63. Print.
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