COMPARISON OF ANCIENT WITH MODERN SLAVERY.
Forces which overthrew Chattel Slavery--Advantages of real Slaves
over Freed-Men and Wages-Slaves--Natural Fecundity esteemed a
Blessing, not a Curse--Condition of American Slaves under Slavery.
Having seen how firmly rooted was the institution of direct human
slavery in the public opinion of the ancient world, let us now inquire
what was the potent force or combination of forces which subverted
that opinion, and which operated the mighty changes that afterwards
took place in the social relation of man to man. By these changes, we
mean the manumission of the slave-class, the consequent formation of
proletarianism, and, in course of time, the universal substitution
of indirect or disguised for direct or personal slavery--an order of
things which has ever since prevailed, and which, at the moment we
write, imposes upon the vast majority of every “civilized” country a
bondage more galling and intolerable than was the personal servitude of
man to man under the ancient system.
It will be readily comprehended what a potent agency was requisite,
and what sacrifices must have been incurred, to subvert a social order
so deeply implanted in the habits, prejudices, and even convictions of
the whole world. To produce such effect, only the most potent causes,
only the most powerful influences known to act upon human nature,
could suffice. What are these? _Religion and self-interest._ For--not
to encumber ourselves with subdivisions of causes--suffice it to say,
that two overwhelming ones brought the change: one, the Christian
dispensation, which gradually revolutionized public opinion amongst the
slave-class, and among the pious and benevolent of the master-class;
the other was of the gross and worldly kind, coming from quite the
opposite direction, yet concurring to the same end--it was the force
of selfishness. This force it was which, operating by calculations of
profit and loss upon the mass of worldly-minded slave-owners, taught
them, if not instinctively, at least by practical experience, that
their bondmen might be made more servile and profitable slaves for
them, _without the name_, than any that ever bore the name. The former
or sublime Christian cause would, had it been allowed to operate freely
and unalloyed with worldly selfishness, have extinguished human slavery
of every form and degree from the face of the earth. The latter or more
worldly cause, by turning the manumitted slaves into proletarians and
mercenary drudges, only substituted a new and worse kind of slavery for
the old.
But, before showing how the change was brought about, let us briefly
compare the two kinds of slavery--the old and the new. Under the old
system a slave was called by his right name--a slave. He was, to all
intents and purposes, the property of his master. He was liable to be
bought and sold, or otherwise disposed of, the same as cattle, sheep,
bales of goods, oil, wine, or any other kind of merchandise. If he had
a harsh or cruel master, he was liable to all manner of ill-treatment,
including corporal punishment and even death itself. Of liberty or
rights of course he had none but what his master might choose to
confer. Whatever wealth he might hoard or scrape together was at the
mercy of his master; for as slaves were themselves but the property of
their masters, whatever belonged to them belonged, by the same rule, to
their owners. It is needless to argue in condemnation of such a system:
it is self-condemned in the very fact that human nature recoils from
such a state, and that it is only bearable by those who know no better,
and only preferable to the sort of mockery of freedom to which it has
given place. Let it not, however, be supposed that the evils of such
a state were felt as we should now-a-days feel them, who have enjoyed
the rights of liberty and conscience; it was quite otherwise. If the
condition of direct slavery had its dark side, it had also its bright
side--bright, at least, in comparison with what has followed. The slave
of antiquity was not insulted with the name or mockery of freedom when
he knew he had none. He had not the shadow hypocritically offered him
for the substance. He had not to upbraid his masters with dissimulation
and treachery, in addition to the burdens imposed upon him. He had not
to complain that his master had robbed him or defrauded him of rights,
and of a position which belonged to him by the same constitutional
law by which the master claimed his own. Of these he could have known
nothing, simply because they had never existed in or before his time.
What men have never had, they can hardly be said to have ever lost;
and what men have never lost, they can better bear the want of, than
they can the loss of what was once theirs, and which they know and feel
ought still to belong to them. In these respects the chattel-slaves of
ancient and modern times have greatly the advantage over the starving
proletarian drudges falsely called “free and independent labourers.”
