those of the state, exclusively war prisoners--were employed on public
works, or to take care of public buildings, or to attend on magistrates
or priests. The condition of public slaves was preferable to that of
the private slaves; indeed, the former subsequently had the right to
dispose by will of half of their property.
The land was tilled by the hands of the senators themselves, patricians
though they were. If a patrician (_pater_) possessed more land than he
could cultivate himself, he divided it among small free cultivators,
or let it out; and no servile hand desecrated the plough. The slaves
employed in the house were not numerous.
King Servius Tullius inaugurated a political reform, intended to
alleviate the condition of the plebeians oppressed by the patricians;
and in preparation for it he took a census. At that time Rome had
eighty-four thousand able-bodied citizens between the ages of eighteen
and sixty years, or a total population of about four hundred thousand
free persons of all ages and sexes. To this number must be added
the plebeians, who were not yet citizens. The artisans, operatives,
clients and strangers perhaps doubled this estimate of the population
of Rome, the limits of which then stretched from the Tiber to the Anio,
including, probably, the lands of Alba, and making in all, an area of
about one hundred and twenty or one hundred and forty square miles.
There would thus be more than five thousand five hundred inhabitants to
a square mile; so that there could have remained but very little room
for slaves.
In the first stages of the republic, the patricians continually
increased their landed estates, and by renting these to tenants,
they acquired power over the poor free laborers, and by lending them
money, got a claim on their bodies and also on the free yeomen and
rustics. The patricians were hard creditors, and rigorously availed
themselves of their legal rights, and their _ergastula_--caves or
vaulted prisons--were almost continually filled with poor debtors.
This impoverishment of the free yeomanry increased after the terrible
devastations perpetrated by the Gauls under Brennus. Finally, these
financial oppressions generated those revolts of the plebeians which
terminated in their obtaining political rights and full citizenship,
together with the jurisprudential reform known as the Twelve Tables.
During the first three or four centuries of the republic, the number
of slaves who were non-debtors was very limited. At the census made
in the year of Rome 280, the free population amounted to over four
hundred and ten thousand persons, and there were then only seventeen
thousand slaves.
Few, if any, women were originally enslaved. If the nursling of a Roman
family often drew its milk from the paps of a slave woman, the Roman
matron, in turn, often gave her breast to the babe of a slave.
In those early times the slaves were kindly treated; they were regarded
rather as members of the family than as chattels; they took their meals
with their masters, and participated in the sacrifices and worship of
the gods. They were not considered dangerous elements in the household
or the state. From that early epoch also date certain privileges
conceded to the slaves--such as their earnings or _peculium_, which, at
first established only by common usage, became afterward defined and
specified by the civil law, in which originally the slave was almost
entirely ignored.
Plebeians, proletarians, clients, free artisans--almost all of whom
were Romans--formed, in the first centuries, the bulk of the slaves
kept in the _ergastula_ of the patricians. Frequently, when a consul
wanted soldiers, he would order the creditors to open their vaults and
disgorge the victims for his service in a campaign. And sometimes,
though rarely, a consular edict quashed the debts and set them free.
In these earliest times of the Republic the name of a _proletarius_,
or procreator of children, was held in honor. It was to an increase of
the number of its freemen, not of its slaves, that the Republic hoped
for duration and power. To be called _colonus_, or a cultivator, was
also an honor to a Roman citizen, whether patrician or plebeian, in
the times of Cincinnatus, Dentatus, and Regulus. Labor was then a high
distinction, nay it was sacred; and a slave may almost be considered an
accident in domestic pursuits. Scaurus, then one of the wealthiest and
most powerful senators, had six slaves, Curius Dentatus one, Regulus
one, when he commanded the Roman legions against Carthage, while
Cincinnatus may have had one, but most probably none.
The three hundred patrician Fabii, who left Rome, crossed the Tiber
and settled at the utmost limits of the state, to guard and defend it
from the inroads of invaders--were yeomen, ploughmen, and farmers. And
without intending to offend or disparage the _ennobled_ pro-slavery
militants of this age and country, one may surely suppose that they
have at least a little respect for the names and the character of a
Dentatus, a Cincinnatus, and a Regulus.
