fate is known, two died after being castrated; six were burned at the stake;
twenty-four were hanged. Kay and Cary concluded that “brutal slave pun-
ishments were both common and normative forms of punishment, encour-
aged by statutory law in order to cow the slaves into submission.”
To ensure punishment without delay and without harm to the owner,
slaves were subjected to special procedures. In North Carolina, from at
least 1715 on, they were tried without a jury, in special courts. If a slave was
condemned and executed, the owner was compensated from public funds.
The owner, however, had to establish that he had acted reasonably in the
affair. Under a law passed in 1753 in North Carolina, he would not be com-
pensated for an executed slave unless he stated, as of course he always did,
that for the previous year, the slave had been properly clothed and pro-
vided with a quart of corn each day as food. Some owners found in the law
a means of getting rid of a surplus or refractory slave at a higher price than
they could get on the open market. It was reported that “many persons by
cruel treatment of their slaves cause them to commit crimes for which many
of said slaves are executed”—so many, in fact, that compensation was abol-
ished after the Revolution, in 1786.
Except for the money involved, masters had little need to take a slave to
court. The “casuall killings of slaves” was legalized by the Virginia legisla-
ture in 1669 and reaffirmed in a further statute of 1705, which specified
that the master “shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation
for the same, as if such accident had never happened.” It was not until 1774
that the “malicious and wilful killing of a slave” would result in one year’s
imprisonment for a first offense.
Falling afoul the law or a master was virtually a certainty for newly
arrived, or “outlandish,” Africans. Traumatized by their capture and the
ordeal of the slave ships, confused by the life into which they had been
plunged, and bewildered by the commands they received in a language
they did not understand, they frequently failed to obey. Moreover, being
often unable to communicate with one another, both because of the variety
of the languages they spoke and because whites tried to prevent them from
“conspiring,” they could not give one another guidance. To hoe and cut
cane or pick cotton, only a primitive level of skill was sufficient.
Sufficient was not efficient. Many whites recognized this. However,
182 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA