The Tragic Reality Of Slave Life

It’s April 10th, 1834. We’re on Royal Street, New Orleans, where the home of Deline Lori is burning. This kind of thing doesn’t stay secret for long in New Orleans. A crowd quickly begins to gather. They point anxiously to the upper floors of the mansion, to the tongues of flame licking the expensive drapes, to the thick plume of gray smoke rising into the warm spring air. Madame Lori is 47 years old.

She’s been married three times and has had six children. She doesn’t let a trifling thing like a house fire rattle her. She smooths out the folds in her extravagant dress, fixes her hair, and tells the bystanders:

“Everyone has been evacuated. There’s no danger.”

Her much younger husband, Dr. Leonard Lori, looks at the ground and he says nothing at all. But the Loris are not strangers to these passers by. Everyone on Royal Street has heard the stories. They’ve listened with fear and disgust at what goes on behind the closed doors of Lori Mansion. They’ve heard all about the 12-year-old Leah, the enslaved girl who fell to her death from this very building.

Leah was pursued across the rooftop, so the story goes, by none other than Madame Lori herself, brandishing a whip. So, the crowd does not take Delphine at her word. The locked door to the mansion’s slave quarters is an immediate red flag. They demand that she hand over the keys so they can check the quarters themselves and make sure that this unfortunate accident doesn’t descend into anything more unpleasant.

But Delane refuses to hand over the keys. The flames are now tearing through the upper floors. Those plumes of smoke have turned dark, oily black. There’s no time to lose. The crowd pushes past the lorries, ignoring their protests. They begin hammering on the door, heaving and hoing until finally it gives way.

And what they find inside will turn the stomach of even the most ardent supporter of the slave trade. The story of Delphine Lori and the depravity that took place inside her New Orleans home has passed down into Louisiana folklore. These days, it’s offered up as a sort of horror story, a ghoulish tale that sounds like something from a penny dreadful.

It’s the source of ghost stories and of creepy rumors of things that go bump in the night. It’s even been the inspiration for hit TV shows. But all of this forgets something very important. Delphine Lori was a real person, and her victims were real people, too. The nightmare endured by so many human beings at the Lori property is just one of the stories we’ll be exploring today as we plum the depths of life as an enslaved person in North America.

The transatlantic slave trade dominated the North American economy for some 240 years. It began long before the country of the United States was founded and was not abolished until the nation was almost 90 years old. This is the third part of our series on this hideous system of trade and trafficking which represents one of the darkest chapters in human history.

We’ve already looked at the capture of human beings on the shores of West Africa and the horrors of the Middle Passage. And we’ve examined the mechanisms of commerce and control that governed the slave markets in the new world and the conditions in which men, women, and children became commodities to be sold to the highest bidder.

In this video, we’re looking at what came next once the traumas of capture, crossing, and commodification were passed. What could these people look forward to? Well, what they could look forward to was a lifetime of indentured servitude and often more than a lifetime. Children born to enslaved parents would be enslaved themselves. The cycle would continue across multiple generations and all would be subjected to the same dehumanizing treatment.

But what was it really like? Slavery was practiced right across the 13 colonies and right across the United States. But shorter harvest periods and more economic diversity meant that slavery was less important to northern society. So the slave populations of states north of the Mason Dixon line tended to be smaller and these states emancipated their enslaved people earlier.

The biggest concentrations of enslaved people right across this 240year period were found in the south. This is where we find the vast farms and plantations that are so commonly associated with slavery. But each plantation was different. And so what your life was like depended greatly on where you were and who your owner was.

Some owners were relatively benevolent. And the word relatively is crucial here because life was never going to be easy. It just might be easier than elsewhere. As we’ll see later on, the worst plantation owners and bosses could be unimaginably cruel. But first, the working day. How this working day looked depended on whether your plantation operated on a taskbased system or a gangbased system.

The task system is exactly as it sounds. You were given a list of tasks to complete and when the list was finished, the working day was finished, too. So you might be ordered to pick a certain amount of a specified crop and once that was done, the remaining time left in the day would be given over to the enslaved people themselves.

But this didn’t mean leisure time. There would be no time set aside for that. Instead, people would be permitted to work for themselves, growing crops or hunting animals for their own dinner tables. Only after their bodies had been broken and their spirit had been exhausted by working for the master, would enslaved peoples be permitted to think about themselves and their own families.

Of course, these tasks might never end. Many enslaved people, particularly women, would be expected to provide domestic servitude in the house. These tasks included child care, cooking, washing, cleaning, sewing, food preservation, and domestic home manufacturing. This work could go on indefinitely as there was always more to do in the big house.

