A Trajectory of Punishment

In the late afternoon of 20 July 1787, a group of convicts were working at the fortress of Kronborg by Elsinore. They were carting gravel. Convicts like these were known to their contemporaries as “slaves” and were immediately recognizable by the light chains they wore over their prison uniforms (see Figure 1).Footnote ¹¹ Only men were subjected to this punishment, typically administered by the army, even if not all such convicts had military backgrounds. At night, the convicts slept in prison barracks. During the day, they laboured, typically on fortifications or other military infrastructure sites. Their work was overseen by soldiers and the so-called slavegevaldigere – a job often given to elderly petty officers. The convicts in question were working under a slavegevaldiger named Johannes Rungrafft. He was sixty-one years old and had served more than thirty years in Denmark's mercenary army. The convicts liked him because, in his own words, he “did not maltreat any slave that worked under him”.Footnote ¹²

Figure 1.

Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809), En slave skubbende en trillebør (A Slave Pushing a Wheelcart), undated.

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

In Rungrafft's work gang were many ex-soldiers. One of them was Johan Lichtmannicke. He had been born in Vienna forty-three years prior. He had never married. Like most foreign mercenaries, he had been recruited in Germany. He had served six of his eight years when he “sold a pair of shoes and therefore had to run the gauntlet, but then pretended to have killed a person”, as he later recounted.Footnote ¹³ He appears to have served in the garrison of the capital. Thus, Lichtmannicke had resorted to crime but had attempted to manipulate the logics of punishment. Running the gauntlet was feared by many. It consisted of having to pass multiple times between two columns of fellow soldiers who were to strike you with a rod. Lichtmannicke was to do twelve passes. To avoid this, he had feigned murder, seemingly expecting to end his life at the hand of an executioner instead. To us, this choice, along with its method, seems puzzling. Still, in the eighteenth century, the spectacle of the gallows promised the individual a well-prepared end, assisted by a priest who would prepare you for the grace that Lutheran theology promised. This was such an alluring death that people would sometimes attempt to kill in order for themselves to be killed properly, instead of regular suicide, which carried a heavy stigma. This misuse of the law prompted a change in 1767 when it was decided that killing in order to kill yourself was no longer to prompt a swift end at the gallows but a lifetime in the slaveries or the prison workhouse, along with yearly floggings at the site of the murder.Footnote ¹⁴ Lichtmannicke was Catholic but evidently preferred Lutheran grace to the prolonged pain of the birches in the hands of his fellow soldiers. However, his story “was investigated and could not be proven, and therefore, he was sentenced to a lifetime of slavery”.Footnote ¹⁵ Because he had not actually committed the fictitious murder, he was spared the yearly flogging. From his entry into the muster of the Copenhagen Slavery, it does, at least, appear as if he was not made to run the gauntlet. He entered the prison in northern Copenhagen on 11 January 1785. He worked the Copenhagen ramparts and military construction sites for about two years until, on 10 April 1787, he was transferred to Kronborg.Footnote ¹⁶

As their crew was about to pick up and haul the last sleigh of gravel for the day, Lichtmannicke approached a fellow convict, Lars Brynildsen. Brynildsen had also been a mercenary soldier. He was Norwegian. Because Stavnsbåndet did not include the Norwegian parts of the composite state, regiments in Norway had a different composition than those in Denmark. Sometimes, Norwegians even found their way into the regiments garrisoned on Danish territories. Brynildsen had been part of a regiment based in rural Zealand when he had stolen and then deserted. Caught, he was sentenced to slavery in Copenhagen. There he had been part of a spectacular escape attempt in which he, along with four fellow ex-soldiers, had run from a worksite at the ramparts before trying to cross the channel separating Zealand and the smaller island of Amager. Each of Brynildsen's running mates drowned, but the Norwegian lagged behind and realized the danger just in time to turn back, making his way to shore where his pursuers apprehended him, beat him, and returned him to the prison.Footnote ¹⁷ Like Lichtmannicke, he was transferred to Kronborg, but for longer. He would later argue that he had not yet really come to know the Austrian newcomer. However, when Lichtmannicke asked Brynildsen if he could borrow his knife, he complied. Normally, Brynildsen used the small blade, about three inches long, to make wooden spoons in his spare hours in the slavery, thereby earning a little cash to supplement the allowances on which convicts lived. Lichtmannicke claimed that he needed the knife to remove a corn.Footnote ¹⁸

