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Chapter 9 A Peculiar Mark of Infamy: Dismemberment, Burial, and Rebelliousness in Slave Societies Douglas R. Egerton Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the trees and blood at the root, Black bodies swingingin the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. —Lewis Allen, Billy Holiday, "Strange Fruit" (1939) As dawn broke on August 20, 1796, Sheriff John Mosebyled William Harris , "a notorious thief" and an African American, from the Richmond city jail. A "great crowd of Spectators," white and black alike, had gathered to witness the macabre spectacle. Mosebyset about "blindfolding and tying up the criminal," before bundling him into "the Cart." The sheriff mounted next and accompanied Harris on the short but symbolic parade to the town gallows,near Fifteenth and Broad Streets.1 The black man died, an example made of him. But at least he died unbroken and physicallyintact; as far as the record indicates, he remained so after death. In many parts of the South, however,whitejudges commonly sentenced rebellious bondmen to be turned over to local surgeons for mutilation following their execution, a practice that had little to do with the training of young doctors. In extreme cases, or in times of servile unrest, white authorities resorted to torture and dismemberment while the accused remained alive.Africans, and manyAfrican Americans, believed that an unnatural death, or the failure to observe proper burial rites, doomed the soul to wander forever in the desolate waste of the damned, unable to serve as that protecting ancestor to whom later generations might appeal for assistance. Some discerning magistrates adjudged that a refusal to allow bondwomen to bury their husbands constituted a proper lesson; other slaves, forced to watch public executions, would be thus dissuaded from 150 Douglas R. Egerton further resistance. To discourage slavesfrom committing crimes, purveyors of southern "justice" operated according to a terrifying logic. In theory, domination over enslaved bodies was the responsibility of individual masters, though their power emanated from colonial or state laws enjoining slave owners to maintain a docile labor force. Eighteenthcentury English statutes varied from colony to colony, but all condoned a ghastly varietyof tortures. Branding, burning, hamstringing runaways,amputating limbs, castrating accused rapists, and conducting private executions were recognized tools of the American master class. In Middlesex County, Virginia, a minister and two of his flock beat and kicked to death one of the clergyman's bondmen who had attempted to run away. Another master chopped off the toes of a slave for "lying out and doing Severall Misdemeanors." Down the coast, in Charles Town (later shortened to Charleston), South Carolina, urban masters consigned their recalcitrant slaves to the 1768 workhouse, known formallyas the House of Correction. Sensitive owners, one resident of the town observed, frequently ordered "refractory slaves"to the workhouse "with a note from the owner directing a specific number of lashes to be given." The "whipping-room" was constructed of double walls filled with sand to muffle inmates' screams. Masters who preferred not to do their own whipping paid a price for their squeamishness: each visit to the workhouse cost a lordly twenty-five cents.2 As the most visible sign of patriarchal command in Charleston, the imposing , tax-supported workhouse served to remind the lowcountry'sblack majority that the line between private and public authority wasan exceedingly vague one. The planter-politicians who drafted the colonial statutes that allowed their overseers—or the workhouse warden—to carve off the ears of a belligerent slave were the same men who convened county courts when plantation punishments failed to enforce racial control. Because Southern courts tried slaves as both men and property, it followed that their sentences focused more on the body than on the accused as human agents. When a Greene County, North Carolina, court found a slave named Scott guilty of murdering another bondman, it sought not to rehabilitate the man but rather to discipline the body. Scott received the biblical thirty-nine lashes, "severely but not barbarously inflicted," at five different places in the county, before a large M (for murder) wasbranded on his right cheek.3 If North Carolina magistrates employed Scott's battered body as a symbol of the rule of order, he was nonetheless lucky to have preserved his body from mutilation; he had, after all, only murdered another slave. On the other hand, American courts were traditionally ferocious when white lives were threatened. In 1712, a group of enslaved Coromantee torched a building in NewYork City's east ward and...

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