d lashes being
given in one case. Another journal tells of fifteen hundred lashes. He
also states that he never witnessed a military flogging, as he "found
the shreaks and crys satisfactory without the sight." Occasionally a
faint gleam of humanity seems dawning, as when we find Colonel Crafts
in camp before Boston in 1779 sending out this regimental order:

"The Colonel is extreamly sorry and it gives him pain to think he is at
last Obliged to Consent to the Corporal Punishment of one of his
regiment. Punishments are extreamly erksome and disagreeable to him but
he finds they are unfortunately necessary."

After that date the "cat" was seldom idle in his regiment, as in others
in the Continental army. Lashes on the naked back with the
cat-o'-nine-tails was the usual sentence, diversified by an occasional
order for whipping "with a Burch Rodd on the Naked Breech," or "over
such Parts as the commanding officer may apoint." There was, says one
diary writer of Revolutionary times, "no spairing of the whip" in the
Continental army; and floggings were given for comparatively trivial
offenses such as "wearing a hat uncockt," "malingering," swearing,
having a dirty gun, uttering "scurulous" words, being short of
ammunition, etc.

A New York soldier in 1676 was accused of pilfering. This was the
sentence decreed to him:

"The Court Marshall doth adjudge that the said Melchoir Classen shall
run the Gantlope once, the length of the fort: where according to the
custom of that punishment, the souldiers shall have switches delivered
to them, with which they shall strike him as he passes between them
stript to the waist, and at the Fort-gate the Marshall is to receive
him, and there to kick him out of the garrison as a cashiered person,
when he is no more to returne, and if any pay is due him it is to be
forfeited."

All of which would seem to tend to the complete annihilation of Melchoir
Classen.

Gantlope was the earlier and more correct form of the word now commonly
called gantlet. Running the gantlope was a military punishment in
universal use in the seventeenth century in England and on the
continent. It was the German _Gassenlaufen_ and it is said was the
invention of that military genius, the Emperor Gustavus Adolphus.

The method of punishing by running the gantlope was very exactly defined
in English martial law. The entire regiment was drawn up six deep. The
ranks then were opened and faced inward; thus an open pas