{"id":31,"featured":0,"modified":"2025-01-24 19:53:34","latitude":32.7787570172323370343292481265962123870849609375,"longitude":-79.93617475032806396484375,"title":"Charleston Work House and \"Sugar House\"","address":"Intersection of Magazine and Logan Street","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/cf251b3165607fcb011aec7f6c56cedf.jpg","creator":["Joseph Williams"],"description":"

\u201cI have heard a great deal said about hell, and wicked places, but I don't think there is any worse hell than that sugar house.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Before South Carolina became famous for its prized Carolina Gold rice, there were several agricultural experiments conducted to determine what would be the most lucrative crop to cultivate here in the Lowcountry; among the various citrus fruits, indigo, and even silkworms, there was sugar. As the coastal region of South Carolina owed its earliest colonists to immigration from Barbados and other English-occupied Caribbean islands that specialized in sugar production, many early colonists were hopeful that this region would prove to be equally acclimated to such a lucrative cash crop as well. When the city\u2019s main workhouse, located at the intersection of Magazine and Mayzck (now, Logan) Streets, burned to the ground in 1780, the prisoners were temporarily housed in the defunct building on Broad Street that had formerly been the site for storing sugar until a new structure could be rebuilt. Once the structure had been rebuilt by the early nineteenth century, the conflation between the \u201csugar house\u201d and the \u201cworkhouse\u201d had become permanent.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After several conspiracies of a slave revolt\u2014most notably the plot Denmark Vesey led in 1822\u2014the workhouse became a site for the nearly exclusive corporal punishment of enslaved people.\u00a0 It was located directly adjacent to the city jail. If enslaved people were thought to have overstepped their boundaries, they would be brought here (as the wry euphemistic phrase went) \u201cfor a bit of sugar.\u201d Enslavers who did not want to sully their own hands by disciplining their slaves would pay a fee in order to have someone else commit this cruel act for them in their stead.<\/span><\/p>\n

The methods of punishment took many forms. Stockades were a simple but brutal form of torture. Prisoners\u2019 legs would be forced through a wooden plank, their hands would be tied by rope, and their necks would be fastened by a heavy chain to one of the beams in the damp, unlit cellar underneath the main floor of the building. Although he himself never was confined to the workhouse, William Pinckney, a former enslaved person, confirmed that, after having been confined for weeks at a time and deprived of any basic necessities, \u201csometimes the slaves died in [the] stocks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In between confinement to the stockades, whippings were especially common, and were typically employed by the use of a paddle, a whip, or even a cat o\u2019 nine tails. One particularly gruesome implement was known as the bluejay, and whenever it was applied it would puncture holes into the flesh. In \u201cRecollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave,\u201d a serialized account published by the abolitionist newspaper, <\/span>The Liberator<\/span><\/i>, one former slave, named James Matthews, recounts his horrifying experiences in the workhouse. After having escaped from his owner, Mordecai Cohen, Matthews was captured and taken to the workhouse for his punishment, where he was whipped upwards of two hundred times over the course of a two-week period. After suffering such brutal treatment, Matthews recalled that his back \u201cwould be full of scabs, and they whipped them off till I bled so that my clothes were all wet. Many a night I have laid up there in the Sugar House and scratched [the scabs] off by the handful.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Another form of torture employed in the workhouse was the treadmill. With its origins in humanitarian prison reform of the early nineteenth century, the treadmill was a device that sought to instill the proper work ethic within the inmate, supposedly to bring about their moral rehabilitation. The treadmill consisted of a cylinder that had a series of steps that the prisoner would step onto in order to keep the machine turning in order to grind corn down for further processing.\u00a0 Each step required one to exert a considerable amount of pressure in order to keep the cylinder rolling. After having been \u201cstripped entirely naked,\u201d enslaved people would be expected to do this for days on end wearing only \u201ca small piece of cloth round the body, and a cap was drawn over their face.\u201d Those who were considered to be too sluggish would have the backs of their legs beaten or whipped and with each step the enslaved person ran the risk of falling and breaking a limb.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another form of punishment practiced at the workhouse as well as elsewhere throughout Charleston were public punishments, such as whippings. Public punishments such as these were intended to reinforce the social mores of the time period. It should be noted that both races and sexes endured public whippings well into the antebellum period; however, as the decades wore on many aristocratic whites grew concerned that this practice\u2014meted out to Blacks as well as to whites\u2014effectively undermined white supremacy, as a \u201ccrowd of our colored population\u201d that congregated to view such a display could secretly relish in the \u201cdegradation of the white by the same punishment\u201d that their own race bore. Consequently, all whippings of white criminals would be held behind closed doors (such as within the confines of the city jail) while the whipping of Blacks would continue to be exposed openly for all to see.<\/span><\/p>\n

