In case there was any thought that slavery was NOT the very definition of “cruel an unusual punishment.”
Here’s an excerpt from Melvin Grigsby’s 1888 book, “The Smoked Yankee,” concerning a plantation along the Mississippi in 1863, he writes:
On that plantation I used to read the records kept by the overseer. It seems that every overseer of a large plantation kept a daily record. That record showed that there were negroes whipped, bucked, and gagged, and otherwise punished every day. Every negro who came from the field with less than his stint of cotton, received so many lashes. I saw there the same kind of instruments of torture that I afterward saw in Andersonsville. One machine was rigged for stretching negroes over a large roller, so that the lash could be applied to the bare skin.