As the work concluded for the day, the convicts were mustered to return to the prison barracks. The slavegevaldiger Rungrafft walked next to the convicts. However, suddenly the officer felt acute pain “as if someone had hit him with a club”. He waved his arms around, and the convicts were alerted. The convict Per Persen Broballe then noticed “that there was a knife in Rungrafft's neck” and immediately pulled it out. No one had seen Lichtmannicke stab the officer, but he immediately confessed to his fellow convicts amid the confusion. The next day, a summary court was held in the sick ward where Rungrafft had been placed. The wound was bad but not fatal, and the officer was conscious as he heard Lichtmannicke recount his story. The convict was suicidal and had hoped to end his life. He held no grudges against Rungrafft, who had “never done him anything wrong”. Instead, he felt wronged on a different level: he had wanted to die since he was sent to the slavery, which he felt was “for a very small crime”.Footnote ¹⁹ Two weeks later, when a follow-up interrogation was held, he still regretted nothing but added that his troubles had continuously worsened. His initial crime of selling his shoes, which, being part of his uniform, were not his to sell, had been committed from “need and starvation”. He found his transfer to Kronborg had been an added punishment because “the slaves in Copenhagen have a better time and get a better allowance even if their work is much easier”.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, the taxing work of securing the fortress against coastal erosion made Kronborg the worst place in Denmark to serve a sentence. While, seemingly, Lichtmannicke had done nothing to warrant his transfer, other convicts, like Brynildsen, were sent to the Elsinore fortress as an added punishment if they ran away, caused unrest, or acted violently.Footnote ²¹

Of course, the 1767 decree meant that Lichtmannicke's hopes of using the law to his perceived advantage were futile. While he had committed a textbook suicide murder attempt, striking a well-liked officer without any premeditated ill feelings between them and, therefore, no ulterior motive, it was no longer possible to attain execution by such means. Instead, Lichtmannicke was transferred again. This time he was sent back to Copenhagen, but instead of going to another slavery, he was transferred to the other strand within Denmark's two-pronged prison system: the prison workhouse. While the military administered the slaveries, this composite institution had ties to the system of poor relief. Through the eighteenth century, the institution, especially the largest prison workhouse in the Copenhagen district of Christianshavn, had been found suitable to hold an ever-growing number of felons, made to perform intramural convict labour. In the courtyard of the towering complex, a Rasphus (rasp house; a small site for the punishment of male prisoners employed in hard labour) was used to hold some of those men considered too dangerous to incarcerate anywhere else. The rasp house inmates slept in cells at night and were made to rasp colonial dye-woods to a fine powder. Lichtmannicke was spared the ritual of a yearly return to and flogging at the crime scene. After all, Rungrafft had lived, and, besides, an annual trip to Kronborg would have been a costly endeavour. Furthermore, this practice was falling out of favour.Footnote ²² He was, however, flogged and branded by the executioner before entry. This meant that he was legally stripped of honour. In eighteenth-century Denmark, honour was an almost material currency. You could have a lot or a little of it, or none, as was the case with people corporally punished by an executioner – typically in the form of public flogging, known as kagstrygning, sometimes combined with branding on the face or the back.Footnote ²³ In the eighteenth century, dishonouring punishments were typically tied to lifelong convict labour without the chance of pardon. There was no way back after losing one's stake in the game of honour.

