This whip that Lewis abolished was used on all occasions. A man was beaten because he did not work, and women were beaten till the blood flowed, because they suckled their babies during working hours, which extended, be it remembered, from five in the morning till seven at night—by law—with an interval of half an hour for breakfast and two hours for the mid-day meal. The women would protest that the little things were hungry and cried, but if the overseer or book-keeper were not kind that was no excuse. Presently there came a law that no slave was to receive more than thirty-nine lashes at once. It was time. They are said on occasion to have received more than 500. But there were ways of getting over the new law. There were men who kept within the letter and yet inflicted fiendish punishment. There is a story told of Barbadoes:
Two officers, Major Pitch and Captain Cook, hearing terrible cries, broke open a door and there found a negro girl chained to the floor being flogged by her master. The brute got out of their avenging hands—I am glad to think there was some pity in that world—but he cried exultingly that he had only given her the thirty-nine lashes allowed by the law at one time, and that he had only inflicted this number three times since the beginning of the night, and that he intended to give her the fourth thirty-nine before morning. This was long before Lewis's time. It was told by Wilberforce, when pleading for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
There were tales enough, of course, of this description and the case against the planters—some of them—was pretty bad. A youth of nineteen was found wandering about the streets of Bridgetown, Barbadoes, by General Tottenham in the year 1780. “He was entirely naked, with an iron collar about his neck having five long projecting spikes. His body both before and behind was covered with wounds. His belly and thighs were almost cut to pieces with running ulcers all over them; and a finger might have been laid in some of the weals. He could not sit down, because his hinder part was mortified and he could not lie down on account of the prongs of his collar. He supplicated the General for relief, for his master had said as he could not work neither should he eat.”
And the people of Bridgetown did not rise up and slay that inhuman monster! It took a long while for the West Indian planter to understand that a slave had any rights.
Clarkson tells a tale of a master who wantonly cut the mouth of a child of six months old almost from ear to ear. Times were changing, and he was brought to task for it. But the idea of calling masters to account was entirely novel.
“Guilty,” said the jury, “subject to the opinion of the Court if immoderate correction of a slave by his master be a crime indictable.”
The Court decided it was indictable and fined him £1, 5s.!
And yet that judgment is a great advance upon the times when the negro, as Mr Francis said in Parliament, was without Government protection and subject to the mere caprice of men who were at once the parties, the judges, and the executioners. He instanced an overseer who, having thrown a negro into a copper of boiling cane-juice for a trifling offence, was punished merely by the loss of his place, and by being obliged to pay the value of the slave thus done to death. He told of another instance, a girl of fourteen who was dreadfully whipped for coming late to her work. She fell down motionless, and was then dragged along the ground by the legs to the hospital, where she died. The murderer, though tried, was acquitted by a jury of his peers, because it was impossible that a master could destroy his own property!
Here is a story told by Mr Pitt at the same time. A passer-by heard the piercing shrieks of a woman coming from an outhouse and determined to see what was going on. On looking in he saw a girl tied up to a beam by her wrists, she was entirely naked, and was swinging backwards and forwards while her owner was standing below her with a lighted torch in his hand, which he applied to all parts of her body!
On the other hand, Mr Edwards told a story to the Assembly of Jamaica, of how some risen slaves surrounded the house of their mistress, who was in bed with her newborn child beside her. Imagine the poor woman shrinking down amidst the pillows, and round the bed these black savages with wild bloodshot eyes and cruel, grasping hands. The very smell of their naked bodies, their rags stained with blood and rum, would strike terror to her heart. They deliberated in their jargon how they could best put her to death in torment. But in the end one of them decided to keep her for his mistress. The vile broken patois they spoke made so much intelligible to her, and then snatching the child from her protecting arms they killed it with an axe before the poor mother's eyes.