A painful remnant of St. Croix’s history was unearthed this week at the gates of Fort Christiansvaern in Christiansted.
On Wednesday, work crews were preparing the ground outside the gate to recreate the fort’s sentry box. But while they were removing non-historic asphalt they instead made an even more startling discovery: a seven-inch-in-diameter hole ringed by halved yellow Danish ballast bricks.
But the innocuous looking hole once held the base of something dreaded and reviled by the island’s enslaved Africans – the town’s whipping post, said William Cissel, historian at the National Park Service’s Christiansted National Historic Site.
"Although this is a tangible reminder of a brutal part of Virgin Islands history, it brings to life all the eyewitness accounts" of whipping as early as 1744, Cissel said.
According to archival information, Cissel said the hole would have held a seven-foot tall post made of a tropical hardwood. Atop the post were metal rings used to secure the tethers of the person in the unfortunate position to receive anywhere from 25 to 500 lashes, the latter usually being a death sentence from the loss of blood.
"It’s a very sad and painful part of our history, but it’s still history," said Joel Tutein, superintendent of the historic site.
Cissel said that by 1838, arbitrary use of the whipping post was halted by Governor General Peter Von Scholten. After that, those accused of violating the law had to go through the Danish Court system.
Nonetheless, the hatred for the whipping post was still alive 10 years later when thousands of slaves stormed Fort Frederik in Frederiksted and threw that post into the sea during the revolt that forced their emancipation, Cissel said.
Any remnant of whipping posts at Fort Frederik or St. Thomas’ Fort Christian are likely gone for good because of changes made over the years, Tutein said. That makes it even more important for the Park Service to tell the story of the estimated 50,000 Africans that were brought through Christiansted as slaves.
Part of the Christiansted National Historic Site’s mandate is to tell the history of the area. The Park Service's management plan for the site, which includes Fort Christiansvaern, the Scale House, Customs House and Steeple Building, calls for the agency to recount the history of St. Croix between 1735 and 1917, when the Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark.
So far, military, religious and trade histories have been interpreted, but not that of the enslaved Africans, Tutein said.
The discovery of the whipping post site, Tutein said, makes his effort to acquire the 250-year-old Danish West Indies & Guinea Co. warehouse building, now owned by the U.S. Postal Service, even more important.
The Park Service wants to spend around $10 million to renovate the building and turn it into a museum chronicling the history of the enslaved Africans who were brought to Christiansted, herded into the courtyard and auctioned off to cane planters from the stairs of the building.
The Postal Service, however, has placed the building on the market for $1.2 million. The Park Service is holding the position that ownership should be transferred, a position supported by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.
Tutein and Cissel, meanwhile, said they knew about the existence of the whipping post site, but thought they would never find its whereabouts. Tutein said he plans to recreate the whipping post as a reminder of what once was and is asking the community for input.
He promised to recreate the harrowing piece of history with as much taste as the tasteless episode can be retold.
"Unless you know where you’ve been," Tutein said, "you’ll never know where you are going."
