the fact that at the birth of Christ, half of the population of the
Roman empire--about sixty millions--groaned under domestic slavery.
This estimate may be below the true mark; but the humanity whose
emancipation or redemption was to be accomplished, was not limited to
the Roman world. For, from Iran and the Indus to the Kuenlun ridges,
dwelt a population five or six times greater than that which populated
the Roman empire, and that, too, almost unvisited by that terrible
social plague which is now represented as being a divine blessing.
Whatever may have been the other multiform social calamities which
befell them--wars, massacres, destructions, impoverishments, and
desolations--are, after all, but transient visitations; while American
chattelhood, as devised by its apostles, eternally degrades both master
and chattel.
XI.
GREEKS.
AUTHORITIES:
_Polybius, Grote, O. Muller, Beckh, Curtius, Clinton, Finlay, etc._
At the foot of the Julian Alps, above the head of the Adriatic, the
branch of the Aryas which peopled Greece separated from their brethren
who wandered into Italy. Keeping to the coast of Adria, the seceders
reached the mountainous gorges of Epirus and the plains of Thessaly.
From the southern slopes of the Cambunian mountains and of Olympus,
they, in course of time, spread over Greece and Peloponnesus. Such at
least are the results of the most recent researches concerning the
pioneers whose labors prepared that region for the part it afterward
played in history. They cleared the forests, drained the marshes, cut
canals to let out the stagnant waters in mountain-basins so common
in Greece; they regulated the currents of rivers and streams, made
the soil arable, and the region fit for man and for further culture.
These primitive cultivators of the valleys of Greece, and builders
of the Cyclopean structures, called themselves, or were called by
others, _Pelasgi_ (that is, _those issuing from black soil, etc._),
and are regarded as the earliest occupants of Hellenic soil. They
were the first settlers, and most probably offshoots of the same
original stem whose successive branches mingled with the Pelasgi, or
crowded them out and took their place in history as Achives, Hellenes,
and Ionians--the last being considered been ancient as well as by
modern writers as having been the autochthones of Attica and of other
neighboring regions. To these Pelasgi and other primitive occupants,
to their laborious pursuits and occupations, to their simple social
structure, as well as to the essentially primitive social life of the
Greeks, Herodotus refers--asserting that at the outset slavery was
unknown in Greece, and especially in Attica.
The Pelasgian epoch was succeeded by what is commonly called the
legendary or heroic age. In this Homeric epoch free yeomen or
agriculturists own and till the soil; all the handicrafts and
professions are free. Carpenters, smiths, leather-dressers, etc., were
all freemen, and so also were the bards and "the leeches" (a highly
esteemed class in primitive Greece). But wealth already began to
accumulate, and the farms of the more fortunate were tilled by poor
hired freemen called Thetes.
The geographical conformation of Greece furnished, as it still
does, a natural incitement to war and piracy. Both formed prominent
characteristics of the heroic times. Phoenician vessels visited the
shores, and Phoenician settlements and factories were built at various
points. These traffickers, perhaps, taught the Greeks that the feeble
may be profitably enslaved by the strong, or at any rate they were the
customers of the Greek pirate.
The general Greek word for slave explains the origin of slavery.
_Dmoos_ and _dmoe_, slave, go back to _dmao_ or _damao_, to subdue,
to subjugate, and so bear witness of war and violence either between
individuals, or between clans, tribes, and districts, and then of
incursions into distant lands. Slavery became an object of luxury,
but not of social and economical necessity. It was confined to the
dwelling of the chiefs and the sovereign; but did not invade the
whole community. Leaders of freebooting expeditions seized every
kind of booty, taking as many prisoners as they could on sea and on
land. If the expedition or foray failed, the chief and his followers
became, in their turn, prisoners and slaves. The prisoners were
employed for domestic use within the precincts of the dwelling, as
servants, shepherds, etc., or were sold or exchanged for others.
