I haven't done a comprehensive study of slavery in all times and places so I can't swear the American system was THE most brutal and I'll admit I tend to avoid, in most cases, reading too much about human cruelty to others because I find it extremely upsetting. I was furious at my history teacher in college for making us read 'Treblinka'…
I haven't done a comprehensive study of slavery in all times and places so I can't swear the American system was THE most brutal and I'll admit I tend to avoid, in most cases, reading too much about human cruelty to others because I find it extremely upsetting. I was furious at my history teacher in college for making us read 'Treblinka' which I figured would at least have a happy ending as it ended with a successful Nazi concentration prisoner revolt, but it was the most brutal thing I'd read to date and I was deeply disturbed by it. I consoled myself that I could put it out of my mind and forget about it, which I did, and all I remember now is descriptions of the 'black humour' (not racial, the very dark humour you find from people in very dark places) and the fact that like 300 pages later, the goddamn happy ending didn't come until like the last three pages. I was pissed.
Worst thing I've read *since* then was intentional, "Hitler's Willing Executioners", which surpasses Treblinka in horror (it makes Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning look like a fucking fairy tale) but I read it about ten years ago, trying to understand the nature of evil and two things that have always struck me as speaking to the core of human evil are lynchings, which Steve has gotten into already and I will add "Ditto, and I read one on Medium a few months back that SO horrified me about what was done to a black woman in the 1930s that I'm like, the ones who just got hung had it easy. The brutality of lynchings post-Civil War are a strong argument for how much hatred white people of the day had for black people for reasons I doubt I will ever understand. Several years prior, I was surprised to find human beings HAD been burnt at the stake here, if not as much as in Europe, and pretty much only black men in particularly brutal killings. No witches in Salem or anywhere else in the Colonies were ever burnt at the stake.
I got my information from Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents" which someone gave me for Christmas a few years ago. I thought, "Oh shit, I wonder if this is one of those lefty-extremist things," but I thought it was quite good, even though I would suggest she is a little too lefty on anti/racism for my taste. BUT....I checked out at least a few of her claims and found them valid. Like that the Nazis' Final Solution was inspired in part by the really hardcore, stratified racism found in the US at the time. Wilkerson also pointed out that whites were even stratified amongst themselves in the early 20th century which was another, "Holy fuck, she nailed it," moment as I was compiling and outlining family history on my mother's side with my uncle and I'd laughed with him about how our formerly moneyed family managed to lose it all by marrying the 'wrong people' - not POC, but people of the 'wrong' European ethnic lineage, including one whose family disowned them because he married...<gasp!> AN AMERICAN! What Wilkerson described about the various European castes fit a little with what I found in our family history.
I checked this book out before I read it and I took Wilkerson to be a fairly credible source (I didn't make an exhaustive study of it, but I did the same before asking for '1493' when some nutty black Medium writer said I needed to read it. It's a well-regarded book and I got it for Christmas (it was on my list). Just started it last night.
Wilkerson's bio notes she's a Pulitzer Prize winner and also a winner of the National Humanities Medal, a NY Times bestseller (The Warmth of Other Suns) and a few other non-fiction awards. She quotes minister William Goodell in the 1830s writing that slaves had no right to ever fight back, defend themselves, has 'no protection and no redress," and furthermore was 'not capable of being injured'.
"Whipping was a geteay form of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism," wrote the historian Edward Baptist. Enslavers used "every modern method of torture," he observed, from mutilation to waterboarding. The chapter on "Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control" is the most difficult and brutal chapter to read, and I was quite glad when it was done (and it's only like seven pages). It gets into the whipping, so common that some slaveowners would whip 'the last slave to leave the quarters,' just to remind the others who was always in charge. The Nazis, by comparison, mandated 25 max lashes, but would make the prisoner count them and sometimes claim they counted wrong and subject them to a few more. American slaveholders, she says, sometimes went as much as 400 lashes. They were often branded, sometimes on the face, and castrations were common too (I actually know a little about castration from my study of the Middle East back when I was a belly dancer in a medieval society, although that didn't cover, obviously, American history). She describes 14 lb chains with metal horns radiating two or three feet from the skull of slaves who'd tried to escape. (I saw a distant cousin when I visited New Orleans in 2000, a 'slave collar' that fit loosely around the neck and with bells to warn the master if he tried to escape, and make it impossible for him to get far even if he did.) Then there was 'bucking', in whcih a slave was tripped naked, hands and feet tied, forced into a sitting position around a stake and rotated for three hours of flogginw tih a cowhide, as other slaves were made to watch. Then he was washed down with salt and red pepper. There's some other stuff in that I've skipped over, this shit is pretty bad.
