Flogging, defined as punishment by whipping according to forms prescribed by law, was a common practice at the time of the founding of the United States. It was one of a number of corporal punishments, including branding, the pillory, and the stocks that were in general use at a time when prisons were employed more as a means to hold people already in the process ofjudgment than to punish or to rehabilitate and when many offenders were too poor to make fining them worthwhile. Flogging was also the most common method of punishing slaves, though no slave was entitled to the protections and limitations of the practice to the extent that these were prescribed in law for civilians.
With the creation of national armed forces during the Revolutionary and early republican eras—in the form of, first, the Continental Army, and subsequently the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy—flogging was the punishment of first resort to enforce subordination and the unquestioning obedience that were deemed essential for military operations. In drawing up articles of war in the Continental Congress in 1776, John Adams borrowed from the customs and practices of the British army and navy, though he also sought to prevent the excesses of the British codes, such as the naval ritual of flogging men round the fleet—a form of punishment administered to a man tied to a grate in a boat in which he received a dozen lashes alongside every vessel in the harbor—from entering into American law. Punishment for lesser offenses, such as drunkenness, were usually limited to a dozen lashes with a cat-o'-nine tails, to be ordered after only minimal or sometimes no judicial proceedings. More serious offenses, such as a first attempt to desert the service, could be punished with up to one hundred lashes after sentencing by a general court martial.
After the Revolution, flogging came under increasing criticism. In part, this was because it subjected the citizens of a new Republic that placed a high premium on the autonomy and dignity of the individual to a cruel form of punishment that was one of the defining characteristics of slavery. But it was also in part because of wider transatlantic changes, associated with the Enlightenment, in thinking about human nature and the causes of crime and deviance. Philosophers, religious leaders, and administrators believed that offenders could be reformed through changes to their environment and by encouraging them to repent of their erring ways, provided they were not brutalized by degrading and disfiguring punishments. For rehabilitation to occur, a range of carceral institutions, including asylums, penetentiaries, orphanages, and workhouses were established to create the circumstances under which offenders could develop the character and selfdiscipline necessary to function as useful and virtuous citizens.
Consequently, from the 1780s to the Civil War the states of the Union, with the exception of South Carolina, restricted and ultimately abolished the practice of flogging offenders in public and replaced it with various forms of incarceration, accompanied by regular work regimes. This did not mean, however, that flogging actually ended as a means of either discipline or punishment. It merely moved indoors and out of public view as almost all carceral institutions in the early Republic continued to use whipping and other forms of corporal punishment to enforce discipline within the reforming institution itself. And in South Carolina, not only did the state not abandon corporal punishments in favor of the penitentiary, it also allowed masters to send offending slaves to the workhouse, where they could be flogged for the payment of a fee.
Flogging in the armed forces was only minimally and far more slowly affected by these changes. From time to time, Congress would revise the Articles of War, but flogging remained the first recourse for punishment, in the case of the navy up until 1850. In the army flogging was abolished on the eve of the War of 1812. The change was made not so much for humanitarian reasons as from a more pragmatic awareness that potential recruits under a voluntary system of miltary enlistment might be reluctant to leave their local militias, where flogging was not practiced, to subject themselves to harsher forms of discipline. This reform had only limited success, and after 1815, as the number of immigrants in the ranks increased along with the number of desertions, the army became convinced that only the restoration of flogging would improve discipline. Accordingly, in 1833 flogging for desertion was reintroduced and remained in force until the outbreak of the Civil War.