The Phoenicians sold Asiatics or Libyans to Greeks and to Pontian
barbarians, and received in exchange the prey made by Greeks in Greece
or in Pontus. The Phoenicians occasionally kidnapped women and boys
and sold them to Asiatics, Africans, and Celt-Iberians. Then, as
everywhere throughout remotest and classical antiquity, many of the
enslaved had previously belonged to the higher and even the highest
conditions in their respective tribes, nations, or communities. So
Eumæus, the swineherd of Ulysses immortalized by Homer, was the son
of a chief of some island or district, who, having been kidnapped by
Phoenicians, was sold to Laertes. In mediæval times, likewise, the
prisoner taken on the battle-field and kept for ransom, if not for
service, often was superior in birth and station to his keeper. No such
social classifications, however, are intrinsic or normal, but only
conditional, relative, and conventional, even when inherited. Logically
they have the same signification and value in a well-graduated society,
with its castles, palaces, charters and other privileges, as on
plantations or among roving nomads and savage tribes. And thus, among
the Southern slaves, descending from prisoners of war or from kidnapped
Africans, there may be several of a purer aristocratic lineage than
many of their drivers, even if the latter were F.F.V.
Enfranchisement, manumission, and ransom were largely practised
in legendary Greece. The children of freemen by slave-women were
free, and equal to those of legitimate birth. Most of the wars and
expeditions during the heroic or Achivian piratical epoch, were made
for the sake of kidnapping men and women, to sell or to exchange with
the Phoenicians for various luxuries. Such was the general origin of
slavery at the time when history throws its first rays on the Grecian
world.
Many defend slavery on the plea that it softened and softens the
results of wars and inroads; that prisoners, once slaughtered, are
preserved for the sake of being sold into slavery. But already, during
the so-called heroic age of Greece, wars and forays were made for the
express purpose of getting captives or for kidnapping. The robber
or pirate was always sure to find a buyer for his booty, otherwise
he would have had no inducement to act. And thus slavery, instead of
softening war, was its very source. The Greeks of the heroic age were
incited to make inroads and depredations by the facility and security
they had of profitably disposing of their captives by selling them
into slavery. The bloody drama played, many, many centuries ago, in
Peloponnesus and Greece, on the Ionian and Egean seas, and among the
islands of the Archipelago, is repeated to-day on both sides of the
Atlantic--on African and on American shores and islands. The tribes
in Africa war with each other, destroy and burn towns and villages,
expressly and exclusively because they find customers for slaves among
Christians, and among self-styled civilized, humanized white men. Thus
much for the assertion that American slavery contributes to soften
the fate of prisoners of war in Africa, and humanizes the savages.
It bestializes them, together with their piratical purchasers and
their Southern patrons. The analogy holds good here, at a distance of
many thousand years and many thousand miles, among different social
conditions, in a different civilization, and in the higher moral
development of the white man.
New invasions successively rolled over the valleys of Hellas; they
changed considerably the social condition of the populations, expelling
or subduing many of the former occupants and yeomen. From the north,
from Thessaly, poured Hellenes, Heraclides, and Dorians, west and
south, principally into the Peloponnesus. Henceforth the whole Greek
family was represented in history by two cardinal social, political,
and intellectual currents, through the so-called Doric and Ionic races.
In Thessaly, serfdom--but not chattelhood--seems to have been anciently
established. New-comers subdued the earlier tillers of the soil.
The subdued became _villeins_, bondsmen, _adscripti glebæ_. Such
dependent cultivators were the Thessalian Penestæ, who paid over
to the landowners a certain proportion of the produce of the soil;
furnished those retainers by which the families of the chiefs, or the
more powerful, were surrounded, and served in war as their followers.