Now in the prison workhouse, Lichtmannicke was done trying to hack the law. Maybe he finally realized that suicide was not attainable by execution, as he had previously believed. However, he did not find that his fate had eased. On 23 April 1792, he “cut his own hand to avoid work”.Footnote ²⁴ We do not know for how long he was unable to dodge the labour, but since he was never transferred again, it cannot have been for long. He died a rasp house inmate on 29 October 1799. Most likely, he was buried by other convicts in the so-called Slave Churchyard on the outskirts of Copenhagen.Footnote ²⁵ His story is exceptional but not unique. While his life trajectory suggests that he had a somewhat frail psyche, he is presented in the sources as coherent and makes a clear argument about his rationale. He was not alone either, as we know of a few handfuls of ex-soldiers who, as convicts, tried to kill in order to be killed, thereby trying to leverage the law in their attempts to avoid a lifetime of penal labour.Footnote ²⁶ Furthermore, suppose we break Lichtmannicke's unusual trajectory into smaller parts. In that case, his experiences resonate with thousands of soldiers in eighteenth-century Denmark, accentuating common themes of poverty, otherness, and desperation.

Recent scholarship has highlighted these themes. For a long time, the history of the Danish military state and its workforces was written without paying much attention to the mercenary soldier. This has changed in the last twenty years. While this work predates or is otherwise unconnected to the recent concerns of military labour historians, the insights produced resonate clearly with the recent agenda of seeing soldiers first and foremost as workers.Footnote ²⁷ The work of Karsten Skjold Petersen, culminating in his doctoral thesis, subsequently published as Geworbne Krigskarle (2004), has highlighted the integral part played by mercenaries in the Danish army while making a thorough examination of their social conditions. From his work emerges the image of the mercenary as a labourer used strategically by the state. Besides the work we would expect soldiers to perform, they were used in various settings. Regiments used soldiers as part of their recruitment efforts abroad, handing them over to the navy for use on their ships and using them as “crown workers” – cheap manual labourers in infrastructure construction and maintenance.Footnote ²⁸ In the latter respect, they were part of logics of deployment that also included the convicts in the slaveries. For instance, crown workers were part of the large-scale project of creating a new naval base at Holmen in Copenhagen – a work that consisted, in part, of land reclamation in the shallow waters north of Christianshavn. Convicts and naval sailors worked alongside them. Lichtmannicke is likely to have worked this site as a convict and, before that, possibly as a soldier too. At the same time, soldiers could also be commanded to interact with convicts as guards. To alleviate upkeep, a large part of the mercenary labour force was given the status of frifolk, literally “free people”. The percentage varied but could be as high as fifty per cent.Footnote ²⁹ When “free”, the mercenary was unpaid but was allowed to work for wages, except when called on to exercise. This was attractive because the pay was much better, even at the lowest tiers of the urban labour market. Petersen describes their work: they worked in crafts (if they knew one), as manual workers in factories and workshops, as hands in construction or at the docks, and, in some settings, as rural servants. They could not become masters or merchants but were employed as servants or day labourers. Much of this work was seasonal.Footnote ³⁰ The possibility of roaming was limited since the soldier needed a passport to go beyond the garrison. If given passports, these would stipulate the conditions of the soldier's travels and violating them effectively made the person a deserter. Thus, while soldiers worked as integral parts of urban and rural labour markets, their integration within local communities was limited by their military status. The same was the case in terms of their options to marry. A mercenary could not marry without the consent of the head of his regiment, who was only allowed to grant such permissions to thirty per cent of their workforce. This can be attributed partly to the state's realization that the soldier's pay could not provide for a family.Footnote ³¹

Other scholars have highlighted how the presence of soldiers was a disruptive force in the urban community. Most soldiers lived as tenants in the households of others. This meant that they were subject to the authority of the head of their household while simultaneously subjected to the authority of their officers. As Camilla Schjerning has shown, this was a cause of disputes as the social geographies of the city blurred in ways exacerbated by the culture of violence and masculinity that defined the military community.Footnote ³² Furthermore, the legal pluralism of the cities’ complicated tangles of jurisdictions would sometimes spill into the streets. As highlighted by Ulrik Langen, officers and their soldiers would sometimes compete for territory with their civilian counterparts.Footnote ³³ In other instances, they would fight sailors in what can be considered turf wars tied to occupational identities.Footnote ³⁴ Perhaps, the ambiguous presence of soldiers in the urban environment is most evident from studies of their crimes. Historian Tyge Krogh has conducted an in-depth analysis of soldiers’ thefts in Copenhagen. Owing to the conditions under which they lived, Krogh traces a culture of larceny and fencing that was, ultimately, a product of the state but also a competitive European labour market for recruits that meant that recruiters did not always enquire deeply into the past of the potential recruit.Footnote ³⁵ Therefore, it is not surprising that mercenaries formed the backbone of several gangs operating in the capital. Krogh argues that this was not “organized crime” in the modern sense but that social conditions perpetuated a widespread crime culture that enabled a market for stolen goods in which it was rarely hard to find a buyer.Footnote ³⁶

