The Making of a Slave (Willie Lynch Virginia USA 1712)

This speech was delivered by Willie Lynch on the bank of the James River in the colony of Virginia in 1712. Lynch was a British slave owner in the West Indies. He was invited to the colony of Virginia in 1712 to teach his methods to slave owners there. The term "lynching" is derived from his last name.

“LET'S MAKE A SLAVE” is a study of the scientific process of man-breaking and slave-making. It describes the rationale and results of the Anglo-Saxons' ideas and methods of insuring the master/slave relationship.

How to keep a black man down

From one white slave plantation owner to another

Gentlemen, I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia, for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves. Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies, where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program is implemented.

As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious King James, whose version of the Bible we Cherish, I saw enough to know that your problem is not unique. While Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along the old highways in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasion.

I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree a couple of miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires, and your animals are killed. Gentlemen, you know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems; I am here to introduce you to a method of solving them.

In my bag here, I have a foolproof method for controlling your black slaves. I guarantee every one of you that if installed correctly, it will control the slaves for at least 300 years. My method is simple. Any member of your family or your overseer can use it.

I have outlined a number of differences among the slaves, and I take these differences and make them bigger. I use fear, distrust, and envy for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies, and they will work throughout the South.

Take this simple little list of differences and think about them. On the top of my list is "AGE", but it's there only because it starts with an "A". The second is "COLOUR" or “SHADE”; there is INTELLIGENCE, SIZE, SEX, SIZE OF PLANTATIONS, STATUS on plantations, ATTITUDE of owners, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill, East, West, North, South, have fine hair, course hair, or is tall or short. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of action, but before that, I shall assure you that distrust is stronger than trust and envy stronger than adulation, respect or admiration.

The Black slaves, after receiving this indoctrination, shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.

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Don't forget you must pitch the old black male vs the young black male and the young black male against the old black male. You must use the dark skin slaves vs the light skin slaves and the light skin slaves vs the dark skin slaves. You must use the female vs the male and the male vs the female. You must also have your white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us; they must love, respect and trust only us.

Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them; never miss an opportunity. My plan is guaranteed, and the good thing about this plan is if used intensely for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually distrustful.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Let's make a slave

It was the interest and business of slaveholders to study human nature, and the slave nature in particular, with a view to practical results. I, and many of them, attained astonishing proficiency in this direction. They had to deal not with earth, wood and stone but with men, and by every regard they had for their own safety and prosperity, they needed to know the material on which they were to work.

Conscious of the injustice and wrong they were every hour perpetuating, and knowing what they themselves would do were they the victims of such wrongs, they were constantly looking for the first signs of the dreaded retribution. They watched, therefore, with skilled and practised eyes and learned to read with great accuracy the state of mind and heart of the slave through his sable face. Unusual sobriety, apparent abstractions, sullenness and indifference indeed, any mood out of the common was afforded ground for suspicion and inquiry.

The original and development of a social being called "The Negro"

What do we need? First of all, we need a black nigga man, a pregnant nigga woman and her baby nigga boy. Second, we will use the same basic principle that we use in breaking a horse, combined with some more sustaining factors. What we do with horses is that we break them from one form of life to another. That is, we reduce them from their natural state in nature. Whereas nature provides them with the natural capacity to take care of their offspring, we break that natural string of independence from them and thereby create a dependency status so that we may be able to get from them useful production for our business and pleasure

Cardinal principles for making a Negro

For fear that our future generations may not understand the principles of breaking both of the beasts together, the nigga and the horse, we lay down the art. For if we are to sustain our basic economy, we must break and tie both of the beasts together, the nigga and the horse. We understand that short-range planning economics results in periodic economic chaos, so to avoid turmoil in the economy requires us to have breadth and depth in long-range comprehensive planning, articulating both skill and sharp perceptions.

We lay down the following principles for long-range comprehensive economic planning:

1. Both horse and nigga are no good to the economy in the wild or natural state.
2. Both must be broken and tied together for orderly production.
3. For an orderly future, special and particular attention must be paid to the female and the youngest offspring.
4. Both must be crossbred to produce a variety and division of labour.
5. Both must be taught to respond to a peculiar new language.
6. Psychological and physical instruction of containment must be created for both.

We hold the above six cardinal principles as truths to be self-evident, based upon the following discourse concerning the economics of breaking and tying the horse and the nigga together, all inclusive of the six principles laid down above.

Note that neither principle alone will suffice for good economics. All principles must be employed for the orderly good of the nation. Accordingly, both a wild horse and a wild or natural nigga are dangerous even if captured, for they will have the tendency to seek their customary freedom and, in doing so, might kill you in your sleep. You cannot rest. They sleep while you are awake and are awake while you are asleep. They are dangerous near the family house, and it requires too much labour to watch them away from the house.

