34. CHAPTER XXXIV.
SOME OF THE EVIL EFFECTS OF FLOGGING.
There are incidental considerations touching this matter
of flogging, which exaggerate the evil into a great enormity.
Many illustrations might be given, but let us be content with
a few.
One of the arguments advanced by officers of the Navy in
favor of corporal punishment is this: it can be inflicted in a
moment; it consumes no valuable time; and when the prisoner's
shirt is put on, that is the last of it. Whereas, if another
punishment were substituted, it would probably occasion
a great waste of time and trouble, besides thereby begetting
in the sailor an undue idea of his importance.
Absurd, or worse than absurd, as it may appear, all this is
true; and if you start from the same premises with these officers,
you must admit that they advance an irresistible argument.
But in accordance with this principle, captains in the
Navy, to a certain extent, inflict the scourge—which is ever
at hand—for nearly all degrees of transgression. In offences
not cognizable by a court martial, little, if any, discrimination
is shown. It is of a piece with the penal laws that prevailed
in England some sixty years ago, when one hundred and sixty
different offences were declared by the statute-book to be capital,
and the servant-maid who but pilfered a watch was hung
beside the murderer of a family.
It is one of the most common punishments for very trivial
offences in the Navy, to “stop” a seaman's grog for a day or
a week. And as most seamen so cling to their grog, the loss
of it is generally deemed by them a very serious penalty. You
will sometimes hear them say, “I would rather have my
wind stopped than my grog!”
But there are some sober seamen that would much rather
draw the money for it, instead of the grog itself, as provided
by law; but they are too often deterred from this by the
thought of receiving a scourging for some inconsiderable offence,
as a substitute for the stopping of their spirits. This is
a most serious obstacle to the cause of temperance in the Navy.
But, in many cases, even the reluctant drawing of his grog can
not exempt a prudent seaman from ignominy; for besides the
formal administering of the “cat” at the gangway for petty
offences, he is liable to the “colt,” or rope's-end, a bit of ratlin-stuff,
indiscriminately applied—without stripping the victim
—at any time, and in any part of the ship, at the merest wink
from the Captain. By an express order of that officer, most
boatswain's mates carry the “colt” coiled in their hats, in
readiness to be administered at a minute's warning upon any
offender. This was the custom in the Neversink. And until
so recent a period as the administration of President Polk,
when the historian Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy, officially
interposed, it was an almost universal thing for the officers of
the watch, at their own discretion, to inflict chastisement
upon a sailor, and this, too, in the face of the ordinance restricting
the power of flogging solely to Captains and Courts
Martial. Nor was it a thing unknown for a Lieutenant, in
a sudden outburst of passion, perhaps inflamed by brandy, or
smarting under the sense of being disliked or hated by the
seamen, to order a whole watch of two hundred and fifty men,
at dead of night, to undergo the indignity of the “colt.”
It is believed that, even at the present day, there are instances
of Commanders still violating the law, by delegating
the power of the colt to subordinates. At all events, it is certain
that, almost to a man, the Lieutenants in the Navy bitterly
rail against the officiousness of Bancroft, in so materially
abridging their usurped functions by snatching the colt from
their hands. At the time, they predicted that this rash and
most ill-judged interference of the Secretary would end in the
breaking up of all discipline in the Navy. But it has not so
proved. These officers
now predict that, if the “cat” be abolished,
the same unfulfilled prediction would be verified.
Concerning the license with which many captains violate
the express laws laid down by Congress for the government
of the Navy, a glaring instance may be quoted. For upward
of forty years there has been on the American Statute-book a
law prohibiting a Captain from inflicting, on his own authority,
more than twelve lashes at one time. If more are to be
given, the sentence must be passed by a Court Martial. Yet,
for nearly half a century, this law has been frequently, and
with almost perfect impunity, set at naught: though of late,
through the exertions of Bancroft and others, it has been much
better observed than formerly; indeed, at the present day, it
is generally respected. Still, while the Neversink was lying
in a South American port, on the cruise now written of, the
seamen belonging to another American frigate informed us
that their captain sometimes inflicted, upon his own authority,
eighteen and twenty lashes. It is worth while to state
that this frigate was vastly admired by the shore ladies for
her wonderfully neat appearance. One of her forecastle-men
told me that he had used up three jack-knives (charged to him
on the books of the purser) in scraping the belaying-pins and
the combings of the hatchways.
It is singular that while the Lieutenants of the Watch in
American men-of-war so long usurped the power of inflicting
corporal punishment with the colt, few or no similar abuses
were known in the English Navy. And though the captain
of an English armed ship is authorized to inflict, at his own
discretion, more than a dozen lashes (I think three dozen),
yet it is to be doubted whether, upon the whole, there is as
much flogging at present in the English Navy as in the American.
The chivalric Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke,
declared, in his place in Congress, that on board of the American
man-of-war that carried him out Embassador to Russia
he had witnessed more flogging than had taken place on his
own plantation of five hundred African slaves in ten years
Certain it is, from what I have personally seen, that the English
officers, as a general thing, seem to be less disliked by
their crews than the American officers by theirs. The reason
probably is, that many of them, from their station in life, have
been more accustomed to social command; hence, quarter-deck
authority sits more naturally on them. A coarse, vulgar
man, who happens to rise to high naval rank by the exhibition
of talents not incompatible with vulgarity, invariably
proves a tyrant to his crew. It is a thing that American man-of-war's-men
have often observed, that the Lieutenants from
the Southern States, the descendants of the old Virginians,
are much less severe, and much more gentle and gentlemanly
in command, than the Northern officers, as a class.
According to the present laws and usages of the Navy, a
seaman, for the most trivial alleged offences, of which he may
be entirely innocent, must, without a trial, undergo a penalty
the traces whereof he carries to the grave; for to a man-of-war's-man's
experienced eye the marks of a naval scourging
with the “cat” are through life discernible. And with these
marks on his back, this image of his Creator must rise at the
Last Day. Yet so untouchable is true dignity, that there
are cases wherein to be flogged at the gangway is no dishonor;
though, to abase and hurl down the last pride of some
sailor who has piqued him, be sometimes the secret motive,
with some malicious officer, in procuring him to be condemned
to the lash. But this feeling of the innate dignity remaining
untouched, though outwardly the body be scarred for the
whole term of the natural life, is one of the hushed things,
buried among the holiest privacies of the soul; a thing between
a man's God and himself; and forever undiscernible
by our fellow-men, who account that a degradation which
seems so to the corporal eye. But what torments must that
seaman undergo who, while his back bleeds at the gangway,
bleeds agonized drops of shame from his soul! Are we not
justified in immeasurably denouncing this thing? Join hands
with me, then; and, in the name of that Being in whose
image the flogged sailor is made, let us demand of Legislators,
by what right they dare profane what God himself accounts
sacred.
Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman?
asks the intrepid Apostle, well knowing, as a Roman citizen,
that it was not. And now, eighteen hundred years after, is
it lawful for you, my countrymen, to scourge a man that is an
American? to scourge him round the world in your frigates?
It is to no purpose that you apologetically appeal to the
general depravity of the man-of-war's-man. Depravity in the
oppressed is no apology for the oppressor; but rather an additional
stigma to him, as being, in a large degree, the effect,
and not the cause and justification of oppression.
