Corporal Punishment

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT. Like their civilian counterparts, military authorities feared the spread of insubordination and resistance from persons at the lower levels of society. The infliction of punishment preserved order. Enlisted men in the Continental Army not only suffered deprivations and hardships, but they also were subject to brutal corporal punishment. Officers, like the gentleman class in civilian society, did not receive corporal punishment; instead they were liable to correction by means of reprimand, fines, imprisonment, or dismissal from the army.

Americans became inured to physically brutal penalties under military authority during the French and Indian War. Provincials serving with British regulars were put under all the severities of the British Articles of War, which sanctioned various forms of physical correction and floggings up to as many as one thousand stripes. At the beginning of the American Revolution, however, the military codes governing the colony and then state militias, and also the initial Articles of War invoked by the Continental Congress, were lenient in comparison to their British counterpart. The Congressional Articles of War of 30 June 1775 replicated the Massachusetts military code of April 1775; no death penalty was provided for desertion, mutiny, sedition, and treason, and flogging could not exceed the amount stated in the Bible—thirty-nine lashes. George Washington, as commander in chief, successfully prodded Congress to enact a sterner Articles of War, and on 20 September 1776 a new such document expanded the number of offenses meriting the death penalty to sixteen and set the limit of lashes per offense to one hundred. Washington tried in vain to persuade Congress to increase the number of lashes; he argued that there was too wide a gap in the maximum penalty of either a hundred lashes or death. Of course, there was a way to go beyond the restriction: for especially nefarious culprits, courts-martial ordered a hundred lashes for each count charged against a soldier.

Although corporal punishment of soldiers in the Continental Army did not reflect substantially the wide-spread use of torture by the British, various odd forms of physical correction were employed by the Americans, mostly in regard to crimes of less than maximum severity. For drunkenness, soldiers wore the "clog" (or log): they were shackled to a segment of wood weighing twenty to thirty pounds, which was dragged around wherever they went. A variation was to wear a three pound clog around one's neck. Also reserved for minor offenses was "the cage," a wooden structure in which a culprit, fed only bread and water, remained standing for up to thirty-six hours. This punishment seems to have been similar to the British army's whirligig, in which a person stood and was whirled around.

Other than simple flogging, three means of correction induced great injury and pain. For the wooden horse, carried over from British practice, two boards were nailed together to form an inverted V. This device was given four wooden legs, and pieces of wood designating a horse's head and a tail were attached to either end. The culprit was straddled over the sharp ridge, with hands tied behind and feet weighted down. The wooden horse was moved along, with vibrations causing pain and ruptures. Some persons undergoing this penalty were emasculated. Because of bodily injury, the use of the wooden horse was discontinued after the beginning phase of the war.

Picketing, a punishment that appears to have been confined to cavalry and artillery units, often accompanied a flogging. The victim had his wrist tied to the top of an upright pole, and a heel rested on a sharp peg driven into the ground. The prisoner had to shift his weight to either his wrist or his heel, which in some instances was penetrated entirely by the peg. Because of the possibility of causing the permanent disability of a soldier, this punishment was seldom used by the Continental Army.

Running the gauntlet, a punishment chiefly for desertion, was used throughout the war, though infrequently. Eventually Washington refused to approve such punishment because it exceeded the number of lashes allowed by Congress and also left a prisoner disabled or even dead. However, American commanders outside the main army were apt to permit courts-martial to inflict running the gauntlet. A soldier running the gauntlet might have to pass through all of a brigade or even, in the rarest of situations, through the whole army. The victim was stripped to the waist and then compelled to proceed through parallel lines of soldiers, his progress being impeded by a sergeant going on ahead, moving backward, pointing a bayonet at the culprit's chest, thereby allowing soldiers, yielding hickory sticks, to make blows well laid on. A sufferer of this punishment was soon, in the words of a contemporary, "in one general gore of blood."

