Punishments In History
The common practice of early Americans that
seems most alien to me is that of
human punishment. During the seventeen and
eighteen hundreds, the way people
were punished was savage and crucial. Those
who punished others for a crime,
seemed to take matters in there own hands
and give punishments that were truly
too harsh compared to the crime
committed. One of the areas in which such
punishment was greatly visible was
in the slave institutes. Masters would treat
their slaves as if they were
‘animals’. It was crucial to see that the only
thing that differed Southern
and Northern stores was that those in the south
stocked "negro-whips" and
"mantraps" in their shelves. Whipping was the
popular way of punishing slaves
at the time, therefore stores made sure they had
that six to seven foot long
peace of cowhide, to sale to masters who wished to
beat there slaves. This
type of whip was not enough, for they began making whips
that had a platted
wire on the end so that it would hurt more and create more
damage to the
skin. I was shocked to read that a slave would get brutal whips
just for
simply taking a drink of water when it was not break time yet. If
looked at
carefully the slave had committed no crime yet was still whipped by
his
master. This is no way in which a human should treat another human, since
we
are suppose to be the intelligent, moralistic species of the world.
Whipping is
still nice, compared to other ways in which many criminals were
punished. At
times of great crimes, delinquents were faced with the
mutilating punishments of
the old penal laws, which included branding, ear
cropping, hanging and even
occasionally castration and burning alive.
Thinking of such punishment is harsh,
for I thought that the only things that
got castrated were the animals in my
grandpas’ farm. That is not all, since I
can not imaging a live human being
burned to death. Making such scenes even
more disturbing was that they were held
in public areas where many people
could gather and watch. In New Haven,
Connecticut, around 1810, Charles
Fowler, a local historian, recalled seeing the"admiring students a [Yale]
college" gathered around to watch petty
criminals receive "five or ten
lashes...with a rawhide whip." On a day of a
hanging near Mount Holly, New
Jersey, in the 1820’s, the scene was that of a
holiday: " around the place in
every direction were the assembled multitudes
– some in tents, and by-wagons.
This is obscene, for humans got a kick out of
seeing other humans get killed.
Where has the idea of morality and self-respect
gone for these people? Right
now you probably just imaging men getting such
punishments but that was not
the case, for women were often treated in the same
type of manor. In a
country tavern in Georgia, Margaret Hall summoned the slave
chambermaid, but
she could not come because the mistress had been whipping her
and she was not
fit to be seen. The next morning she made her appearance with
her face marked
in several places by the cuts of the cowskin and her neck
handkerchief
covered with spots of blood. In my point of view, a woman is not to
be
treated in such manor, for they are to be respected more than men. It is
not
that I don’t believe that people should be punished for doing things
they
shouldn’t do, but it should be reasonable. I believe in the idea of "Eye
for
an Eye", for if a person murders another, his/her punishment should be
death.
But for a person, who simply got into a fight with someone else,
death doesn’t
seem to be a reasonable way of punishing him. Instead he should
be given a
beaten himself so that he can see what it feels like. People in
the past seemed
to take things to far and not think about the situation
carefully. Thanks to
God, the old ways, so startling unfamiliar to the
modern reader, gradually fell
away. Americans changed their assumptions about
what was proper, decent, and
normal in everyday life and began to look at
life in a different view. Who
knows, perhaps our morals, to some future
observer, will seem as idiosyncratic
and astonishing, as I believe this type
of behavior is.