However, the patricians and many of the rich plebeians continued
uninterruptedly to increase their lands in the _ager publicus_ at the
cost of the smaller yeomen, and that at a time when rural slavery may
be said to have been in its infancy. And it was the object of the
celebrated agrarian laws to restore the balance between the rich and
the poor in the possession of the public lands.
The wars carried on by Rome with the Greek cities in Italy, which were
crowded with slaves, and the wars carried on beyond the borders of
Italy, were the great nurseries of slavery. In such wars free citizens
were of course killed in vast numbers, and slave war-prisoners were
brought back to Rome in their stead. The Punic wars are the turning
point in the political history and in the social and moral development
of the Romans. These wars gave the first great stimulus both to urbane,
and rustic slavery. Urbane slaves were those employed in houses and
villas for personal service; rustic slaves were those engaged in
working the estates.
Rome became more and more a maritime and commercial emporium, and
slaves were now imported as merchandise, besides the continually
increasing number of prisoners of war. Thus Regulus brought over twenty
thousand Carthaginians of all conditions of life, who were sold into
slavery. But even at the time of the second Punic war, the number of
slaves of all kinds must have been comparatively very small; for after
the terrible defeat at Cannæ, the Roman senate ordered the slaves to be
armed, and only eight thousand were inscribed on the military roll. The
census taken about that time gave, in all the state, two hundred and
thirty-seven thousand Roman adult citizens, or 1,185,000 free persons
of all sexes and ages; making in all, 770,000 Romans, with their
Italian allies, fit for military duty.
The victorious Hannibal sold into slavery thousands of Roman citizens;
while the final conquest of the Carthaginian empire and of Sicily
poured many thousands of slaves into Rome from Africa, from Sicily,
and from Spain. Thus thirty thousand inhabitants of Palermo and
twenty-five thousand of Agrigentum, were sold into slavery. Among those
brought by Scipio from Africa, were two thousand artisans whom he
promised he would not sell, but would keep as slaves of the state.
Henceforth conquests in and out of Italy became a social and political
necessity for Rome. The spoils and lands rapidly increased the wealth
of the citizens, but principally of the patricians. The habits of
luxury, the contempt of manual and especially agricultural labor,
became general; and with it the demand increased for slaves to work
the estates and to cater to the other wants of the rich and effeminate
Romans. So now again, war and rapine, the annexation of Mexico,
Central America, Cuba and Hayti, are the aims of the militant American
slaveocracy.
In course of time Rome became a mart for slaves, as great as were
Carthage, Corinth, Athens and Syracuse. The slave market, like all
the other markets in the city, was superintended by the ædiles. The
municipal regulations compelled the vender to hang a scroll around the
neck of the slave, containing a description of his character, in which
his defects were declared and his health warranted, especially his
freedom from epilepsy and violent diseases. The nativity of the slave
was considered important and was also to be declared. When the Romans
conquered Asia, the Syrians (who belonged to the Caucasian race) were
considered to be especially adapted for slavery, just as the negroes
are at the present day. An incalculable majority of the Roman slaves
were of the Caucasian or Japhetic race. Where, oh, where, during these
almost countless centuries, slept the Scriptural curse of Ham?