When I was in New Orleans I saw a holding pen for slaves near the river in which they'd be crammed, sometimes for days on end, without any room to do anything but stand. When some of them died they just stayed there, propped up by the others until someone let them out. One story I heard - you can find this all over the Internet, but I've been unable to verify *all* the claims - was the infamous Madame LeLaurie, who was found having supposedly performed hideous Nazi-like experiments on slaves (early 19th century) including turning one into a 'crab' by breaking all her limbs and a few others whose memory I have repressed. Evidence, for this, we were told, was the newspaper that reported it the next day and you could buy a reproduction in souvenir shops that detailed the horrors but they were written in French and I really didn't need to read it even if they'd had it in English. There are some problems with the story - they supposedly found a lot of slave corpses inside that no one knew about, which is pretty questionable given how hot Lousiana gets in an era with no a/c. I've Googled this from time to time and while some facts are indisputable (Mme. LeLaurie existed, a slave girl jumped out a second-story window and fell to her death in the street, widely regarded as suicide, the mansion catchign fire, and some evidence of brutality) but some say she was 'no worse' than others of her time, and given the wanton cruelty even for the time alleged to her, I'm not sure what to believe.
American slavery was pretty bad, for sure, and if you an pick apart Ms. Wilkerson's claims you're welcome to. I know plenty of other cultures and times have been very brutal, but remember we're talking about slaves, not everyone in general. It struck me that cruelty and barbarism were used quite specifically to keep slaves in line, and often not even for that, just for the sheer 'fun' of the cruelty. Given how brutal lynchings were afterward, and some of the less violent bigotries Wilkerson describes like 'pollution', i.e., black bodies couldn't be in pools or touch white people lest they 'pollute' them, a quite common bigotry that's also fairly universal. I hadn't heard/read about it with American blacks, and I Googled on it and found yeah, that was a big thing in the early 20th century and then don't you know CNN had a story just a few days later about the history of 'pool politics' in the 1950s.
Like I said, I haven't made a comprehensive study of what was absolutely the worst slave institution ever, but I'd say American slavery is definitely a contendah.
Now let's see if Substack posts this long-ass response without losing it (I have it copied and pasted into email if it does :)
I was sincerely wondering if you had come across an expert judiciously weighing different forms and making the conclusion that the US had by far the most brutal in history; that would surprise me, but I like changing my mind due to evidence. What I'm hearing is more that you have recently been exposed to some especially wrenching examples from US history.
From what I've come across, slavery has always been pretty bad, everywhere. While the average treatment of the compliant subset of slaves varies across cultures, it seems pretty universal that (1) the treatment of escaping or rebelling slaves is almost always brutal, and (2) individual owners can have unbounded cruelty if they "own" somebody else.
I consider slavery near the top of pernicious practices that our species has adopted, due to a combination of how terrible it is on average and the prevalence of the practice. Sadly, it paid off and so was very widely practiced on large scale. When humans got the idea that they could "own" other humans like they would "own" a donkey, and thus gain control and rights to the fruits of their labor, it was a terrible path.
If you had recently read about how slaves were treated in the Caribbean, you might for a while believe that was the worst form the world had ever known - until you read the gory details of another example elsewhere.
Anecdotes about the worst recorded examples of some single system, or even of several systems, are not a good yardstick for general comparisons of slavery across cultures.
So rather than compare, let's just stick to what you said - we know it was terrible - without need to compare. Finding that someplace else was worse, or better, would not in any way make US slavery any more acceptable.
The only function I've seen for comparison, is in making a case that the worst behavior in human history deserves the most generous compensation in human history. Other than that sort of case making, I see no gain to making dubious comparisons.
Like I mentioned before, I haven't made a comprehensive study of slavery, and probably never will, it's not my wheelhouse. I'm reading more on race issues than I was before but avoid the 'woke' crap. I'll table my assessment for now because I can't provide a lot of historical analysis for my position, it's assembled over many years of the slavery issue occasionally passing my eyes. I also don't know enough about pre-colonial slavery, and particularly pre-European slavery in Africa, something I've tried to find information about but have not found much except for a Wikipedia article about it. Google it, and almost every result is about post-contact slavery and how bad it was. Since Africa is *still* the centre of slavery today, within as well as without, that would be a quite interesting comparison.