Flogging was the preferred correction, for trivial as well as major offenses. Although sentences for the same crimes varied, usually because of extenuating circumstances, patterns did emerge. For example, repeatedly being drunk brought twenty lashes; not cleaning arms, twenty-five; stealing the shirt of a soldier, fifty; and one hundred or death for desertion, plundering, or sleeping on duty. A man accused of the plundering of civilians might be summarily whipped. Stragglers could be whipped on the spot if they could not explain their absence from their unit. Flogging was a frequent occurrence at camp, sometimes occurring as many as ten times a day. Most of the punishments were inflicted at the regimental level, during morning or evening roll calls, or at guard mounting on the parade ground. The victim, stripped to the waist, was tied to a tree or post, called the "adjutant's daughter." Troops of his regiment (or, rarely, his brigade) witnessed the ordeal from a hollow square or parallel line formation. The punishment was under the direction of the regimental adjutant or, sometimes, the provost marshal. Regimental drummers and fifers—in cavalry units, the trumpeter—performed the whipping.

The preferred instrument for flogging, the cat-o'-nine-tails, consisted of nine knotted cords attached to a handle. Before fifty lashes could be delivered, the back of the victim "would be all out and like jell." Frequently punishment was stretched over several days, "in which case the wounds are in a state of inflammation and the terror of the punishment is greatly aggravated." Usually the victim was given a lead bullet to chew on. A former drummer in the American army, Samuel Dewees, recalled that upon completion of a whipping, the victim was untied and laid down with his face to the ground, and then pack salt was strewed over his back. His comrades then took a small paddle-board and "patted" it down, beating it thus into the gashes, and then laid him by for awhile until he recovered a little. Cruel as it seems, the salt was actually a form of mercy, as it cleansed the wounds and enabled them to heal (Hanna, Dewees, p. 203).

Corporal punishment in the American Revolutionary army did not have the desired effect of making for a more disciplined body of troops. It did not reduce the rate of desertion; in fact, camp brutality undoubtedly was one of the factors that impelled men to desert. Moreover, the cruelty affected recruitment. As Lieutenant Colonel David Cobb of a Massachusetts regiment said, "the Continental officers are so cruel and severe" that "men can never be got to serve under 'em."

In the officer corps no protest mounted against corporal punishment. General Daniel Morgan, who did not resort to it, was close to being a lone exception; Dr. James Thacher, an army surgeon, spoke out against it; and Dr. Benjamin Rush, for a while Physician General of the middle department of the army, after the war, stated that corporal punishment "increased propensities to crimes" and that "a man who has lost his character at a whipping post, had nothing valuable to lose in society." The civilian population voiced little demand for army correctional reform. This lack of concern is attributable to the existence of physical punishment in civilian life for persons deemed to be of a lower class; a realization that a large number of soldiers were riffraff and therefore needed stringent discipline; and the belief that only a well-ordered army could win the war. Only toward the end of the war did Washington express any qualms about the use of corporal punishment. He had never shown any sympathy for soldiers being punished, being concerned only that the punishment fit the crime. In general orders of 12 November 1782, Washington noted that to "reclaim" soldiers "who are not lost to all sense of virtue and military Pride," different "modes of punishment may be introduced which by awakening the feelings of honor will have a better influence than corporal."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin, Robert H. "The Administration of Military Justice in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, 1775–1783." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1976.

Bernath, Stuart L. "George Washington and the Genesis of American Military Discipline." Mid-America49 (1967): 83-100.

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Camus, Raoul F. Military Music of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976.

Cox, Caroline. "A Proper Sense of Honor:" Service and Sacrifice in George Washington's Army. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Hanna, John S., comp. History of the Life and Service of Captain Samuel Dewees. Baltimore: R. Neilson, 1844.

Neagles, James. Summer Soldiers: A Survey and Index of Revolutionary War Courts-Martial. Salt Lake City, Ut.: Ancestry Incorporated, 1986.

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Ward, Harry M. George Washington's Enforcers: Policing the Continental Army. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.