Explanation: Robert E. Lee, the foremost general of the Confederate forces in the US Civil War, was a Southern Gentleman™.
And by that, I mean a horrific fucking slaver using civility towards white people as a mask for immensely inhumane cruelty.
Robert E. Lee personally owned slaves that he inherited upon the death of his mother, Ann Lee, in 1829. (His son, Robert E. Lee Jr., gave the number as three or four families.) Following the death of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, in 1857, Lee assumed command of 189 enslaved people, working the estates of Arlington, White House, and Romancoke. Custis’ will stipulated that the enslaved people that the Lee family inherited be freed within five years.
Lee, as executor of Custis’ will and supervisor of Custis’ estates, drove his new-found labor force hard to lift those estates from debt. Concerned that the endeavor might take longer than the five years stipulated, Lee petitioned state courts to extend his control of enslaved people.
The Custis bondspeople, aware of their former owner’s intent, resisted Lee’s efforts to enforce stricter work discipline. Resentment resulted in escape attempts. In 1859 Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and their cousin, George Parks, escaped to Maryland where they were captured and returned to Arlington.
In an 1866 account, Norris recalled,
[W]e were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.
Washing lashed backs with brine or hot pepper juice was a well-known ‘additional’ punishment levied on flogged slaves in the American South, whenever the punishers felt like the slaves deserved it, or looked at them wrong, or if the slavers were just having a moment of pure fucking meanness.
It’s really sad how lionized Lee is despite being worse than average even by slaver standards.
Like, history is my center of interest. I am acutely aware that morals and norms are deeply contextual things, and that most people will grow up absorbing the morals and norms of the time and place.
But how can someone be such a piece of shit that their own slave overseer refuses to carry out their orders? The man’s job is literally to brutalize slaves, and HE thinks you’ve gone too far?
I thought it was somewhat common for wills to state that the slaves should be freed upon the owner’s death, perhaps as a way to assuage their conscience for something deep down they knew to be wrong, but it was rare for the slaves to actually be freed by the heirs?
Many wills put some form of provision on the freedom - such as, in this case, being within five years, rather than immediately. In most cases, however, the wills were carried out unless the heirs themselves found a strong reason to dispute them - even Lee here only asks for an extension, precisely because he does not have a strong legal basis to dispute the will on a fundamental level.
At the end of the day, it depended on how adept the heir - and their lawyers - were at manipulating the legal system, and just how bad the legal system of their particular state was.
Mass emancipation was unusual at this point in the South, though - slavery had become increasingly ideological in the South since the 1830s, with a whole bizarre system of philosophical justification for why brutalizing human beings was not only okay, but morally correct.
Explanation: Robert E. Lee, the foremost general of the Confederate forces in the US Civil War, was a Southern Gentleman™.
And by that, I mean a horrific fucking slaver using civility towards white people as a mask for immensely inhumane cruelty.
Washing lashed backs with brine or hot pepper juice was a well-known ‘additional’ punishment levied on flogged slaves in the American South, whenever the punishers felt like the slaves deserved it, or looked at them wrong, or if the slavers were just having a moment of pure fucking meanness.
It’s really sad how lionized Lee is despite being worse than average even by slaver standards.
Like, history is my center of interest. I am acutely aware that morals and norms are deeply contextual things, and that most people will grow up absorbing the morals and norms of the time and place.
But how can someone be such a piece of shit that their own slave overseer refuses to carry out their orders? The man’s job is literally to brutalize slaves, and HE thinks you’ve gone too far?
Notably, he got a cop to do the beating when the slave overseer thought it was going too far.
I thought it was somewhat common for wills to state that the slaves should be freed upon the owner’s death, perhaps as a way to assuage their conscience for something deep down they knew to be wrong, but it was rare for the slaves to actually be freed by the heirs?
Many wills put some form of provision on the freedom - such as, in this case, being within five years, rather than immediately. In most cases, however, the wills were carried out unless the heirs themselves found a strong reason to dispute them - even Lee here only asks for an extension, precisely because he does not have a strong legal basis to dispute the will on a fundamental level.
At the end of the day, it depended on how adept the heir - and their lawyers - were at manipulating the legal system, and just how bad the legal system of their particular state was.
Mass emancipation was unusual at this point in the South, though - slavery had become increasingly ideological in the South since the 1830s, with a whole bizarre system of philosophical justification for why brutalizing human beings was not only okay, but morally correct.