Historian Aisha Jaled describes how slaveolding white women delegated domestic tasks they didn’t want to do to enslaved women. White women’s freedom from domestic tasks was purchased at the expense of slave women’s toil. Once all the domestic tasks were finally done, enslaved women would need to repeat these labors all over again for their own families in their own homes.

The gang system, though worked differently. Labor was not organized by tasks, but rather by time. This system was sometimes called the sun up to sun down work, but this isn’t particularly true. Enslaved people would be woken around 4 in the morning by the overseer. In the southern states, where fieldwork was most common, this was always going to be long before first light.

They would eat breakfast swiftly, and then they would get to work in the fields. At lunchtime, they’d have a quick break to eat, and then they’d be back at it again. They would work on until the sun went down, often completing a 16-hour workday before they were permitted to return to their quarters to prepare their own evening meal.

This schedule would then be carried out Monday to Saturday. Enslaved people usually got Sundays off, but only because the Bible demanded it, not out of any sort of compassion or care. Enslaved people were purchased with one reason in mind, let’s remember, to work. And so, they weren’t treated as humans deserving of care and respect.

In the words of author Alice Walker:

“Enslaved peoples were machinery, but machinery that could be whipped if it didn’t produce enough fast enough. machinery that could be mutilated or even killed if the desire arose. Machinery that could be cheated cheerfully without a trace of guilt.”

And Alice Walker was not exaggerating.

Cruelty and bitter hardship were deeply ingrained into the lives of most enslaved people across the United States. In 1866, 3 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and one year after the end of the Civil War, the Wesborough Record related the following story:

The wife of an ex negro trader in Virginia said to a freedman who was skinning a live catfish:

“How can you be so cruel?”

“Why?” said the intelligent contraband. “This is the way they used to do me and I is going to get even with somebody.”

Whether or not this story is true is not particularly important. What is important is that it illustrates the sheer barbarity that enslaved people were subjected to, often for only the slightest infringement and sometimes no infringement at all.

One of the most disturbing images to emerge from the plantations is that of Peter, also known as Peter of the Scourged back or just poor Peter. Peter had been enslaved by Captain John Lions and sent to work on his 30,000 acre plantation in Louisiana. When the Emancipation Proclamation was made in January 1863, thousands of enslaved people began making their own bids for freedom.

But the Civil War had still not reached its end, and plantation owners in the areas of Louisiana, not under Union control, simply ignored the demands from Washington. And so it took Peter nearly 2 months to make his own escape. On April 2nd, 1863, he was photographed in Baton Rouge, shirtless and with a craze of welts and scars across his back.

Peter’s own account goes like this:

“I don’t remember the whipping. By and by, my senses began to calm. They said I was sort of crazy and tried to shoot everybody. I did not know that I had attempted to shoot anyone. They told me I’d burned up all my clothes, but I don’t remember that. They told me I attempted to shoot my wife first. I did not shoot anyone. I did not harm anyone. My wife tell me I don’t do these things when I come away. She thought I was dead with whipping.”

The upsetting image of Peter’s scars helped to change the public opinion of slavery. But Peter’s story is far from unique. It’s just that Peter was photographed while thousands of other victims were not.

Another story comes from Henrietta King. King testified that she’d been caught stealing candy. She was punished with the whip and she had her head crushed beneath the treads of a rocking chair. Henrietta was only 8 or 9 years old at the time. She reported that the beating had shattered her jawbone and permanently disfigured her. In her own words:

“It gave me a false face. Children laugh and babies get to crying when they see me.”

As well as whips, plantation owners and overseers used paddles to punish the people in their charge. A hot paddle was dotted with bore holes to ensure maximum agony and maximum damage to the flesh. Someone who witnessed the paddle in action described it like this:

“There was a puddle of blood on the floor just as if a hog had been killed. He then took a paddle and paddled her on top of that almost to death.”

The witness goes on to state what happened next once the beating was complete:

“The overseer made me wash the victim down with brine. They mix the brine very thick and rub it in with corn husks.”

Washing with brine is actually something that comes up again and again in these narratives. The former slave Andrew Boon remembered:

“After a beating, the blood sometimes would be running down their heels. Then the next thing was a wash in salt water strong enough to hold up an egg. Slaves was punished that way for running away and such.”

Other substances were sometimes used instead of brine. Tarpentine, hot pepper juice, and melted candle wax were all applied to enslaved people’s flesh after a whipping or beating. As one former enslaved person said:

“This is to keep the raw flesh from putrifying and to make it heal quick.”

