Captioned Common mode of whipping with the paddle, this illustration is from an anti-slavery tract. In his The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972) John Blassingame describes punishments meted out by cruel masters; black men, he writes, were bent over barrels or tied down to stakes while paddles with holes in them broke blisters on their rumps (p.163).

Trial and imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola, Florida, for aiding slaves to escape from bondage (Boston, 1845). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-90726)

English

Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

NW0335

North America

"Paddling a Slave, U.S. South, 1845", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed October 2, 2023, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1255