Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie on Robert E. Lee and the whipping of the Norris slaves posted by Rad Geek 09 Jun 2014 9:52 am
This passage is from Bruce Levine’s 2013 study, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (Random House, 2013). Levine’s text includes an error of misreading the sources: in reading descriptions of the escape and whipping, he seems to have mistakenly parsed my sister Mary, a cousin of ours, and I determined to run away
as my sister, Mary (a cousin of ours), and I determined to run away,
thus mistaking Mary Norris for the unnamed cousin of ours
in Norris’s testimony (in fact, according to Pryor, inf., the cousin is George Parks).
Hundley was anxious to attribute such conduct to only the greediest and cruelest masters. In fact, however, cracking whips and piercing cries were heard throughout the South. Robert E. Lee liked to think of himself as a humane owner. But he could react as fiercely as any other when his power and authority were challenged. In 1859, three of Lee’s slaves–Wesley Norris, his sister, and a cousin named Mary–attempted to escape from the Arlington plantation. Recaptured in Maryland, the unfortunate people were jailed there for two weeks and then delivered back into Lee’s hands. Promising to teach them a lesson they would not soon forget, Lee had them taken to the barn, stripped to the waist, and whipped between twenty and fifty times each on their bare flesh by a local constable named Dick Williams. As the punishment proceeded, Wesley Norris later recalled, Lee
stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams towhich he did.44lay it on well,44. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters (New York, 2007), 260-261.
–Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (Random House, 2013). 11, 309n44.
March 14th, 2015 at 7:26 pm
First, from everything I have read (including Ms. Pryor’s book — and her notes), I have seen no proof that Lee had anyone whipped. As far as I know, Wesley Norris is the only person who ever (non-anonymously) made this claim. However, as it turns out the family of Mr. Norris, at the very time he used his name to libel Lee, was priming Congress to get 10 acres of land from the Arlington Plantation. Now that it can be established that Mr. Norris’ family may have had a motive for exaggerating this story and thus libeling Lee, it seems that Mr. Norris’ credibility must be brought into question. If you have questions, free feel contact me through the editor who has my address. Unfortunately, I found nothing in Ms. Pryor’s book about what the Norris family was trying to do at the time Wesley Norris’ allegation came out in print. If you find it, please send it to me…