Perhaps brine and corn husks and pepper juice were effective, and perhaps they really did promote quick healing. But it’s difficult to ignore the agony these substances must have caused. And if I’m being truly honest, it feels like there were other motivations involved, like causing even more pain to the victim and deriving some pleasure from the torment. It’s certain that some plantation owners did take pleasure in the beatings.

The historian John Bards examined the diaries of Bennett H. Barrow, a cotton plantation owner from West Feliciana in Louisiana. Barrow apparently used a mixture of methods to keep his enslaved persons in line. As Bards tells us, Barrow mentions:

“Handing, dunking them underwater, staking them to the ground, shooting them, raking negro heads, and forcing men to wear women’s clothing.”

BS’s research found that Barrow personally inflicted at least 160 beatings on the enslaved people on his plantation across just 23 months and he certainly seemed to enjoy himself. Bards continues:

“Some diary entries, for example, had a general whipping frolic or whipped about half today reveal indiscriminate violence on a mass scale.”

You might have noticed a grim sounding punishment from Barrow’s diary. Handsoring. Historian Robert William Fogle describes this as beating an enslaved person with the serrated edge of a broken hand saw. This brutal treatment is mentioned repeatedly in records from the time. The plantation owner, J.R. Long, gave the following account of what he did to an enslaved person who ran away in 1838:

“I gave him a real whipping and handaring, and he’s been a fine negro ever since. I told him he might run off if he chose and I would knock out one of his jaw teeth and brand him, and I intend to stick to my promise.”

It seems that J.R. Long’s warning did not work. However, the following summer, Long reported the following:

“Adam ran away from the overseer the other day. He come home to me at night and I branded him. He’s been at work since and has done fine.”

J.R. Long describes both branding and removing teeth from his charges. We’ve discussed branding in the previous video in this series, and it’s obviously a horrifically painful and dehumanizing experience designed to literally mark out an enslaved person as someone’s specific property, similar to how livestock are branded on farms.

Removing teeth, though, is a little more nuanced. It wouldn’t demarcate an enslaved person as the property of a particular plantation, but it was a sign that the slave was quote unquote badly behaved. In 1853, Charleston plantation owner Zyber Oaks sent one of his men to purchase an enslaved girl. The employee reported back:

“She is very badly whipped, but good teeth. The whipping has been done long since.”

Basically, Oaks didn’t mind too much that the girl had been whipped long since. He was more interested in her teeth. If she had teeth missing, this meant she was bad news in Oaks’s eyes. As usual, potential buyers blamed the enslaved individual for their supposed transgressions and did not question the savagery of their former owner.

Enslaved women and girls were regularly subjected to extremely unsettling treatment. As the power imbalance was so enormous on plantations, it was common for women to be sexually exploited by their masters. Often this was for the gratification of the master. Sometimes the abuse was designed to create more enslaved people who could then be sold.

Chris Franklin was enslaved in Louisiana in the 19th century and she later gave this account:

“There are lots of places where the young masters had heirs by girls. They sell them just like other slaves. That was pretty common. It seemed like the white women don’t mind. They didn’t object cuz it meant more slaves.”

Sometimes enslaved people would be forced into marriages together and ritually humiliated. Louisa Everett remembered her own forced marriage in Virginia:

“Well, the master told us that we must get busy and to do it in his presence, and we had to do it. After that, we were considered man and wife.”

Enslaved people were often subjected to weirdly sexualized punishments. When a slave runaway named Ginger Pop was recaptured in Louisiana, his master devised a bizarre and stomach churning punishment. As the witness, Joseph Rhymer, later testified:

“The master drove attack through the skin of his penis, attaching him to the bed rail. Then he hit him two or three licks and Ginger Pop pulled loose.”

By pulled loose, Rayma means that the skin of the victim’s penis tore open and he fell to the floor. Ginger Pop’s member was terribly mutilated, but it seems he survived his ordeal. When he attempted to run away again, he experienced yet more brutality. Rayma’s testimony continues:

“The master took a 10 penny nail and made several licks at it to drive it through his ear, but did not get it through. He then got a hand vice and screwed it on his ear several times and made the boy’s ear bleed.”

Ginger Pop did not live much longer. He died several weeks later, reportedly of infective chills. His miserable and humiliated condition likely accelerated his end. Now, all of this is probably a bit difficult to get your head around. How were plantation owners and overseers allowed to get away with such treatment? Surely, the legal codes of the state would come down hard on anyone who brutalized their slaves in such a way.