But they could not be sold out of the country; they had a permanent
tenure in the soil, and enjoyed family and village relations. Perhaps
more than twenty centuries afterward, this was also the condition of
the rustics all over western and mediæval Europe, and in some parts
this condition even lasted down to our century--everywhere similar
events generating emphatically analogous results and conditions. The
holdings of the Thessalian Penestæ were protected by the state, whose
subjects they were, and not chattels of the individual proprietors. The
Thessalian and Doric invaders and conquerors imposed a similar yoke
wherever they were victorious and finally settled. The last Doric and
Heraclidic invasion, which culminated in the institutions and history
of Sparta, subdued the former occupants of Peloponnesus, some of
whom were likewise of Doric origin. Of such origin, in considerable
proportion, were the renowned Helots. So, also, in course of time,
the descendants of the companions of Achilles became, in the north,
serfs under certain conditions of a more liberal nature; while others,
descending from the companions of Agamemnon and Menelaus, became
Sparta's Helots.
The condition of the Helots, in many respects, was similar to that of
the Penestæ of Thessaly. They could not be sold beyond the borders
of the state, not even by the state itself, which apportioned them
to citizens, reserving to itself the power of emancipation. They
lived in the same villages which were once their own property, before
conquest transformed the free yeomen or peasants into bondsmen. The
state employed the Helots in the construction of public works. Their
fate, however terrible it may have been, was altogether within the
law, whereas other domestic slaves in Greece, just like those in the
Southern States, depended upon the arbitrary will of individuals.
The Spartan law had various provisions for the emancipation of the
Helots. They served in the army and fought the great battles of the
Lacedemonians. Will the South intrust their chattels with arms and
drill them into military companies?
Sparta was the seat of an oligarchy, which owned the greater part of
the lands of Laconia, and kept in dependency the other autochthonous
tribes, which in some way or other escaped the fate of the Helots.
Such were the Periokes, enjoying certain political and full civil
rights. But, in the course of events, the oligarchy tried to violate
those rights, and the Periokes joined Epaminondas against Sparta,
facilitating its subjugation, just as, centuries afterward, they joined
Flaminius and the Romans against their Spartan masters. In Lacedemonia,
as in Attica, there existed small landholders, called _gamori_ or
_geomori_, and others called _autougroi_--rustics possessing petty
patches of land, or farming small parcels owned by large proprietors.
Just so in the South the large plantations are surrounded by poor
whites, by "sand-hillers," etc., some of them owning small patches,
generally of poorer soil; others altogether homeless and landless.
Subsequently these _geomori_, etc.--poor, free populations and their
homesteads--were almost wholly engulfed by large plantations and
domestic slavery. This was the work of time, as in her great days
scarcely any chattel was known in Sparta.
The landed oligarchy of our Southern plantations is in more than one
respect analogous with that of Sparta. The city of Sparta itself was
rather an agglomeration of spacious country habitations than resembling
other great cities.
When the Dorians made Sparta the centre of their power, the lands of
Laconia were divided into ten thousand equal lots for the ten thousand
Spartan citizens. Undoubtedly the homesteads, cleared and owned by the
first settlers and colonists in the South, were more equally divided
than they are now; and the increase in the extent of plantations on
the one hand, and the decrease of the respectability of the poorer
settlers and their transformation into "poor oppressed white men,"[12]
on the other, were both effected by domestic slavery. At the time
of Lycurgus--about four hundred years after the division--the above
number of oligarchs was reduced to nine thousand; at the time of
Herodotus--about four hundred years after Lycurgus--to eight thousand;
and thus a reduction of one-tenth took place during each period of
from three hundred to four hundred years. This was the time of the
world-renowned Spartan poverty and virtue. But wars, conquests, etc.,
changed the character of the Spartans; luxury and wealth crept in, and
with them came large estates and domestic slaves, the latter chiefly
consisting of Greek prisoners of war. At the beginning of the first
Peloponnesian war, Sparta may have had two hundred and twenty thousand
Helots, and there were comparatively few domestic slaves in that
number. The Peloponnesian war made the Spartans leaders of Greece, but
filled Sparta with prisoners from other Greek states, and introduced
wealth: from that war begins the decline of the Spartan spirit. The
Helots and the impoverished poor whites successively became chattels.
