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 illustrationsmight be given, but let us be content with a few.
One of the arguments advanced by officers of the Navy in favour ofcorporal punishment is this: it can be inflicted in a moment; itconsumes no valuable time; and when the prisoner's shirt is put on,_that_ is the last of it. Whereas, if another punishment weresubstituted, it would probably occasion a great waste of time andtrouble, besides thereby begetting in the sailor an undue idea of hisimportance.
Absurd, or worse than absurd, as it may appear, all this is true; andif you start from the same premises with these officers, you, mustadmit that they advance an irresistible argument. But in accordancewith this principle, captains in the Navy, to a certain extent, inflictthe scourge--which is ever at hand--for nearly all degrees oftransgression. In offences not cognisable by a court-martial, little,if any, discrimination is shown. It is of a piece with the penal lawsthat prevailed in England some sixty years ago, when one hundred andsixty different offences were declared by the statute-book to becapital, and the servant-maid who but pilfered a watch was hung besidethe murderer of a family.
It is one of the most common punishments for very trivial offences inthe Navy, to "stop" a seaman's _grog_ for a day or a week. And as mostseamen so cling to their _grog_, the loss of it is generally deemed bythem a very serious penalty. You will sometimes hear them say, "I wouldrather have my wind _stopped_ than _my grog!_"
But there are some sober seamen that would much rather draw the moneyfor it, instead of the grog itself, as provided by law; but they aretoo often deterred from this by the thought of receiving a scourgingfor some inconsiderable offence, as a substitute for the stopping oftheir spirits. This is a most serious obstacle to the cause oftemperance in the Navy. But, in many cases, even the reluctant drawingof his grog cannot exempt a prudent seaman from ignominy; for besidesthe formal administering of the "_cat_" at the gangway for pettyoffences, he is liable to the "colt," or rope's-end, a bit of_ratlin-stuff_, indiscriminately applied--without stripping thevictim--at any time, and in any part of the ship, at the merest winkfrom the Captain. By an express order of that officer, most boatswain'smates carry the "colt" coiled in their hats, in readiness to beadministered at a minute's warning upon any offender. This was thecustom in the Neversink. And until so recent a period as theadministration of President Polk, when the historian Bancroft,Secretary of the Navy, officially interposed, it was an almostuniversal thing for the officers of the watch, at their own discretion,to inflict chastisement upon a sailor, and this, too, in the face ofthe ordinance restricting the power of flogging solely to Captains andCourts Martial. Nor was it a thing unknown for a Lieutenant, in asudden outburst of passion, perhaps inflamed by brandy, or smartingunder the sense of being disliked or hated by the seamen, to order awhole watch of two hundred and fifty men, at dead of night, to undergothe indignity of the "colt."
It is believed that, even at the present day, there are instances ofCommanders still violating the law, by delegating the power of the coltto subordinates. At all events, it is certain that, almost to a man,the Lieutenants in the Navy bitterly rail against the officiousness ofBancroft, in so materially abridging their usurped functions bysnatching the colt from their hands. At the time, they predicted thatthis rash and most ill-judged interference of the Secretary would endin the breaking up of all discipline in the Navy. But it has not soproved. 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 expresslaws laid down by Congress for the government of the Navy, a glaringinstance may be quoted. For upward of forty years there has been on theAmerican Statute-book a law prohibiting a captain from inflicting, onhis own authority, more than twelve lashes at one time. If more are tobe given, the sentence must be passed by a Court-martial. Yet, fornearly half a century, this law has been frequently, and with almostperfect impunity, set at naught: though of late, through the exertionsof Bancroft and others, it has been much better observed than formerly;indeed, at the present day, it is generally respected. Still, while theNeversink was lying in a South American port, on the cruise now writtenof, the seamen belonging to another American frigate informed us thattheir captain sometimes inflicted, upon his own authority, eighteen andtwenty lashes. It is worth while to state that this frigate was vastlyadmired by the shore ladies for her wonderfully neat appearance. One ofher forecastle-men told me that he had used up three jack-knives(charged to him on the books of the purser) in scraping thebelaying-pins and the combings of the hatchways.
It is singular that while the Lieutenants of the watch in Americanmen-of-war so long usurped the power of inflicting corporal punishmentwith the _colt_, few or no similar abuses were known in the EnglishNavy. And though the captain of an English armed ship is authorised toinflict, at his own discretion, _more_ than a dozen lashes (I thinkthree dozen), yet it is to be doubted whether, upon the whole, there isas much flogging at present in the English Navy as in the American. Thechivalric Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, declared, in his placein Congress, that on board of the American man-of-war that carried himout Ambassador to Russia he had witnessed more flogging than had takenplace on his own plantation of five hundred African slaves in tenyears. Certain it is, from what I have personally seen, that theEnglish officers, as a general thing, seem to be less disliked by theircrews than the American officers by theirs. The reason probably is,that many of them, from their station in life, have been moreaccustomed to social command; hence, quarter-deck authority sits morenaturally on them. A coarse, vulgar man, who happens to rise to highnaval rank by the exhibition of talents not incompatible withvulgarity, invariably proves a tyrant to his crew. It is a thing thatAmerican men-of-war's-men have often observed, that the Lieutenantsfrom the Southern States, the descendants of the old Virginians, aremuch less severe, and much more gentle and gentlemanly in command, thanthe Northern officers, as a class.
According to the present laws and usages of the Navy, a seaman, for themost trivial alleged offences, of which he may be entirely innocent,must, without a trial, undergo a penalty the traces whereof he carriesto the grave; for to a man-of-war's-man's experienced eye the marks ofa naval scourging with the "_cat_" are through life discernible. Andwith these marks on his back, this image of his Creator must rise atthe Last Day. Yet so untouchable is true dignity, that there are caseswherein to be flogged at the gangway is no dishonour; though, to abaseand hurl down the last pride of some sailor who has piqued him, besome-times the secret motive, with some malicious officer, in procuringhim to be condemned to the lash. But this feeling of the innate dignityremaining untouched, though outwardly the body be scarred for the wholeterm of the natural life, is one of the hushed things, buried among theholiest privacies of the soul; a thing between a man's God and himself;and for ever undiscernible by our fellow-men, who account _that_ adegradation which seems so to the corporal eye. But what torments mustthat seaman undergo who, while his back bleeds at the gangway, bleedsagonized drops of shame from his soul! Are we not justified inimmeasurably denouncing this thing? Join hands with me, then; and, inthe name of that Being in whose image the flogged sailor is made, letus demand of Legislators, by what right they dare profane what Godhimself accounts sacred.
Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman? asks theintrepid Apostle, well knowing, as a Roman citizen, that it was not.And now, eighteen hundred years after, is it lawful for you, mycountrymen, to scourge a man that is an American? to scourge him roundthe world in your frigates?
It is to no purpose that you apologetically appeal to the generaldepravity of the man-of-war's-man. Depravity in the oppressed is noapology for the oppressor; but rather an additional stigma to him, asbeing, in a large degree, the effect, and not the cause andjustification of oppression.