The Hannibalian war was eminently destructive to the yeomanry and to
their small homesteads. Internal domestic economy was shaken from the
foundation and almost entirely destroyed; the arable lands were rapidly
turned into wild sheep pastures, with wild slaves on them as shepherds;
the patricians no longer considered agriculture their first occupation,
when they found that the slaves of Sicily, Africa, and afterward Egypt,
were able to nourish both them and the people; and any land still in
culture, was worked by poor farmers, by colonists and slaves. The term
_colonist_, also, now acquired a somewhat degraded signification, for
they were now but poor proletarians and plebeians. Now also came into
more common use the legal denomination _familia rustica_, or rural
chattels; and perhaps at this time, or soon after, originated in Rome
the proverb: "_As many slaves, so many enemies._"
In the course of the sixth century, U.C., there burst out in great
force the antagonism between the free rural laborer and the slave. The
struggle for life and death between the large land and slave holders
and the yeomanry or freeholders, became more and more active. That
which had taken root but slowly in the previous centuries, became
strengthened by contact with nations of older and more corrupt
civilizations. The influence of Carthage appeared in the rural
economy of the Romans, and they began to model their agriculture on
the Carthaginian slave husbandry. The book on "Agriculture," written
by Magon, a Carthaginian, was translated into Latin by order of the
senate. The country was rapidly filled with slaves, and now originated
that reckless cruelty in dealing with them which was reflected soon
after in the laws. The large slaveholders continually enlarged
their estates by buying or seizing under various pretexts the small
homesteads. In the times of Publicola and of the Twelve Tables, the
small freeholders had been driven to despair by debts and executions;
but now they were ruined and utterly destroyed by slave labor. The
patricians, who had formerly been mortgagees of homesteads, and for
whom the freeholder had worked to quash his indebtedness, now became
large planters. Thus in Rome and throughout Italy, as well as in the
conquered provinces, the slave tide rose higher and higher. These
provinces constituted the estates of the sovereign Roman people; but
in their administration the patricians applied the same discipline,
the same iron rod that they held over their slaves. They kept the
ironed chattels in walled courts and prisons, and it became proverbial
that "A good mastiff should show no mercy to slaves"--a proverb still
applicable to the bloodhounds of slavery.
The poor freemen, expelled from the country and deprived of employment,
crowded more and more into Rome, increasing, to a fearful extent, the
Roman proletariate. For more than three centuries the best men of Rome,
Crassus, Licinius, Emilianus, Drusus, and the Gracchi, made various
efforts, to arrest by agrarian laws, the destruction of freeholds,
first by the large estates, and then by slaveholders. These efforts
were the principal causes of the internal struggles and civil wars of
the Roman republic, and their failure proved the destruction of the
Roman world. Scipio Æmilianus Africanus prophecied the downfall of
liberty and of the Roman state, if this substitution of plantation
economy for the old yeomanry and freeholds did not cease. About the
year 620 U.C., scarcely any freeholds for yeomen existed in Etruria;
and Plutarch says, "When Tiberius Gracchus went through Tuscany to
Numantia he found the country almost depopulated, there being scarcely
any free husbandmen or free shepherds, but for the most part imported
slaves. He then first conceived the course of policy," etc. An account
almost precisely similar of the present condition of Virginia may be
found in a speech made a few years ago by one of her own sons--one,
too, of the most ardent upholders of slavery, whether as governor of
the state, as active politician, or as a private citizen. The Roman
planter desolated Etruria by devoting it to the breeding of cattle; the
Virginian desolates her prolific soil and his own manhood by devoting
them to the breeding of "niggers." But here the analogy ceases. The
Virginian savior will stand in history the antipodes of the Gracchi.
The Roman oligarchs, slaveholders and slave-traders, baffled the
sublime efforts of the Gracchi, who attempted not only to preserve but
to increase the number of freeholders. The Gracchi were murdered by
the oligarchs and the degraded rabble. Publius Scipio Nasica and other
senators, fomented and incited Publius Satureius and Lucius Rufus, who,
armed with bludgeons or legs of broken chairs, struck down and murdered
Tiberius Gracchus. With similar barbarity Senator Sumner was assaulted
in his chair of office; and Senators Toombs and Mason, as well as Hons.
Keitt and Brooks, had thus their bloody prototypes in Rome. The murder
of the Gracchi was applauded by the degraded Roman rabble; so also
did the "poor whites" in the South applaud the assault on Sumner, as
well as every other act of savage violence perpetrated in Washington
or elsewhere in the interests of slavery. The Roman men and matrons,
however, did not present _cudgels of honor_ to Publius Satureius and
Lucius Rufus.