Thus, the seemingly draconian punishment meted out against Lichtmannicke when he sold his shoes in order to eat expressed a marked unease among urban elites facing an amorphous crowd of soldiers roaming the streets of the garrisons and dealing in things that often could not be accounted for. They upset a social order that still ultimately hinged on the household.

Violent Communication

Crucially, punishments cannot be understood only in the context of the ills they were to combat. Punitive forms were defined by law, but in reality, they were complex and evolving assemblages of practices, and care is needed to avoid the projection of simplified schemata.Footnote ³⁷ Notably, we might be tempted to conjure up a clear divide between corporal punishments and forms of incarceration. Popular modernization narratives state that penal modernity was marked by a transition from one to the other: from the outward spectacle of the body at the gallows to the inward world of the penitentiary cell.Footnote ³⁸ However, in Denmark, the prison (starting as a kind of auxiliary technology of convict labour) had existed since the mid-sixteenth century. It had grown incrementally since this point, while the uses of corporal punishments evolved alongside it in a pattern that appears far from linear.Footnote ³⁹ As I have argued elsewhere, historians trying to understand the emergence of carceral institutions need to take stock of the empirical fact that their evolutions were often glacial and challenging to link to any one moment of modernity, in part because there was never just a single “prison” corresponding to a single “modernity”.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the early modern Danish case, there was no clear separation of the corporal and the carceral. Felons who arrived at the gates of prisons had often received corporal, sometimes dishonouring punishments as part of their journeys there, and discipline within the prisons was always upheld by the threat of violence mimicking the way punishments communicated outside the walls.

We should not be surprised by this. As the Danish prison system found its many forms only gradually, beginning in the sixteenth century, such institutions evolved in a culture that thought of violence as integral to social order.Footnote ⁴¹ In Lutheran Denmark, it was understood that authorities on all levels had a religious duty of both care and coercion, to the point that the two cannot be disentangled. As argued by cultural historian Nina Koefoed, this entanglement and obligation is embedded within the concept of tugt – a notion of religious discipline that accompanied the prison workhouses everywhere in continental Northern Europe, beginning in the late sixteenth century.Footnote ⁴² In Denmark, the prison system was bifurcated, with the notion of tugt clearly embedded in the prison workhouses, while understandings of military discipline underpinned the slaveries.

