Slave holders confounded by slaves’ intelligence
The contribution of slaves to the building of the United States can hardly be overstated. This is not just because they did a huge amount of the hard work in the trenches, they also often had skills and knowledge that those who enslaved them did not.
Some of the “gentlemen farmers” who owned plantations had rarely dirtied their hands and did were not inclined to try. Slaves kept the farms going from the planting to construction to handling blacksmithing duties.
The competence of slaves presented a real problem for slave owners, though. It meant that, if they were able to escape slavery’s chains, the Black people who were held had the skills to live on their own. They did not need their white masters for survival.
Slave owners fooled themselves into believing that Blacks would live in misery were it not for the extremely basic food and clothing they were provided. Slavers believed that even those who ran away would try to find their way back to the “easy” life.
Wrong.
Slavers underestimated Blacks desire for freedom — the same as any human would have — in fact, slave owners underestimated Black people at every juncture.
Escaping Blacks confounded slave owners, who, incredibly, believed slaves were treated well. When a slave managed to get free, owners thought that cruelty would stop the escape attempts. Instead, it only convinced those who remained that they must also find a way out.
Among the individual stories are hundreds where Black people bear the marks in one way or another of slave owners who looked for any way possible to keep slaves from getting away.
Whipping was the most common punishment and it could be deadly. It was definitely brutal. The chopping off of fingers and toes, or first joints of those appendages was another punishment designed to keep slaves in line.
Branding was one option that owners used to both mark their “property” from others who might try to steal slaves and to help locate them if they escaped.
Other stories already published here have mentioned branded slaves. It had to take a special kind of cruelty to do that to another human being.
A Black man named Thompson (no other name available) knew that cruelty first-
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