On May 29, 1850, an enslaved man named Ellick stood seeding and hoeing in Thomas Mickle’s field. Hired out to Mickle, Ellick had already worked a long, hot day when Mickle approached on horseback to tell him that he would have to replant and re-hoe everything he had done. When Ellick protested that that would take all night, Mickle dismounted and threatened to flog him if he didn't return to his hoe. Ellick did so, but when Mickle rode off a little ways, Ellick suggested that it would probably be better for Mickle to hire somebody new to finish up. At this Mickle reared around and prepared to flog Ellick for his insolence.

This basic pattern of escalation—this uneven clash of wills between the well-armed and the defenseless—replayed itself thousands of times across the antebellum South. What fascinates me is both human beings' capacity for enduring such treatment and their occasional inability to take it any more. For whatever reason, on this day, Ellick ‘snapped.’ Some combination of circumstances—some brewing for years, others existing only in the moment—made it impossible him to endure his enslavement any longer. When Mickle moved to strike, Ellick said he wouldn’t allow it. Mickle then pulled a gun, to which Ellick responded, “shoot.” At this, Mickle discharged a load of squirrel shot into Ellick's leg, but Ellick remained unfazed.

“You see you have shot me,” Ellick said, but “I don’t care for you[r] gun.” Mickle then turned to report Ellick to his mistress (and presumably to get reinforcements or, one hopes, a doctor), but he hadn’t gone far when he turned to see Ellick coming on the run. Mickle unloaded both barrels into Ellick’s stomach. He was found by the jury to have committed justifiable homicide.

As a system of compulsory labor, slavery was by definition violent. Precisely how violent is difficult to say. Few overseers recorded every act of discipline on a plantation, though we do have one diary from a Louisiana planter who fired his overseer because the man was “good for nothing” and generally cruel to his slaves. Taking over the duties himself, he recorded administering 160 whippings in a twenty-three month period, roughly one every four and a half days. Most of these beatings were administered in front of the assembled slaves, meaning that a public beating was a spectacle they endured at least once a week. Some of the slaves were whipped for “rascality” or “misconduct,” but most were whipped for failure to work. Sixty of the seventy-seven slaves who worked in the fields were whipped at least once. Eighty percent of the male cotton pickers and 70 percent of the female cotton pickers were whipped one or more times in this two-year period.

Beatings were also the stock-and-trade of the Magistrates and Freeholders Court (see example below). While many slaveholders administered their own punishments, some counties like Spartanburg had court systems that would try slaves for infractions, sending the ‘guilty’ to the local jailor for whippings, incarceration, and (occasionally) hanging. Free blacks were also tried in the Magistrates and Freeholders Court and received like punishments. To be black, then, was to be beaten, and to be under the constant threat of a beating.

This is hardly news, however, nor is it particularly surprising that occasional acts of discipline ended at the morgue. On June 15, 1838 a slave named Peter managed to wrest the stick he was being beaten with out of his overseer’s hand and gave the overseer half a dozen good licks before he was subdued. Infuriated, the overseer was determined to force Peter to submit to the lash but Peter struggled so valiantly that the overseer finally had to settle for crushing Peters head with a stone. In a similar case in May 1844, two overseers were so exasperated by an altercation with a slave named Randal that they took turns lashing and resting until they had delivered more than four hundred blows. After his wounds were washed with salt to intensify the pain, Randal told them to go ahead and wash him with salt again—then he vomited and died.

Why dwell upon such encounters? Doesn’t it just reproduce all the indignities the black body was forced to endure? No. The disciplinary violence of the slave regime belongs to its perpetrators alone, who here have names. An enslaved man named Peter was stoned to death by Caleb Watkins. An enslaved man named Randal was beaten to death by Alfred L. Hughes and Sebourn Randolph. All of these men are dead. Justice will never be done. But there is a sort of justice in naming names and in recording what happened. “We cannot escape history,” Lincoln said, and I would like to believe that he is right. I would like to believe that our actions “light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

Moreover, as the cases of Peter and Randal suggest, the enslaved were not passive in the face of injustice but often heroically defiant, and their names too should be lighted down, even if this is all we can ever know about them.

All of these cases are clear cut. Morally we identify with Randal and Peter and abhor the conduct of Hughes, Randolph, and Watkins. Do we also identify with a slave named Appling, who found his mistress doing her chores next to the local creek and raped her? When he was done, the mistress told him he would hang for it. “I then told her, ‘might and might not,’” Appling told a fellow slave, “and then I took hold of her and held her head in the Spring branch until she was dead.” Is such conduct excusable? Certainly it is understandable, given the massive amount of violence and sexual abuse visited upon the enslaved. What about the case of an enslaved woman named Clarisy, who murdered her three children “by breaking their sculls with an axe and cutting [their] throats”? Or the case of the ten-year old enslaved nurse, Ceily, who killed one of her four-year old charges by pressing his head with a brick and choking him to death? Did enslavement drive them to this as well?

Possibly. Enforced illiteracy and daily violence degrade the conscience, even when you are their victim. The expectation that all slaves could have or should have risen above their brutalization to become proto-Civil Rights workers is both ridiculous and unfair. Some did, some didn’t. Some could, some couldn’t. Like any group of human beings, the enslaved must be granted their astounding variety of personality, character, and circumstance if they are to be granted their humanity at all.

NEXT: Coroners and Freedmen

Magistrates and Freeholders Court Cases (Spartanburg)