Above all, you cannot get them to work in this natural state. Hence both the horse and the nigga must be broken; that is, breaking them from one form of mental life to another. KEEP THE BODY TAKE THE MIND!

In other words break the will to resist. Now, the breaking process is the same for both the horse and the nigga, only slightly varying in degrees. But as we said before, there is an art in long-range economic planning. You must keep your eye and thoughts on the female and the offspring of the horse and the nigga.

A brief discourse on offspring development will shed light on the key to sound economic principles. Pay little attention to the generation of original breaking, but concentrate on future generations. Therefore, if you break the female mother, she will break the offspring in its early years of development, and when the offspring is old enough to work, she will deliver it up to you, for her normal female protective tendencies will have been lost in the original breaking process.

For example, take the case of the wild stud horse, a female horse and an already infant horse and compare the breaking process with two captured nigga males in their natural state and a pregnant nigga woman with her infant offspring. Take the stud horse and break him for limited containment. Completely break the female horse until she becomes very gentle, whereas you or anybody can ride her in comfort. Breed the mare and the stud until you have the desired offspring. Then you can turn the stud to freedom until you need him again. Train the female horse whereby she will eat out of your hand, and she will, in turn, train the infant horse to eat out of your hand also.

When it comes to breaking the uncivilized nigga, use the same process, but vary the degree and step up the pressure so as to do a complete reversal of the mind. Take the meanest and most restless nigga, strip him of his clothes in front of the remaining male niggas, the female, and the nigga infant, tar and feather him, tie each leg to a different horse faced in opposite directions, set him a fire and beat both horses to pull him apart in front of the remaining nigga. The next step is to take a bullwhip and beat the remaining nigga male to the point of death in front of the female and the infant. Don't kill him, but put the fear of God in him, for he can be useful for future breeding.

The breaking process of the African woman

Take the female and run a series of tests on her to see if she will submit to your desires willingly. Test her in every way because she is the most important factor for good economics. If she shows any sign of resistance in submitting completely to your will, do not hesitate to use the bullwhip on her to extract that last bit of bitch out of her. Take care not to kill her, for in doing so, you spoil good economics. When in complete submission, she will train her offspring in the early years to submit to labour when they become of age.

Understanding is the best thing; therefore, we shall go deeper into this area of the subject matter concerning what we have produced here in this breaking process of the female nigga. We have reversed the relationships. In her natural uncivilized state, she would have a strong dependency on the uncivilized nigga male, and she would have a limited protective tendency toward her independent male offspring and would raise the female offspring to be dependent like her. Nature had provided for this type of balance. We reversed nature by burning and pulling a civilized nigga apart and bull-whipping the other to the point of death—all in her presence.

By her being left alone, unprotected, with the male image destroyed, the ordeal caused her to move from her psychologically dependent state to a frozen, independent state. In this “frozen psychological state of independence”, she will raise her male and female offspring in reversed roles. For fear of the young male's life, she will psychologically train him to be mentally weak and dependent but physically strong.

Because she has become psychologically independent, she will train her female offspring to be psychologically independent.

What have you got?

You've got the nigga woman out front and a nigga man behind her and scared. This is a perfect situation for sound sleep and economics.

Before the breaking process, we had to be alert and on guard at all times. Now we can sleep soundly, for, out of frozen fear, his woman stands guard for us. He cannot get past her early infant slave moulding process. He is a good tool, now ready to be tied to the horse at a tender age.

By the time a nigga boy reaches the age of sixteen, he is soundly broken in and ready for a long life of sound and efficient work and the reproduction of a unit of good labour force.

Continually through the breaking of uncivilized savage nigga, by throwing the nigga female savage into a “frozen psychological state of independence”, by the killing of the protective male image, and by creating a submissive dependent mind of the nigga male savage, we have created an orbiting cycle that turns on its own axis forever, unless a phenomenon occurs and reshifts the position of the male and female savages. We show what we mean by example. Take the case of the two economic slave units and examine them closely.

The Negro marriage unit

We breed two nigga males with two nigga females. Then we take the nigga male away from them and keep them moving and working. Say one nigga female bears a nigga female, and the other bears a nigga male. Both nigga females being without the influence of the nigga male image, frozen with an independent psychology, will raise their offspring into reverse positions. The one with the female offspring will teach her to be like herself, independent and negotiable (we negotiate with her, through her, by her, and negotiate her at will). The one with the nigga male offspring, she being frozen with a subconscious fear for his life, will raise him to be mentally dependent and weak but physically strong—in other words, body over mind. Now, in a few years when these two offspring become fertile for early reproduction, we will mate and breed them and continue the cycle. That is good, sound, and long-range comprehensive planning.