Well, yes, they would. Right across the South, there were slave codes in place, and these legal statutes prevented overly harsh punishments. In North Carolina, the killing of a slave could be considered murder from 1791 onwards. The same applied in Tennessee from 1799 onwards with the following exception:

“Any slave in the act of resistance to his lawful master or any slave dying under moderate correction.”

Similar laws were enacted in Louisiana in 1806, in Georgia in 1816, and South Carolina in 1821. So enslaved people should have had protection, at least in the eyes of the law. But they didn’t. And this was largely for two reasons. One, it was very difficult for black witnesses to convincingly testify to white judges and jurors, especially when the threat of retribution was so high.

And two, there were simply too many loopholes. A slave owner could say that they were doing out moderate punishment and the enslaved person died unexpectedly or they could invent some case of rebellion or recalcitrance to justify the killing. There was a system in place and in this system the white man was very much on top and so punishments often got out of hand.

Many enslaved peoples were severely beaten and sometimes these punishments were fatal. Enslaved people could simply be executed without a judge or jury and in a manner that would be considered cruel or unusual. In other words, these executions would be considered unconstitutional if they were applied to anyone else.

When an enslaved man named Ben killed the overseer Bird Carter at a plantation in Mississippi, the plantation owner Calvin Smith sentenced Ben to death. Smith and his men fashioned a barrel-like container for Ben. The container was only big enough for Ben to fit inside. It was said to be quote “just his length.” Into this barrel, Smith had driven a series of sharp nails. The point of each nail protruded through to the inside of the barrel where they punctured Ben’s skin and caused hideous wounds.

Torment was of course far from over. Ben was taken to the top of a hill and then according to the witness James Roberts, he was rolled down to the bottom:

“Of course, his whole body was a perfect jelly or perfect mince meat. Every particle of flesh was torn from his bones. The cask was opened and the jelly of his flesh was thrown into the river.”

A neighbor named Bellinger remembered seeing the process taking place and he recalled how Calvin Smith was sitting on a block laughing to hear the man’s cries. The one who was rolling wanted to stop, but Smith told him that if he didn’t roll him well, he would give him 100 lashes.

In other cases, enslaved people were burned alive. In 1842, three enslaved people, a girl named Margaret and two boys named Joseph and Enoch, allegedly went on a killing and kidnapping spree. Joseph and Margaret were apprehended while Enoch got away. Margaret claimed she had tried to prevent the murders and she was believed. Joseph said Enoch had put him up to it and he was not believed and so Joseph was swiftly sentenced to a summary execution.

The Boston newspaper, The Liberator, detailed Joseph execution. It appears Joseph was dragged to the bank of the Mississippi and chained to a tree. A bonfire was then built around him. Joseph asked first for prayers, then for water, and then finally, driven mad by the agony of waiting, he asked them to hurry up and light the fire.

The Liberator’s reporter describes the scene like this:

“Joseph watched unmoved the curling flame that grew until it began to entwine itself around him and feed upon his body. Then he sent forth cries of agony painful to the ear, begging someone to blow his brains out. At the same time, surging with almost superhuman strength, he leapt from the burning piles.”

At that moment, the sharp ringing of several rifles was heard, and he fell a corpse on the ground. He was then thrown into the fire and consumed, not a vested remaining to show that such a being ever existed.

The life of an enslaved person in the United States was an unending sequence of humiliations and backbreaking labors, often punctuated with physical assaults, which were sometimes fatal. It’s little wonder then, that some enslaved people decided that enough was enough. Slave rebellions occurred multiple times across the long history of the slave trade. Some of these rebellions were so bloody and so disturbing that they need to be examined in a video of their own. And we will certainly be covering them in more detail in the future.

So for now, let’s just say this. None of these rebellions were successful. All ended in bloodshed and death. And one in particular ended with the heads of innocent men, women, and children mounted on spikes along a Virginia roadside. Each and every one of these rebellions was an expression of pure desperation.

They are examples of what happens when a human being is stripped of all dignity and all hope. All that remains then is violence and the inevitable retaliation that follows. There was no upside to the life of an enslaved person. If they were lucky, they’d have an owner that didn’t give them the paddle or bind them in chains, but they’d still be locked into a life of thankless labor.

They’d still be denied education, opportunity, and a wealth of other basic human rights. For those who were less fortunate, that grim life would be tinged with violence and humiliation. It might end in a brief flash of rebellious descent, or it might just end in a dirty hvel once the work and maltreatment had finally broken body and spirit.

And yet, the United States still has an awkward relationship with slavery. So awkward that if you look at the comments of this video, you’ll find all sorts of interesting opinions. We’ll delve deeper into the legacy of slavery in a future video and try and deal with some of the modern conversations around it.