The Danish Code of 1683 marked an explicit formalization of the use of convict labour and thus incarceration. However, it also highlights the overlap between punishments targeting the body and those concerning labour: in no way did it do away with corporal punishments. The breadth of corporal punishments sanctioned by the code and its continuous modifications are staggering. They include various forms of whippings, some clearly tied to the logics of household tugt. The body, as a subject of pain and exemplarity, also played a clear role in punishments such as being locked in the pillory (gabestok) and in a set of punishments that, while not mentioned in the code, were still used widely in rural Denmark, such as being put on the “wooden horse” or in the “Spanish mantle”, which similarly married degrees of physical discomfort with public shaming.Footnote ⁴³ The body also played a role in the practice of punishing with hunger through short stints of incarceration on a diet of water and bread, and even in the practice of public confession, in which a sinner was forced to proclaim their sins in front of their congregation. The latter form was sometimes connected to punishments in the prison workhouse, where the ritual took place in the prison church.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, most of these punishments could be experienced on one's path to prison, but they did not automatically lead one there. By contrast, that was, in effect, the case for all corporal punishments involving whippings by the executioner at the public shaming post known as the kag and for those who were branded, typically on the face or the back. These two forms often went together. In a few instances, the similarly dishonouring dismemberment of noses, ears, fingers, or hands could also be used in conjunction with convict labour. These mutilations predated prisons and had initially often been used in conjunction with banishment from one's local community but were reconfigured as the state took the reins of the penal system.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this way, the carceral domain was intricately related to a range of corporal and shaming measures varying in severity and impact on the life trajectory of the punished. Prisons did not obsolete the use of executions either. The Danish code sanctioned various executions similarly connected to particular forms of maiming, such as severing specific limbs and multiple forms of public torture. Drowning and burning were also sanctioned for specific crimes, typically of a religious nature. Peculiarly, all these bloody theatres were scenes of grace. Sovereignty manifested doubly: in the excess of violence and the moderation of said violence. And grace often related the use of corporal and capital punishment to convict labour, as the latter was used as an alternative to the former, especially in the case of capital punishment. This had the added effect of preserving labour, though this only seems to have been the explicit logic of the practice in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁴⁶ The widespread use of commutations was, however, checked by religious orthodoxy, which dictated specific retribution in the cases of certain crimes.Footnote ⁴⁷

The military also employed many of these punishments, but their codes adjusted and added to the repertoire, sometimes pointing to different logics. Some corporal punishments could be meted out without a formal sentence. These were known as “corrections” and “arbitrary punishments”. Their uses were regulated by a series of decrees to limit excessive use. Corrections were punishments meted out daily by officers, who used their canes to beat soldiers for disobedience or negligence. This parallels the right of heads of households to chastise their subjects. On the other hand, arbitrary punishments were decided only by the head of the regiment. The punishments employed in such instances were also less personal. They included being put on the wooden horse, being forced to carry weapons, a form known as pælslutning, in which the punished was chained to a pillar with their feet barely touching the ground, and krumslutning, in which the punished had their hands and feet fixed together and were left in this painful position for a set duration.Footnote ⁴⁸ Crucially, these forms hinged on combining pain and shaming. If the soldier facing arbitrary punishments demanded to be brought before a formal court and sentenced according to the military articles, he had a right to be so. However, because a court procedure would leave a paper trail, this was usually not in his interest, given that many punishments were graded based on the offender's past run-ins with the law. Of course, some offences, like theft and desertion, were too grave not to warrant proper procedure.

The punishments enabled by the military codes included the disciplinary punishments mentioned above. However, they also contained graver measures directed principally at deserters and thieves. These included the practice of punishing deserters in absentia. In such cases, the runaway's name would be put to paper and the note posted on the gallows. The punishment communicated in several ways. First, it evoked the clauses in the law codes that enabled the hanging of deserters. Second, the association between the gallows and dishonour added a stigma to the punishment. Ironically, both these messages were somewhat blunted by two related facts: (1) deserters were very rarely hanged in peacetime, with commutations being standard practice and hanging being replaced with a lifetime in the slavery in 1763, and (2) while there was a perception of dishonour associated with the gallows, this practice did not legally dishonour the deserter perpetually, if he returned.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, the lines of demarcation invoked by the punishment had, in practice, a degree of elasticity. Fundamentally, this meant that a deserter could still be taken back if he were apprehended or returned willingly. His labour would have been lost if he had been dishonoured (or hanged).