But the ancient bondsman had other and more substantial advantages
unknown to his proletarian successors. He knew nothing of the actual
wants and destitution, nothing of the manifold privations, in which
the great mass of the labouring classes now-a-days live, move, and
have their being. The very fact of his being his master’s property
caused him to be always well fed, well housed, well clothed, and
well cared for, according to his condition and habits. If he had no
property, nor the right to acquire any, independently of his master’s
control, neither had he any rent or taxes to pay, nor any other claims
or demands upon him that were not all amply provided for at his
master’s expense. Food, clothing, shelter, firing, medicine, medical
care--these and every other essential requisite for keeping him in
health and good condition were abundantly supplied him by his master,
for the master’s own sake. Indeed, it was the master’s interest to
do so; for whether there was work for the slave to do, or not, it
equally behoved the master to keep him always in good condition, that
he might be the better workman when there was work for him to do,
and that he might fetch a better price in the slave-market when his
services were no longer wanted. Besides, it was the custom in those
days for masters to take a pride in displaying the goodly state of
their slaves--of both their prædial and domestic slaves--just as our
modern gentry and graziers take a pride in displaying the stock upon
their farms, the studs in their stables, and, above all, the plump and
portly figures of their butlers, footmen, grooms, and all the other
paraphernalia of modern flunkeyism. There was, in those days, none of
that desperate competition, in vanity or in trade, which now-a-days
makes starvelings of the millions in order to make millionaires of the
thousands; which offers premiums for fat oxen, and the union workhouse
to lean labourers; and which awards prizes for bulls and rams, and
superior breeds of every description of brutes (not excluding even the
stye and the kennel), while it degrades the human animal below the
lowest description of savage man, and maintains its anti-christian
pomp of circumstances for the few, at the expense of blistering the
backs and pinching the bellies of those who, St. Paul said, should
be “first partakers of the fruits.” This kind of modern science was
wholly unknown to the ancients. Not a line is there in the works of
Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, indeed of any of the old poets,
philosophers, or historians, to show that they knew anything of our
modern science of political economy. They believed in slaves and in
slavery; but they had no idea of enriching a master-class by famishing
the bodies of those to whom the masters owed everything, much less did
they ever dream that the wealth and aggrandisement of the master-class
were to be promoted by the expatriation, decimation, or diminution
of the slave-class. If the ancient Spartans occasionally decimated
their slaves, it was not because they looked upon them as a “surplus
population,” burdensome upon their estates, but because they feared
their growing numbers, while their own ranks were being continually
thinned by internecine wars with their neighbours. The idea of a slave
being a useless incumbrance, a mere incubus upon the soil, was an idea
utterly incompatible with their established custom of regarding slaves
not only as property, but as that superior description of property
which alone gave value to every other. Accordingly, though amongst the
ancient philosophers we find many strange schools and sects, and very
many eccentric and incomprehensible doctrines taught, yet nowhere do we
meet with any sect or school corresponding with our modern political
economists. There is no such philosopher as our Parson Malthus to be
found in the whole circle of classic or Biblical lore. Had such a
fellow as Malthus shown himself in the days of Alexander the Great,
and gone about preaching that the gods had sent too many mouths for
the meat and harvests they had provided, not even Diogenes would have
associated with such a lunatic; and if the slaves had only got scent
of the tendencies of his theory, not Alexander himself could, in all
probability, have prevented them from flaying him alive. Fortunately
for them, however, there were no Malthuses in the world at that time.
In the absence of such philosophers, slaves were not only free to
marry and to beget children, but their masters actually regarded
every increase in their slaves’ families as a direct gain--a direct
increase of the most valuable portion of their property. The idea that
at Nature’s feast there was no cover for the new-comer was, at that
epoch, an idea that would be as abhorrent to the master’s notions
of self-interest as it would have been to the slave’s instincts of
procreation and self-preservation.
It is true, the condition of slaves was a deplorable one when they had
such brutes for masters as Seneca describes in the person of Vedius
Pollio; but we are to regard such extreme cases as rare exceptions.