But as we near the end of this video, I’ll share with you the words of Olivia Williams, who works as a tour guide at the Mclo Plantation Museum in South Carolina. Williams has expressed her discomfort at the attitudes of some of her visitors. She worries that too many people visit Mleard in search of a rosetinted gone with the wind style fantasy of the antibbellum south. They do not wish to be confronted with the realities of slavery because such a confrontation might ruin their fun day out.

In Williams’s own words:

“Slavery was not that bad. That’s probably the number one thing we hear.”

To my face, people have said:

“Well, they had a place to sleep. They had meals. They had vegetables.”

For the College of Charleston historian Shannon Eaves, such views are nothing short of depressing. She says:

“They wouldn’t go to Avitz or Dhau and expect to hear a happy narrative and walk away cheerful because they have an understanding that this was a place of death and exploitation and forced labor.”

A slave plantation was just that. Even though, yes, this was someone’s home. Perhaps it’s this skewed modern perspective that makes slavery such a difficult subject to confront. For more than 200 years, enslaved people were erased from history. They had no agency and no visibility in society. The results of their labor were certainly visible. Results like the vast amounts of money brought in by cotton, tobacco, and other crops, or the palatial splendor of the sprawling estates that were built upon the blood and toil of enslaved people.

But the enslaved people themselves were not visible. So when modern tourists visit places like Charleston or Richmond or Baton Rouge, they come looking for a fairy tale, looking for an imaginary era of refinement, an era of mint jeulips and good old-fashioned southern hospitality. They do not come looking for the brutality and barbarity that took place behind the closed doors of these lavish homes.

Lavish homes like the one on Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which caught fire on April 10th, 1834. Our final story of this video, of course, is our first story. You’ll remember that when we left the Lori Mansion in New Orleans, it was on fire and a mob of passers by was desperate trying to break open the doors to the slave quarters.

Once they’d forced their way inside, the mob found that Delphine Lori had lied to them. There were still people inside the mansion and they had no way to escape. First, they found the source of the fire. This was a 70-year-old cook who had started the blaze on purpose. She was chained to a stove by a ring fastened around her ankle, and she must have known that a fire like this was certainly going to claim her life.

This suicidal act was a final cry for help. It was an attempt to bring about her own end all the more swiftly, as she was unable to bear the torment of life under the lores anymore. But now the cook had been spared this grizzly fate and now she would tell her rescuers what she had seen. She said:

“The Lores took people to the upper room, and those people never came back.”

The group now sprinted to that upper room. The New Orleans B reported what they found there:

“Seven people were found inside, more or less horribly mutilated, suspended by the neck, with the limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other.”

The seven were rescued. Some told their rescuers that they had been imprisoned in this manner for several months. An account penned by the writer Harriet Martinue a few years later described how the seven wore iron collars with spikes which kept their heads in one position. The cowhide stiff with blood hung against the wall and there was a stepladder on which this fiend stood while flogging her victims in order to lay on the lashes with more effect.

One of those who entered the property was the judge Gene Frantois Canon and he claimed to have witnessed an old negro woman who had received a very deep wound on her head who was too weak to be able to walk.

In the aftermath of the fire, the truth of what Deline and her husband had been up to was revealed. They had been subjecting their enslaved people to the most abject horrors and torments. And many of those people did not survive their torment. At least 12 people died in the Lori mansion between 1830 and 1834 and probably several more than this. The youngest was a girl named Leontine who died aged only 2 years old.

The revelations about the Lori mansion caused a riot in New Orleans. Fearing for her life, Deline Lori was forced to flee. According to Martin, she fled to Mobile, Alabama, and then she escaped to France. From Martin’s own writing:

“She is supposed to be now skulking about in some French province under a false name.”

In fact, that French province was likely Paris. It’s believed that Lori died in the French capital in either 1843 or 1849.

So, the discovery of such barbaric treatment was enough to cause public uproar on the streets of New Orleans. Had Deline not escaped when she did, she may well have met with a similar fate as some of the people she brutalized in her own home, which truth be told is probably what she deserved. And yet, this public anger was not enough to end slavery in Louisiana.

The practice continued for more than three more decades. It took a constitutional change and a civil war to finally rid the state of slavery. We’ll be looking at the end of slavery in more detail later in this series. Back in New Orleans in 1834, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind. The idea of someone mistreating their fellow human beings right there in the heart of the community, this was a big problem.

But as for the brutality and barbarity doled out behind closed doors on farms and plantations in other parts of the state, well, to the people of New Orleans, that was someone else’s business. So they asked no questions. They heard no lies. And they let the wheels of this murderous system keep on turning.