CRUEL AND NOT UNUSUAL
On the morning of October 29, 1865, a little more than five months after the end of the Civil War, an African-American private in the Union army named Jacob Plowden stepped out of his tent at Camp Shaw in Jacksonville, Florida, to witness a horrific sight. On the parade ground, two white officers had tied a shirtless African-American soldier by his thumbs to a scaffold. The man was dangling in agony, the toes of his feet barely touching the ground as his thumbs were pulled away from their sockets.
The soldier’s alleged crime: stealing a jar of molasses from the commissary that morning.
Plowden lost his temper. An ex-slave from Tennessee in his mid-40s who had become a farmer in Pennsylvania before enlisting in the Union army in 1863, he was appalled to see black soldiers treated with the sort of brutality inflicted on slaves in the South. Two years earlier, Plowden had defied an order to help a white