Similarly, the punishment of running the gauntlet communicated in specific ways. It was a harrowing ordeal.Footnote ⁵⁰ Fears like the ones experienced by Lichtmannicke as he faced his initial punishment gain even more importance in light of a society where beatings were not unusual. Indeed, the repeated runs between one's fellow soldiers were painful, probably also more so than the counterparts in the civilian law codes in which an offender could be sentenced to public whippings by an executioner. With repeated runs, the number of strikes could range in the thousands, even on a single day. The fact that the codes included the standard practice of spreading the runs over several days if they exceeded a certain number indicates that lawmakers understood how much the practice placed a strain on the body. However, while deterrence hinged on this violence, the practice, in fact, preserved the potential labour power of the punished by not legally dishonouring them, given that the executioner was not involved.Footnote ⁵¹ Being dishonoured took away legal rights, such as the ability to bear witness against those with honour.Footnote ⁵² In the eighteenth century, dishonour effectively always entailed a lifetime prison sentence. Only in the last decade of the century did authorities slowly begin to commute such sentences and return the honour lost. Effectively, the dishonoured person left their community, never to return. A dishonoured soldier would never again be available to his regiment. While his labour could still be exploited as convict labour, he was a perpetual outsider. By contrast, a person who had run the gauntlet could be back on duty as soon as he had healed. And even those for whom running the gauntlet was the first step to a prison sentence could still be released back into the army. Further, the stigma of running the gauntlet was checked by the communal nature of the ritual. By making soldiers carry out the punishment, there was a limit to the ability to “other” the punished. Anecdotal evidence even suggests that soldiers felt sorry for those they were to punish.Footnote ⁵³

In this way, the seemingly draconian punishments enabled by the military codes communicated in ways that mediated the othering inherent to exemplary punishments. Historian Guy Geltner argues that a critical feature of corporal punishments is their use of the body to communicate. They do so in three “discrete yet often overlapping ways”.Footnote ⁵⁴ Corporal punishments index social otherness to an audience. In this way, they make the borders of a community tangible. This would be true of all punishments that involved an audience. The infliction of dishonour heightened the effects of indexing, while the brand could make such a limit perpetually readable on the punished body or face. Of course, the most extreme versions of indexing were in capital punishments, but these would sometimes also involve further reasoning. For instance, when crimes were collective, it was common practice to attempt to single out ringleaders and pardon those understood to have been seduced. When no ringleader could be identified, punishments would sometimes still play on this dynamic. For instance, groups of soldiers facing execution were, on rare occasions, made to publicly play dice with who was to die, while the rest would be sentenced to life in prison.Footnote ⁵⁵ To draw the lines of a social world, authorities only needed to communicate in examples, and potential inclusion was often part of the message. Thus, while striking us as unjust, such measures would still “eliminate ambiguities regarding that society's normative boundaries”.Footnote ⁵⁶ Military corporal punishments communicated exemplarity to fellow soldiers but, at the same time, often took care not to create a perpetual other from the punished body unless this was perceived as absolutely necessary. At stake was the potential of inclusion and therefore labour. The scars on one's back left after running the gauntlet might achieve indexing, but not in ways that severed the scarred from normal work relations. Fundamentally, this hinged on the fact that the person to whom those scars communicated was themselves an insider to inflicting such marks.

The second mode of communication outlined by Geltner is that of mimesis. In this mode, corporal punishments communicated by mirroring the crime in the punishment. This could be literal or symbolic, as when, for instance, the hand of a person guilty of forgery was severed. Both military and civilian codes used mimesis in crimes relating to violence, most explicitly in cases of murder where the Old Testament underpinning of the codes meant that blood spilled had to be repaid in kind. Part of the importance of the 1767 decree under which suicide murderers were not to be executed lies in breaking with this orthodox principle of mimesis.

If mimesis played only a minor part in the communications of corporal punishments of soldiers in eighteenth-century Denmark, the obverse is the case with the third mode of communication: numerical proportionality. As Geltner points out, scholars have often overlooked this dimension of corporal punishment, understanding proportionality as an inherently modern principle of justice incompatible with the spectacle of violence.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, almost all the punishments mentioned here could be graded according to the severity of the crime or circumstances meriting grace or escalation. This appears to have been especially true of military punishments in which the time on the wooden horse or locked in fetters could be modulated along with the number of passes through the gauntlet, the number of men in each column, and the duration over which the ritual of violence was to take place. In this way, military authorities operated a carefully tuned spectrum of pain. By contrast, the indexing dishonour inflicted by an executioner was not tied to a number.