The current of slavery now flowed in unchecked course, ever enlarging
as it advanced. The free citizens, deprived of their homes and
property, though now inspired no more by the antique Roman virtue,
nevertheless preserved somewhat of their former bravery, and the
legions extended the Roman sway over Greece and Asia. The captives
taken from the cities and districts were no longer colonized, as
formerly, but were sold into slavery like prisoners made on the
battle-field, and the most vigorous and patriotic portion of the
population of other countries was sold as chattels. The depopulation of
Macedon, Epirus, and Greece by the Roman conquerors, has been already
mentioned. Cato brought large numbers of slaves from Cyprus; Lucullus
must have made innumerable thousands in Bithynia and Cappadocia,
judging from the low price of about two-thirds of a dollar per head,
for which his human booty was sold. Marius made slaves of more than one
hundred and fifty thousand Gauls, Kymri and Teutons, and among them
undoubtedly many Angles and Saxons.
The exactions, taxes and tributes which the Roman oligarchy compelled
the conquered kingdoms to pay, increased the general poverty, ruin and
slavery. The men and children of the Sicilians and other nations were
sold into slavery by the Roman tax-gatherers: and when Marius demanded
from Nicomede of Bithynia, as an ally, his contingent of troops, the
king made answer that all his able-bodied men were sold into slavery
by the Roman tax and tribute gatherers. And even to the present day,
in the slave states, they sell into slavery free men and women for the
costs of prison and judgment.
All these slaves, either in person or cash, centred toward Rome, and
thus increased the power and resources of the oligarch slaveholders,
while at the same time they incontinently devoured the domestic economy
of the state; and the impoverished and homeless freemen took their
revenge on the oligarchs under Marius, father and son, and under
Cinna; while Sylla, in turn, was the avenging sword of the oligarchs
and slaveholders. In his time slaveholders were composed principally
of wealthy ancient patricians and new rich men or cavaliers, who
together constituted the oligarchy of capital: just as now, the "old
families," as they are called, of the slave states combine with the
new plantation-buyers, overseers, traders, etc., and jointly form the
slave-driving oligarchy.
Sylla shed in torrents the blood of those who dared to hope for a
reform from Marius and the reduction of the power of the slaveholders.
He was their soul and their representative, and was guilty of every
cruelty to uphold the interest, not of Rome, but of the egotistical
oligarchy; just, again, as in the slave states, the diminutive would-be
Syllas are ready to sacrifice every thing to maintain slavery, even to
the destruction of society and the republic; while the public spirit of
a free state makes every freeman seek his own welfare in the general
good.
In the time of Sylla, Italy contained about thirteen millions of
slaves; and slave insurrections, both there and in Sicily, succeeded
each other almost uninterruptedly. History has recorded some of them,
and immortalized the name of the heroic Spartacus. The insurrection in
Sicily also, under Ennus, lasted more than four years, and cost the
lives of nearly a million of victims.
Slave-breeding was not yet conducted on a large scale. The advice of
Cato the Grumbler, was against its permission; and he obliged his
slaves to pay him a tax from their _peculium_ whenever they cohabited
with the other sex.
The large amount of grain imported from conquered countries cultivated
by slaves, brought about a competition which soon destroyed the
homesteads of the yeomanry, and transformed the fertile Campagna and
almost the whole of Italy into a vast cattle pasturage.
It has been already mentioned (see "Greeks") that during the
post-Alexandrian dissolution of Greece and of the east, Cilician piracy
was rampant in the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Until Pompey
destroyed this piracy, it had its centres and markets in Crete, in
Rhodes, and even in Alexandria; but the principal mart was in Delos,
where sometimes ten thousand slaves changed masters in a single day.
The Roman merchants were the best patrons of the Cilician pirates; and
recent developments show that our slave-planters are again beginning to
be willing customers to the Americo-African pirates and slave-traders.
In general, wherever the capitalist-slaveholder is permitted to develop
his supremacy in a state, both man and society are materially and
morally ruined. Thus it was with Rome and Italy at that epoch: and so
also, the American slave states move on rapidly in the orbit from which
Rome whirled into the abyss.