I haven't done a comprehensive study of slavery in all times and places so I can't swear the American system was THE most brutal and I'll admit I tend to avoid, in most cases, reading too much about human cruelty to others because I find it extremely upsetting. I was furious at my history teacher in college for making us read 'Treblinka' which I figured would at least have a happy ending as it ended with a successful Nazi concentration prisoner revolt, but it was the most brutal thing I'd read to date and I was deeply disturbed by it. I consoled myself that I could put it out of my mind and forget about it, which I did, and all I remember now is descriptions of the 'black humour' (not racial, the very dark humour you find from people in very dark places) and the fact that like 300 pages later, the goddamn happy ending didn't come until like the last three pages. I was pissed.
Worst thing I've read *since* then was intentional, "Hitler's Willing Executioners", which surpasses Treblinka in horror (it makes Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning look like a fucking fairy tale) but I read it about ten years ago, trying to understand the nature of evil and two things that have always struck me as speaking to the core of human evil are lynchings, which Steve has gotten into already and I will add "Ditto, and I read one on Medium a few months back that SO horrified me about what was done to a black woman in the 1930s that I'm like, the ones who just got hung had it easy. The brutality of lynchings post-Civil War are a strong argument for how much hatred white people of the day had for black people for reasons I doubt I will ever understand. Several years prior, I was surprised to find human beings HAD been burnt at the stake here, if not as much as in Europe, and pretty much only black men in particularly brutal killings. No witches in Salem or anywhere else in the Colonies were ever burnt at the stake.
I got my information from Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents" which someone gave me for Christmas a few years ago. I thought, "Oh shit, I wonder if this is one of those lefty-extremist things," but I thought it was quite good, even though I would suggest she is a little too lefty on anti/racism for my taste. BUT....I checked out at least a few of her claims and found them valid. Like that the Nazis' Final Solution was inspired in part by the really hardcore, stratified racism found in the US at the time. Wilkerson also pointed out that whites were even stratified amongst themselves in the early 20th century which was another, "Holy fuck, she nailed it," moment as I was compiling and outlining family history on my mother's side with my uncle and I'd laughed with him about how our formerly moneyed family managed to lose it all by marrying the 'wrong people' - not POC, but people of the 'wrong' European ethnic lineage, including one whose family disowned them because he married...<gasp!> AN AMERICAN! What Wilkerson described about the various European castes fit a little with what I found in our family history.
I checked this book out before I read it and I took Wilkerson to be a fairly credible source (I didn't make an exhaustive study of it, but I did the same before asking for '1493' when some nutty black Medium writer said I needed to read it. It's a well-regarded book and I got it for Christmas (it was on my list). Just started it last night.
Wilkerson's bio notes she's a Pulitzer Prize winner and also a winner of the National Humanities Medal, a NY Times bestseller (The Warmth of Other Suns) and a few other non-fiction awards. She quotes minister William Goodell in the 1830s writing that slaves had no right to ever fight back, defend themselves, has 'no protection and no redress," and furthermore was 'not capable of being injured'.
"Whipping was a geteay form of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism," wrote the historian Edward Baptist. Enslavers used "every modern method of torture," he observed, from mutilation to waterboarding. The chapter on "Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control" is the most difficult and brutal chapter to read, and I was quite glad when it was done (and it's only like seven pages). It gets into the whipping, so common that some slaveowners would whip 'the last slave to leave the quarters,' just to remind the others who was always in charge. The Nazis, by comparison, mandated 25 max lashes, but would make the prisoner count them and sometimes claim they counted wrong and subject them to a few more. American slaveholders, she says, sometimes went as much as 400 lashes. They were often branded, sometimes on the face, and castrations were common too (I actually know a little about castration from my study of the Middle East back when I was a belly dancer in a medieval society, although that didn't cover, obviously, American history). She describes 14 lb chains with metal horns radiating two or three feet from the skull of slaves who'd tried to escape. (I saw a distant cousin when I visited New Orleans in 2000, a 'slave collar' that fit loosely around the neck and with bells to warn the master if he tried to escape, and make it impossible for him to get far even if he did.) Then there was 'bucking', in whcih a slave was tripped naked, hands and feet tied, forced into a sitting position around a stake and rotated for three hours of flogginw tih a cowhide, as other slaves were made to watch. Then he was washed down with salt and red pepper. There's some other stuff in that I've skipped over, this shit is pretty bad.