Put together, we can say that the semiotics of military punishments in the period suggested an emphasis on creating a clear example, grading severity numerically, yet, ultimately, in the name of labour, limiting the otherness that exemplary punishments imparted, at least legally. As a result, corporal punishments could work as an integral part of the disciplinary machinery of the mercenary army without producing a further need for new recruits.

Mercenaries’ Experiences of Penal Slavery

As highlighted by Lichtmannicke's trajectory, Denmark's carceral system consisted in two parallel tracks, of which he saw the worst parts. Both revolved around the performance of labour as punishment, but on other matters, they were fundamentally different. One was the prison workhouses, where convicts performed intramural labour in textile manufacturing. The other was the so-called slaveries, where convicts laboured for the military state. The prison workhouse was directed at the civilian population. At the start of the century, it housed a distinctly gendered population of women and children, but as the century marched on, it came to house more and more men sentenced for graver and graver offences.Footnote ⁵⁸ The largest of the kind was the multitiered institution at Christianshavn, where upwards of 600 inmates worked in various wards, including the rasp house that housed Lichtmannicke for the last twelve years of his life. However, as a former soldier, the Austrian was a rare sight within the walls. Mostly, ex-soldiers were put in chains and sent to the slaveries. There they joined a homosocial world directed by the military, though it was not only soldiers that became “slaves”. Looking at the inmates’ registers of the Copenhagen Slavery (Stokhusslaveriet), ex-soldiers experienced 1181 of the 3190 stays recorded in the institution from 1741 (when the institution opened and took over the duties and population of the naval dockyard slavery known as Trunken) to 1800.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the same period, civilians experienced 1185 stays, while former naval workers accounted for 437 stays. People listed as recidivists and those transferred to the institution from other prisons accounted for the remainder, with a small number (forty-one) having no disclosed background.Footnote ⁶⁰

Through this period, the musters were systematic in listing the sentence as well as the corporal punishments the newly arrived inmate had endured just prior to entry. They were also systematic in noting how the stay ended. This data can therefore be used to sketch out how the carceral experiences of ex-soldiers related to their prior experiences of punishment and compared to the other main social groups within the institution. The notes about corporal punishments can be sorted into three distinct categories: no corporal punishment (as part of the sentence at least), non-dishonouring corporal punishments (such as running the gauntlet or naval flogging with the cat), and dishonouring punishments (typically whipping and/or branding by the executioner, but in some cases of people already dishonoured, flogging by a dishonoured convict within the prison itself).

The numbers support the above reading that prison was far from an alternative to corporal punishment. More than half of the inmates arrived as part of punitive sequences involving corporal punishment as part of their sentence. However, as shown in Table 1, the occupational divides presented a divide in degree and kind.

Table 1.

Corporal punishment at entry into the Copenhagen Slavery by occupational group, 1741–1799.

Naturally, we would expect a kind of hierarchy of pain in which having undergone no corporal punishment before entry would entail a milder prison sentence. This was the case for civilians and sailors but not for soldiers. Here, we see that those who arrived without having undergone corporal punishment as part of the sentence were, in fact, more likely to carry lifetime sentences than those who had received military corporal punishments. By far the most common of these punishments was to have run the gauntlet. However, those who had done so were often still considered to belong to the military. In this sense, the 51.6 per cent of the ex-military convicts who had received non-dishonouring corporal punishments were, in many cases, still considered by their regiments as potential workers. Had they received dishonouring corporal punishment, no ordinary release would have been possible. Thus, we can say that while soldiers (and sailors) were more likely to enter convict labour with scarred backs, those scars did not communicate perpetual otherness as the scars or brands carried by their civilian counterparts. Rather, they effectively communicated a kind of “suspended belonging” to the military sector.

This becomes clear as we look at the mode of final exit of soldiers. Exit has been categorized into death, escape (in which case the escape was the final mode of exit, discounting failed attempts), release, deportation, recapitulation (meaning entering back into mercenary service), and transfer to another prison. Of course, that last category was not really a final exit, but the sources do not allow us to systematically trace all men who, like Lichtmannicke and Brynildsen, were sent elsewhere. Deportation and recapitulation must be considered as variants of release. They have been noted only when the musters explicitly mention such exits, but a greater number of such exits are likely to be hidden in the data on instances when a convict is simply noted as “released”. In Table 2, the mode of exit of ex-soldiers is listed according to their experiences of corporal punishment prior to entry.

