Frederick Douglass
One of the biggest reasons for the harsh punishments that slaves endured over minor offences was that their masters were trying to keep them under their control. Slaves were very cut off-they were not allowed to read or write. They were also sometimes separated from their families at young ages. As slaves are free-minded, free-willed people, there is always the possibility that they would rebel. The whole point of this was to keep them from rebelling. And if a slave did something majorly against the rules, they were punished even more severely to ensure that it would not happen again. The slave masters thought that if they used harsh punishments for even the most simple things, then the slaves would not want to step out of line again.