Sparta could only muster seven hundred citizens against Epaminondas at
Leuctra. During the period between Herodotus and Aristotle the number
of citizens was reduced to little above one thousand. At the Macedonian
conquest, Sparta averaged fourteen chattels for every three freemen.
One hundred years after Aristotle, under King Agis, about two hundred
oligarchs constituting the body politic, the citizens of Sparta owned
nearly all the lands of Laconia, and worked them by chattels.
This numerical reduction of citizens and deterioration of their
historic character principally affected the military standing of
Sparta. Causes so obvious as not to require explanation prevent at
present a similar diminution of the number of Southern oligarchs,
notwithstanding the existing numerical disproportion between them and
the non-slaveholding whites, whose political freedom, to a rational
appreciation, is rather nominal than real. The disease is the same--its
workings alone are different. The sword was the soul of Spartan
institutions: the pure and elevated conception of the American social
structure rests not on physical but on intellectual and moral force;
but its deterioration is visible in the new conception of slavery
inaugurated and sustained by the militant oligarchs. The process of
moral and intellectual decomposition in the South would be still more
rapid but for the various influences from the Free States, which, like
refreshing breezes, fan its fainting energies.
The sword, it is true, may have decimated whole Spartan communities;
but such losses were supplied from the class of the Periokes and other
freemen, and even sometimes from the Helots. Domestic slavery devoured
the small estates, degraded the freemen, and dried up the sources of
political renovation. Five thousand Spartans fought at Plateæ, which
gives a total population of about forty thousand. The number of Helots
owned by them at that time amounted to one hundred and seventy-five
thousand. Subsequently, after the Peloponnesian and Macedonian wars,
these Helots were transformed into chattels, and the degenerate
Spartans attempted to transform the Periokes into Helots, but made them
simply deadly enemies. Almost in proportion as the Spartan oligarchs
increased in wealth and possessions, not only did the number of Helots
and slaves increase, but military ardor decreased. At Leuctra, Sparta
hired her cavalry; and soon after, Sparta, rich in Helots and chattels
but poor in citizens, was forced passively to witness the curtailing of
her frontiers by Philip of Macedon.
The Helots often revolted; and frequent conspiracies were discovered
and subdued in terrible slaughter, when the oligarchs believed
themselves again safe. The old laws of most of the American colonies,
north and south, contain repeated regulations, dating from the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concerning conspiracies, revolts,
and tumults perpetrated by negroes; and this, too, several generations
before the birth of active abolitionism. For not to abolitionism but
to the love of liberty inborn in human nature--in the Spartan Helot as
in the colored chattel of the Southern oligarch--are to be attributed
the conspiracies continually fermenting among Southern slaves. At
times the Spartans were obliged to ask succor from the Athenians
and other allies against their revolted Helots. To-day the Union
is fully able to suppress servile revolts, but in some future time
the South may vainly look in all quarters of the horizon for active
allies. It may find some well-wishers among its interested northern
sympathizers, but the chattels will have the sympathy of the civilized
Christian and heathen world, besides finding allies among the free
colored populations of the Antilles. Under England's fatherly and
humane direction, these colored populations are being initiated into
genuine Christian civilization, and make comparatively great strides
and progress in material and political culture, in orderly life, in
self-government, in the employment of the free press, and in debating
their interests in legislative assemblies and cabinet councils. Ever
since the establishment of American slavery on a social and religious
basis, the mass of the white population in the South, and, above all,
the great heroes, apostles, and combatants of the new political creed,
are returning to barbarism--willingly and deliberately renouncing all
genuine mental and moral culture. And thus the two extremes may meet
in some future emergency--the colored inhabitant of the Antilles as a
superior civilized being, will face the barbarized white oppressor in
the South.
The Spartan Helot increased with a fecundity fearful for the oligarchs,
who resorted to the horrible _kryptea_, or slaughter of unarmed Helots
all over Laconia at a time appointed specially and secretly by the
ephors. This was the last resort to avert the danger, and more than
once was it used during the brilliant epoch of Sparta.