In our day and age, we should note that we are continuing to grapple with a discriminatory criminal justice system that metes out longer and harsher sentences to racial minorities than to white people\u2014similar to how punishments given to enslaved people in the workhouse differed greatly from those to white criminals in the adjacent city jail. The workhouse continued to be used as a house of corporal punishment after emancipation, until the building was razed after the disastrous earthquake of 1886. Tucked away out of sight and out of mind from the hustle and bustle of downtown Charleston, the suffering wrought at this site so many years ago proves to be an all-too-eerie analog to the fact that the pain and suffering of Black and Brown people in our twenty-first century criminal justice system remains equally absent from our attention today.<\/span><\/p>","sponsor":null,"subtitle":null,"accessinfo":null,"lede":"(CONTENT CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF TORTURE)","website":null,"related_resources":["Interview of William Pinckey to Agatha Aimar Simmons, <\/span>Agatha Aimar Simmons Papers<\/span><\/i>, Avery Research Center, Charleston, South Carolina.<\/span>","The Liberator<\/span><\/i>, September 13, 1838, September 30, 1838.
<\/span>","Walter J. Fraser, Jr., Charleston! Charleston!: The History of a Southern City<\/i>, (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989).
<\/span>"],"factoids":[],"files":{"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/cf251b3165607fcb011aec7f6c56cedf.jpg":{"id":309,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","title":"Sugar House","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/cf251b3165607fcb011aec7f6c56cedf.jpg","description":"Depicted in this lithograph is one of the few surviving representations of the Sugar House in Charleston. After failed cultivation of sugar cane on the peninsula shifted towards the much more lucrative rice crop by the early eighteenth century, the building was modified to instead serve as a house of corporal punishment for enslaved persons. When sending their slaves to be tormented there, masters would sometimes make the wry, insensitive joke that they had sent their slaves off to \u201cget a bit of sugar.\u201d Courtesy of Library of Congress."},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/f71afc227a197cdcdb07ca664c99163c.jpg":{"id":311,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","title":"Charleston Jail 1865","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/f71afc227a197cdcdb07ca664c99163c.jpg","description":"This lithograph from Harpers Weekly depicts the yard of the Charleston jail in 1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress."},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/75992b6b8e9f5ab4cffa9c4bdd0a4bbb.jpg":{"id":312,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","title":"Treadmill","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/75992b6b8e9f5ab4cffa9c4bdd0a4bbb.jpg","description":"This is a depiction of a nineteenth-century treadmill in use. As prisoners climbed the \u201ceverlasting staircase,\u201d guards would monitor their performance and would whip those who were perceived to be slacking. While considered to be a moral alternative to prevailing prison practices at the time, today we understand such an instrument of corporal punishment to be little more than torture. Courtesy of the Encyclopedia Britannica."},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/eb004a5189855ebb2cfa40f1388ba277.jpg":{"id":319,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","title":"Charleston Work House","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/eb004a5189855ebb2cfa40f1388ba277.jpg","description":"This lithograph from Harpers Weekly depicts an alternative view of the Charleston Jail in 1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress."}}}