FREE ESSAY ON CRUEL PUNISHMENT

CRUEL PUNISHMENT

Cruel Punishment
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.