When I was in New Orleans I saw a holding pen for slaves near the river in which they'd be crammed, sometimes for days on end, without any room to do anything but stand. When some of them died they just stayed there, propped up by the others until someone let them out. One story I heard - you can find this all over the Internet, but I've been unable to verify *all* the claims - was the infamous Madame LeLaurie, who was found having supposedly performed hideous Nazi-like experiments on slaves (early 19th century) including turning one into a 'crab' by breaking all her limbs and a few others whose memory I have repressed. Evidence, for this, we were told, was the newspaper that reported it the next day and you could buy a reproduction in souvenir shops that detailed the horrors but they were written in French and I really didn't need to read it even if they'd had it in English. There are some problems with the story - they supposedly found a lot of slave corpses inside that no one knew about, which is pretty questionable given how hot Lousiana gets in an era with no a/c. I've Googled this from time to time and while some facts are indisputable (Mme. LeLaurie existed, a slave girl jumped out a second-story window and fell to her death in the street, widely regarded as suicide, the mansion catchign fire, and some evidence of brutality) but some say she was 'no worse' than others of her time, and given the wanton cruelty even for the time alleged to her, I'm not sure what to believe.
American slavery was pretty bad, for sure, and if you an pick apart Ms. Wilkerson's claims you're welcome to. I know plenty of other cultures and times have been very brutal, but remember we're talking about slaves, not everyone in general. It struck me that cruelty and barbarism were used quite specifically to keep slaves in line, and often not even for that, just for the sheer 'fun' of the cruelty. Given how brutal lynchings were afterward, and some of the less violent bigotries Wilkerson describes like 'pollution', i.e., black bodies couldn't be in pools or touch white people lest they 'pollute' them, a quite common bigotry that's also fairly universal. I hadn't heard/read about it with American blacks, and I Googled on it and found yeah, that was a big thing in the early 20th century and then don't you know CNN had a story just a few days later about the history of 'pool politics' in the 1950s.
Like I said, I haven't made a comprehensive study of what was absolutely the worst slave institution ever, but I'd say American slavery is definitely a contendah.
Now let's see if Substack posts this long-ass response without losing it (I have it copied and pasted into email if it does :)
> "American slavery was pretty bad, for sure"
Let's agree on that.
I was sincerely wondering if you had come across an expert judiciously weighing different forms and making the conclusion that the US had by far the most brutal in history; that would surprise me, but I like changing my mind due to evidence. What I'm hearing is more that you have recently been exposed to some especially wrenching examples from US history.
From what I've come across, slavery has always been pretty bad, everywhere. While the average treatment of the compliant subset of slaves varies across cultures, it seems pretty universal that (1) the treatment of escaping or rebelling slaves is almost always brutal, and (2) individual owners can have unbounded cruelty if they "own" somebody else.
I consider slavery near the top of pernicious practices that our species has adopted, due to a combination of how terrible it is on average and the prevalence of the practice. Sadly, it paid off and so was very widely practiced on large scale. When humans got the idea that they could "own" other humans like they would "own" a donkey, and thus gain control and rights to the fruits of their labor, it was a terrible path.
If you had recently read about how slaves were treated in the Caribbean, you might for a while believe that was the worst form the world had ever known - until you read the gory details of another example elsewhere.
Anecdotes about the worst recorded examples of some single system, or even of several systems, are not a good yardstick for general comparisons of slavery across cultures.
So rather than compare, let's just stick to what you said - we know it was terrible - without need to compare. Finding that someplace else was worse, or better, would not in any way make US slavery any more acceptable.
The only function I've seen for comparison, is in making a case that the worst behavior in human history deserves the most generous compensation in human history. Other than that sort of case making, I see no gain to making dubious comparisons.
Like I mentioned before, I haven't made a comprehensive study of slavery, and probably never will, it's not my wheelhouse. I'm reading more on race issues than I was before but avoid the 'woke' crap. I'll table my assessment for now because I can't provide a lot of historical analysis for my position, it's assembled over many years of the slavery issue occasionally passing my eyes. I also don't know enough about pre-colonial slavery, and particularly pre-European slavery in Africa, something I've tried to find information about but have not found much except for a Wikipedia article about it. Google it, and almost every result is about post-contact slavery and how bad it was. Since Africa is *still* the centre of slavery today, within as well as without, that would be a quite interesting comparison.