In the South the chattels likewise increase very rapidly, but not
rapidly enough to satisfy the breeders, planters, and slave-traders.
All things considered, the colored enslaved population increases
in a proportion by far more rapid than the white. After 1783 the
blacks were estimated at between five and six hundred thousand: the
census of 1860 will find them full four millions: and no wonder.
Trafficking slave-breeders, as well as planters, organize breeding as
systematically as cattle-raisers attend to their stock. In Virginia
this is the principal pursuit, and the chief source of income from
domestic husbandry. The breeders have small enclosures to gently
exercise the young human stock like the breeders of valuable horses.
In some States, principally in the cotton region, the colored chattels
outnumber the whites; in others the respective numbers are nearly
equal. About one hundred and fifty years ago, South Carolina, through
the voice of her law-makers, referring to the increase in chattels,
declared it an "afflicting providence of God that the white persons
do not proportionably multiply." Nowadays South Carolina finds the
affliction a blessing. Though her colored population already outnumbers
the white, she is first in assaulting humanity by reopening the
slave-trade.
Cotton is a plant indigenous to the old world--to Asia and Africa. Its
culture by free labor may soon become very profitable in other regions
of the globe. Sooner or later this will end the exclusive American
monopoly of its production, and then the dead weight of chattelhood
will press fearfully on the oligarchs in economical as in social ways,
even if the chattels remain quiet: this is, however, impossible to
suppose, on account of their continually increasing numbers. Already
slaves are tortured, murdered, burnt and slaughtered at the first
danger, even though it be imaginary. Now this is done individually,
and, even according to Southern notions, illegally. When the profits
from slave-labor shall dwindle, and the danger from great masses of
chattels shall increase, self-preservation and fatality will force the
slaveocracy into attempting to re-enact the Spartan _krypteia_: the
cattle-breeder easily transforming himself into the butcher. Even now
many of them are on the way to bringing this about, by exposing their
old and unproductive field hands to perish from want and misery.
In the course of about four centuries, both during and after the
Peloponnesian war, the Spartan oligarchy was enriched more and more
by the spoils of victorious wars, and by the importation of slaves
as war prisoners from other Greek and from barbarous nations. Then
the difference between the rich and poor was more striking, and the
eternal process of oppressing the poor, seizing upon their property,
or buying them out, was busily and cheerfully pursued. Then Laconia
was held by comparatively few Spartan slaveholders--but there were no
more heroes of Thermopylæ. Citizens and freemen were a scarcity during
the Augustan period; but slaves, the property of a few wealthy owners,
actually covered Lacedemonia and Sparta. Domestic slavery undermined
and destroyed the Spartan nation in precisely the same manner as it did
others before and since. The enslaved Helots and Greeks, and many of
the descendants of the enslavers, became, in their turn, slaves of the
Romans, then of the Slavic invaders, afterward of the Crusaders, till
finally all of them, masters and slaves, groaned under the yoke of the
Osmanlis. The traveller can now scarcely find the few mouldering ruins
of the once proud and enslaving city. Spartan history covers nearly a
thousand years: and for centuries the destructive disease was at work.
Some of its symptoms, in the course of half a century, are already
highly developed in the South.
Piracy and kidnapping, which in Greece originated at a time when every
man saw an enemy almost in his immediate neighbor, did not wholly cease
when national relations became more normal and regular. When slavery
began to permeate the domestic economy, piracy and the slave-traffic
were of course more active. The Southern enslavers assert that their
region is not yet supplied with the necessary number of chattels.
They draw on piracy, kidnapping, and bloodshed in Africa. The almost
incessant wars between the Greek neighboring tribes and nations
encouraged slavery; and innocent citizens, going from one Greek state
to another, were often enslaved through enmity and greed. However,
this savage custom became softened and finally abandoned when the
mutual relations became more civilized and regulated; whereas free-men
from free states of the Union are arrested and imprisoned in the
so-called civilized slave-holding states, and in some cases they can be
legally sold as slaves.