Like other slaveholders, he made full use of the “painful discipline” of which he spoke. In 1859, three of the people he enslaved on his Virginia plantation—a man named Wesley Norris and his sister and cousin—fled north and were captured near the Pennsylvania border. They were forced back to Lee’s plantation. Upon their arrival, Lee told them that “he would teach us a lesson we would never forget,” Wesley Norris later recounted. Lee ordered his overseer to strip them to the waist, tie them to posts, and whip the men fifty lashes and the woman twenty, on their bare backs. When the overseer
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