Table 2.

Exit of ex-soldiers from the Copenhagen Slavery, having entered 1741–1799.

Fundamentally, dishonour was a determinant of exit. The dishonoured ex-soldiers, almost all of whom carried life sentences, were more likely to die or be transferred than their non-dishonoured counterparts. Because there were no hopes of getting a pardon until 1791, this makes sense. So does their propensity to escape. However, it should be noted that dishonoured ex-soldiers were more likely to escape than their civilian and naval counterparts (twenty-one and eighteen per cent of those escaped as final exit). The reason might be that, as foreigners, few had families in Denmark. Therefore, they would be harder to track and have fewer qualms about leaving the country.

Their status as migrants also explains the common use of deportation for ex-soldiers. Deportation was used in the cases of migrant ex-soldiers who were deemed of no potential use to the military. As shown here, even dishonoured convicts could be released this way, but usually, only soldiers were, owing to their status as foreigners. Only four dishonoured non-soldiers are mentioned to have been deported in the muster. Ex-soldiers who had received non-dishonouring corporal punishments were also deported, while it appears less common that those who had received no corporal punishments were deported. Deportation happened by boat. In a few instances, deportation is listed as part of a sentence that was to conclude after a set duration. This was the case for several ex-soldiers who had been found to have already been dishonoured prior to their recruitment but had tried to hide their past. They were also the only exceptions to the rule that dishonour entailed a lifetime sentence. For instance, the soldier Gottfried Schreiber, originally from the town of Legnica in what is today Poland, arrived in March 1769 on account of a case of theft and desertion, but during the trial, it had been revealed that he had previously been whipped by an executioner in Danzig. His sentence was explicit about his eventual deportation, which was natural given his dishonour. However, first, he was to endure three days’ worth of whippings by a dishonoured convict before spending a year in prison. In April of the following year, he was sent on a packet boat to Lübeck.Footnote ⁶¹ Typically, however, deportation concluded a lifetime sentence and was therefore contingent on a pardon given by the king. Petitions could influence such a pardon. For instance, the ex-soldier Johan Paul Ritter was pardoned from the slavery at Kronborg in 1758 after a petition from his brother, who pledged to follow him to Königsberg.Footnote ⁶² In this way, the acts of grace that were a key component of the communicative workings of corporal punishments also defined many carceral trajectories. It appears as part of the condition that the deported person would face a lifetime in a slavery if they returned.Footnote ⁶³

Deportation was an end specific to (some) soldiers on account of their migrant status. Recapitulation, on the other hand, was an exit defined by their status as potential labourers. While naval men could also be released on condition of returning to naval service, this appears significantly more common for soldiers.Footnote ⁶⁴ Recapitulation typically appears to have been conditioned on the period of capitulation being reset to begin from the start. For instance, when Mathias Hauschildt was pardoned after enduring seven years of a lifetime sentence and released from Kronborg into a regiment in 1758, the note to the fortress commander explicitly stipulated that his bondage to the regiment was to start over.Footnote ⁶⁵ This practice reflected the standard practice that all punishments for desertion would reset the period of service.Footnote ⁶⁶ Sometimes pardoned convicts would enter into new regiments, but in cases of convicts carrying sentences for a set duration, the regiments explicitly stated at the initiation of the stay whether they wanted the convict to return at the conclusion of the stay.Footnote ⁶⁷ In such cases, sentences were sometimes cut short at the request of heads of regiments.Footnote ⁶⁸

Both recapitulation and deportation were more common for those who had received a non-dishonouring corporal punishment than those who had not received any corporal punishment at all. We can interpret this as a consequence of what was communicated by the scars of those convicts whose punishment started with running the gauntlet. They were still considered military workers, but their potential use was to be evaluated. If deemed useful, they would re-enter the regiments. If not, they would be expelled from the realms.