All historic testimony goes to show that the general rule was in the
other direction. Even Seneca’s testimony proves this; for, in speaking
of this very Vedius Pollio, he says, “Who does not detest this man,
even more than did his own slaves, for fattening the fish in his ponds
with human blood?” The treatment of his gladiators by Lentulus Batiatus
is another indirect proof to the same effect. Had Lentulus trained
his gladiators to appear in the arena in the usual way, to be matched
against others on some great occasion of public games, &c., they would
not have complained, much less rebelled. They would, in that case, but
have been called upon to exercise a profession which was as familiar to
the Romans, and as little distasteful to the combatants themselves, as
that of prize-fighting in England or bull-fighting in Spain. But the
brute, Batiatus, kept his gladiators locked up, and was professedly
training them to _fight with one another_ till they should die by each
other’s hands--a destination which, while it promised certain death,
held out no prospect of honour, _éclat_, nor even safety to the greater
number. It was this studied brutality, so much out of the ordinary
course, which provoked the slaves to mutiny and revolt. And the fact of
its being the only recorded instance of gladiators rising in rebellion
against the laws is the best proof that such barbarity was unusual, and
not sanctioned by the public opinion of the time. Indeed, so general
appears to have been the contentment of ancient slaves with their lot,
that only one or other of three causes is ever assigned by history for
the servile outbreaks it records:--first, excessive cruelty on the part
of masters; second, the non-execution of the laws regulating the labour
and condition of slaves; and third, the chiefs of parties raising and
embodying them with their insurgent bands in times of civil war. The
fewness of the servile wars recorded as arising out of the two first
causes sufficiently testifies that harshness on the part of masters,
and the non-execution of the regulations in favour of the slaves,
were but exceptions to the ordinary course of slave-life, and not the
general rule. It proves also that it was not against slavery itself the
slaves rose, seeing that it was only what they considered _an abuse of
it_, and not the thing itself, they rose against, and that, even when
victorious, they never set about abolishing the institution. And as to
the third cause of slave-insurrections, it proves still more forcibly
the general contentment of slaves with their lot; for, had it been
otherwise, _three_ slaves only out of the whole population would not
have responded to Marius’s appeal for a general rising of their order;
still less would they have failed to profit by the splendid victories
of Spartacus, when, had they only felt the sentiment of equality, or
entertained any dissatisfaction with their lot as slaves, they might
have effectually exterminated the whole master-class, and established
whatever form of government and of social order they thought fit.
Indeed, they had frequent opportunities during the last sixty years of
the Republic, and also during the first century or two of the Empire,
to make a successful rising against the master-class, had they been
inspired generally with a hatred of their servile condition. But it was
not so.
As a general rule, the slaves both of Greece and Rome were fully
reconciled to their condition, and had good reason to be so,
considering how profoundly ignorant they were of the political
conditions upon which alone real liberty can exist for the many. With
their ideas and habits, any attempt to emancipate themselves would have
plunged them into deeper degradation and ruin. Even their masters, much
less themselves, knew little of the laws and institutions by which
liberty, with security and prosperity, can be established. The proof
of this is their interminable wars with one another, and with their
neighbours all around them. A still stronger proof is their egregious
folly in allowing agrarian monopoly, and usury to make such frightful
progress amongst them, that “free citizens” became actually greater
slaves to money-lenders and land-monopolists than the slaves so called;
till at last the republics of Greece and Rome were brought to such a
state that a military despotism alone could save them from tearing
one another to pieces. When such universal ignorance and barbarity
prevailed amongst the master-class--an ignorance and barbarity that
virtually left civil liberty and equality without any solid guarantees
whatever--it would be madness to expect that any revolution useful to
humanity could have been effected by a still more ignorant slave-class.
They would but have made confusion more confounded, and, by altogether
suspending production, annihilated society itself amid scenes of
indescribable carnage and cannibalism. At all events, the slaves knew
better than to make any such attempt. They preferred bearing the ills
they had, to flying to those they knew not of. Without land or capital,
and freedom to use them in security, they were infinitely better off
as slaves than they would be by any revolution, however successful,
that did not give them these essential requisites. And seeing how the
poorer classes of free citizens fared (who had to make shift to live
without the use of land or capital), it is no wonder they clung so
tenaciously to their well-fed, well-housed servile condition. In plain
truth, the slaves of antiquity would have been mad to exchange their
slavery for what is, now-a-days, falsely called liberty, unless in so
doing they took good care that, along with liberty, _they had the means
of producing and distributing wealth on their own account_. And as this
supposes a species of politico-economical knowledge infinitely beyond
what might be expected from such a class in their day,--as it supposes
such a knowledge of agrarian, monetary, fiscal, and other laws as
are absolutely necessary to the preservation of even the semblance
of liberty, and which knowledge was almost as dead a letter to their
masters as to themselves,--we cannot but rejoice, for their own sakes,
that the slaves of antiquity chose to remain as they were. When men
have but a choice of two evils, it is desirable they should choose the
lesser. The slaves of antiquity had but a choice between direct slavery
and the miseries of proletarianism: in our opinion, they chose the
lesser of the two. Had they been wise enough to understand their true
political and social rights, they might have escaped both. Christianity
came to teach them; but man’s perversity stepped in between them and
the light of the Gospel. Even to this day, after eighteen centuries of
gospel-propagandism, not one in a thousand of the slave-class--whether
they be chattel-slaves or wages-slaves--whether they be proletarians
or the property of their masters--understands his political and social
rights. The consequence is, the two kinds of slavery prevail still all
over the world; and, of the two, direct or chattel-slavery is now, as
formerly, the lesser evil of the two. In no part of the East, that we
know of, would an Oriental slave of modern times exchange conditions
with one of our Wigan handloom weavers, nor with a Dorsetshire labourer.