In the Mithridatic and Asiatic wars, Pompey enslaved more than two
millions of Asiatics; and according to the census made under him, Italy
contained at that time only 450,000 able-bodied citizens capable of
military duty, or a total free population of about 2,200,000. It is
also asserted that Cæsar enslaved at least one million of Gauls. In the
age of Cicero only about two thousand citizens of Rome possessed landed
property, but with it they owned legions of chattels; and Cicero--a
parvenu without manhood, first the accessory and then the betrayer
of Cataline--maintained that only slaveholders could be considered
respectable.
After the patricians were restored to power by Sylla, they found that
war and hereditary slavery did not supply the necessary quantity
of slaves; and they consequently began to kidnap and enslave poor
freemen--even their Roman fellow-citizens. To rob and take violent
possession of the remaining freeholds became now a matter of course. In
the time of Cicero nearly all handicrafts in the city, which had once
been in the hands of freemen and clients, were carried on by slaves,
either directly for their masters, or indirectly by being hired out
to others. It became more and more common to hire out skilful slaves
and to train them up with the view of receiving the revenues of their
proficiency. It was then just as it is now; for then Italy, as now the
slave states, was owned by slave-drivers, worked by slaves, and guarded
by heartless overseers and bloodhounds.
In the beginning of his career, Cæsar tried to create a free yeomanry
by distributing the public domain among the poor free citizens and the
disabled soldiers. After the victory over the oligarchs and Pompey,
he colonized eighty thousand of the proletarians of Rome. But it was
forever too late; and besides, the oligarchs and slaveholders opposed
his attempts. Scarcely any free laborers existed; the domain of the
slave-driver was universal; indeed it was such an epoch as is now
again so ardently desired by small senators, would-be statesmen, and
the whole vanguard of the knight-errant army of chattelhood. Freeholds
disappeared from Italy, and almost from the world, with the exception
perhaps of the valleys in the Apennines and the Abruzzi. The region
from the modern Civita Vecchia across Tusculum to Boiæ and Naples,
where once a dense population of Latin and Italian free yeomanry
ploughed the soil and reaped the harvest, was now covered with splendid
villas for the masters and with _ergastula_ for their chattels. But the
proud inhabitants of the villas, the rich patricians and slaveholders,
were themselves soon to become political slaves. Central Italy and
the lands around Rome which nursed the armies, and from which were
recruited the conquerors of the Carthaginians, Numidians and the
phalanxes of Macedonia, was now a waste, depopulated solitude, owned by
a few wealthy planters.
Domestic slavery now brought Rome into the condition to which it had
reduced Greece and the oriental world centuries before. The Italy of
Varro and of Cicero resembled the Greece of Polybius, Carthage on the
eve of its fall, or Asia as found by Alexander. _What will be the
full and ripe crop of this dragon-teeth-seed in America?_ Whenever
domestic slavery is planted and takes enduring root in a country, even
the beauty of nature is ravaged and destroyed. Do the chattel-cabins
enliven the landscape of Virginia or beautify the coast of Carolina?
The living rill or river gloriously reflects a thousandfold the rays
and colors of light, but stagnant sewers are everywhere alike fetid and
abominable.
During the epoch when slavery flourished and the Roman republic fell
into decay, those terrible cruelties toward slaves which history
records, and which even now strike the mind with horror, came into
vogue. Slaves, chained in gangs, worked in the fields; at night they
were crowded together in prisons; a Greek letter was branded with a
hot iron into their cheeks, and other unmentionable cruelties were
practised. Still, even then, they were comparatively well fed, as
indeed are all useful and submissive beasts. The Roman fabulist
Phoedrus, in his tale of "_The Dog and the Wolf_," tells how this good
feeding was regarded by the nobler minds of that demoralized epoch.
After the time of Cato the breeding of slaves became more general, and
one woman would frequently nurse several babies, while their mothers
were otherwise employed. This became even more common, however, in a
subsequent epoch.
Slaves were used for all purposes in the household of the rich Roman
oligarch. They performed the highest as well as the basest labors; they
were even doctors, architects, literati, readers and amanuenses; they
exercised in some degree the function of printing in our day, as by
their labor manuscripts were copied and libraries formed.