Warning: Possible interloping negatives

Earlier, we talked about the non-economic good of the horse and the nigga in their wild or natural state; we talked out the principle of breaking and tying them together for orderly production. Furthermore, we talked about paying particular attention to the female savage and her offspring for orderly future planning; then, more recently, we stated that by reversing the positions of the male and female savages, we created an orbiting cycle that turns on its own axis forever unless a phenomenon occurred and reshifted the positions of the male and female savages.

Our experts warned us about the possibility of this phenomenon occurring, for they say that the mind has a strong drive to correct and re-correct itself over a period of time if it can touch some substantial original historical base. They advised us that the best way to deal with the phenomenon is to shave off the brute's mental history and create a multiplicity of phenomena of illusions so that each illusion will twirl in its own orbit, something similar to floating balls in a vacuum.

This creation of a multiplicity of phenomena of illusions entails the principle of crossbreeding the nigga and the horse, as we stated above, the purpose of which is to create a diversified division of labour, thereby creating different levels of labour and different values of illusion at each connecting level of labour. The result of which is the severance of the points of original beginnings for each sphere illusion.

Since we feel that the subject matter may get more complicated as we proceed in laying down our economic plan concerning the purpose, reason and effect of crossbreeding horses and nigga, we shall lay down the following definition terms for future generations:

1. Orbiting cycle means a thing turning in a given path.
2. Axis means upon which or around which a body turns.
3. Phenomenon means something beyond ordinary conception and inspires awe and wonder.
4. Multiplicity means a great number.
5. Sphere means a globe.
6. Crossbreeding a horse means taking a horse and breeding it with an ass, and you get a dumb backward ass long-headed mule that is not reproductive nor productive by itself.
7. Crossbreeding niggas means taking so many drops of good white blood and putting them into as many nigga women as possible, varying the drops by the various tone that you want, and then letting them breed with each other until another circle of colour appears as you desire.
   
   What this means is this; Put the niggas and the horse in a breeding pot, mix some assess and some good white blood, and what do you get? You got a multiplicity of colours of ass backward, unusual niggas, running, tied to a backward ass long-headed mules, the one productive of itself, the other sterile. (The one constant, the other dying, we keep the nigga constant for we may replace the mules for another tool) both mule and nigga tied to each other, neither knowing where the other came from and neither productive for itself nor without each other.

Controlled language

Crossbreeding completed, for further severance from their original beginning, we must completely annihilate the mother tongue of both the new nigga and the new mule and institute a new language that involves the new life's work of both. You know language is a peculiar institution. It leads to the heart of a people. The more a foreigner knows about the language of another country, the more he is able to move through all levels of that society. Therefore, if the foreigner is an enemy of the country, to the extent that he knows the body of the language, to that extent is the country vulnerable to attack or invasion of a foreign culture.

For example, if you take a slave, if you teach him all about your language, he will know all your secrets, and he is then no more a slave, for you can't fool him any longer, and being a fool is one of the basic ingredients of and incidents to the maintenance of the slavery system.

For example, if you told a slave that he must perform in getting out “our crops” and he knows the language well, he would know that “our crops” didn't mean “our crops”, and the slavery system would break down, for he would relate on the basis of what “our crops” really meant. So you have to be careful in setting up the new language for the slaves would soon be in your house, talking to you as “man to man”, and that is death to our economic system. In addition, the definitions of words or terms are only a minute part of the process.

Values are created and transported by communication through the body of the language. A total society has many interconnected value systems. All the values in the society have bridges of language to connect them for orderly working in the society. But for these language bridges, these many value systems would sharply clash and cause internal strife or civil war, the degree of the conflict being determined by the magnitude of the issues or relative opposing strength in whatever form.

For example, if you put a slave in a hog pen and train him to live there and incorporate in him to value it as a way of life completely, the biggest problem you would have out of him is that he would worry you about provisions to keep the hog pen clean, or partially clean, or he might not worry you at all. On the other hand, if you put this same slave in the same hog pen and make a slip and incorporate something in his language whereby he comes to value a house more than he does his hog pen, you got a problem. He will soon be in your house.

Henty Berry, speaking in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1832, described the situation as it existed in many parts of the South at the time.

We have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which light may enter their (the slaves) minds. If we could extinguish the capacity to see the light, our work would be complete; they would then be on a level with the beasts of the field and we should be safe. I am not certain that we would not do it, if we could find out the process and that on the plea of necessity.

From Brown America, The story of a New Race by Edwin R. Embree. 1931 The Viking Press.