But, to bring this question to a test that will make the difference
at once obvious to every one, let us just compare the condition of a
modern American slave (so-called) with that of “a free and independent
labourer” in England. We choose these two countries because they are
inhabited by the same Anglo-Saxon race; because they are at the head
of modern civilization; and because, from the commercial intercourse
between them, we know more of their positive and relative condition
than of any other two known countries.
First, what was the actual condition of a modern chattel-slave, as he
was to be found in any of the Southern States of the great American
Union? We shall give it from the lips of an eye-witness--from one
who has visited that country and judged for himself, in the year
1849--above all, from one who is a rank abolitionist, and so thorough
going a hater of slavery, and of everything pertaining to it, that in
the paragraph immediately preceding the one we are about to extract, he
buoyantly exclaims, “When we remember the ardour and perseverance of
the American character, and the intelligence of their leaders, we must
believe that the day approaches when the axe shall be laid to the root
of this fell upas-tree.” The author of this sentiment is a Mr. Edward
Smith, who was deputed, along with another gentlemen, by an influential
body of capitalists in London to make a survey and inspection of
the north-western part of Texas, with a view to some extensive plan
of colonization projected by the parties. This Mr. Edward Smith has
furnished his employers with a printed report of his travels through
several States of the Union; and in that report he utters not a few
jeremiads upon the curse of slavery, and not a few withering invectives
against its aiders and abettors. If, therefore, any testimony in favour
of slaves and slavery can be pronounced wholly unexceptionable, it
is that of Mr. Edward Smith, the Abolitionist. Now, what says this
gentleman? We quote pages 83 and 84 of his report:--
“From the slaves themselves and from other parties I have learned that,
with few exceptions, they are kindly treated, are not overworked, and
have abundance of food, clothing, and efficient medical attention. We
saw them lodged in small cabins, sometimes rudely built, and in other
places very neatly built, but always _partaking of the character of the
planter’s or overlooker’s house_ near to which they stand. A slave,
his wife and family, occupy a cabin exclusively, unless the family be
small, when two or more families live together. The planters find it
to be their interest to use their negroes well. They always permit
and, indeed, urge the slave to do overwork by planting a small plot
of land, set apart for his use, with corn, tobacco, or other produce.
This they do after the day’s work is over, and also on Sundays,
when the law does not allow the master to require them to work; and
wherefore we saw them clean and well dressed, lying upon the banks of
the rivers, as we passed by. When the produce is gathered, it is sold
by the planters, and the proceeds given to the slaves. Some slaves
prefer to cut wood, which is sold to the steamboats; and all supply
themselves with vegetables from their own garden. Many industrious
slaves can thus obtain from fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars per
year for themselves, which they expend in the purchase of tea, coffee,
sugar, whisky, and other luxuries of the table, and in clothing fit
for any European gentleman. In large cities, as New Orleans, they
hire themselves from their masters at an agreed-upon sum, and work
for others, as they prefer, and thus earn from twenty to twenty-five
dollars per month for themselves. _Very many slaves own horses, kept
for their own use; and others own lands_; and Captain Knight, of the
‘New World,’ stated that he knew a slave _who owned four drays and
teams and seven slaves_. Indeed, when they are good servants, they are
much valued, and obtain every enjoyment they desire.”
This extract is, we think, pretty decisive of our position; yet there
is another, just following, which is so strongly corroborative of what
we have advanced in respect of the contentment with their condition
which we have ascribed to the ancient slaves, that we cannot forego the
temptation to quote it. “Free-born Britons!” “independent labourers!”
mark this passage:--
“They” (the slaves) “do not usually care to save money wherewith to
purchase their freedom, _feeling that the protection of their masters
is an advantage to them_; but there are those, as the stewardess on
board the boat on which we descended the Mississippi, who have paid
from 1,000 to 1,500 dollars for their freedom!”