Slavery in History

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X.

CHINESE.

AUTHORITIES:

The Biots, Kaeuffer, Gutzlaff, etc.

China belongs to the present and to the remotest past of the Asiatic world.The historical existence of China and her civilization are at least coeval with that of Egypt and of Assyria, perhaps older than that of the Aryas.

Some geological investigators affirm that the table-land inclosed between the northern slopes of the Himalayas, the Kuenlun, the desert of Gobi—which is said to be older than the formation of the Himalayas—the Heavenly or Blue mountains, and the Altaï, was the first land which rose from the waters, and that therefore it was the first, and perhaps the only place in the north, where man appeared.This admitted, the probability is, that from that first human family issued a race bearing to-day various appellations, as the Yellow, the Altaïc, Turanian, Scythic, Finnic, Mongolian and Tartar—which is the last general denomination adopted by science, at least for the branches occupying central Asia, and reaching to the frontiers of Europe and the descendants of the Aryas.The first immigrants to China from the Kuenlun probably followed the current of the Yellow river; and it seems that the aborigines retired before the invaders, or perhaps the new yellow settlers mixed with the primitive occupants. In the southern parts of China, in the mountains of the interior, are still found tribes of dark-colored men resembling the negroes or the Pacific islanders, and using notched characters similar to those used by the Malays.

Agriculture seems to have been the sacred occupation of these yellow-hued settlers along the banks of the Yellow river—as it was in the valley of the Nile, of the Euphrates, and on the plains of Iran. Everywhere the origin of agriculture is lost in the night of time, and Quain or Cain—that is, the kernel, the young, the generating, etc., the husbandman of the Scriptures—is many thousand years older than Abraham, the wandering and slave-holding patriarch. The oldest Chinese records show agriculture to have been the special occupation of the father of a family, of the chief of a clan, and then of the emperor of the entire nation. With his own hands he directs the plough—therefore the plough could not have been desecrated by the hands of a slave. And it was not. In the family, in the domestic as well as in the national life, slavery first dimly appears only about the thirteenth century B.C.

In the remotest time, labor was, as it is now, the basis, the cement and the soul of the Chinese social and political life and growth—and by labor I mean, intellectual and manual labor in its most varied departments and developments.No classes, no castes, existed in the old primitive times; and perhaps, during many thousand years, no dynasties. The best and ablest person was selected as the chief and ruler: all the offices or functions were obtained by intellectual faculty and by superiority of knowledge, but not inherited; and the same system prevailed throughout all the occupations and pursuits of life. No labor whatever was degraded or degrading; it was carried on by men free and equal, and in principle recognized as such.

In China, as everywhere else, slavery appeared as a disease in the social body.It was generated by war and crime.Prisoners of war and condemned criminals became, so to say, slaves of the state, which used them for public labors or hired them out to private individuals.The highest officers of state, persons over seventy years old, and children, could not be condemned to slavery, excepting children exposed or abandoned by their parents.Slaves hired by private individuals were only used as helps or servants in households and families.But most of the servants were always freemen—they are so now; and slaves never were used in agriculture or in the different handicrafts.The land being generally considered as the property of the state, or of the emperor, the sovereign divided, distributed it, under certain conditions and servitudes, for tribute in money or kind, etc. But slaves are not mentioned among the various objects enumerated as constituting the tribute.The increase of population generated poverty, and paupers sold and still sell themselves or their children into slavery.Repeated domestic or internecine wars, recorded at a very distant historical epoch, were among the prominent agencies in increasing poverty. Impoverished persons and those deprived of their homes either sold themselves or became serfs attached to the soil, but not chattels. As serfs their legal condition and denomination is preserved in the books written about the twelfth century B.C., by Ma-tuan-lin—they are named usurped families or usurpeesEven after the conquest by the Mantschou Tartars, chattelhood did not get hold of the political structure, nor did it absorb the agricultural and industrial domestic economy of the Chinese.With the exception of the reigning family, no social position or function is privileged as hereditary; and in the same way, accidental slavery was not transmitted to the children of the enslaved.Their condition was and is controlled and regulated by law, which watches over the property of the state.Among the numerous domestic wars there are never recorded any revolts of slaves—an evidence of their very limited number.

Over-population generated and generates the most terrible and varied oppressions and miseries; but all of them lose their sting when compared with chattelhood.Over-population and misery generated the so-called coolie-system, which in principle is based on voluntary indenture.The reckless cruelties and the numerous infamies characterizing the manner in which the coolie trade is carried on, is evidence of the utter moral degradation and depravity of the white civilized Christian traders, and the inefficiency of their respective governments.

The Chinese civilization is commonly looked down upon from the heights of narrow-minded presumption and ignorance. About three thousand years B.C., public schools existed in China, and a full scientific and material culture prevailed there. Chinese records (among them the Books of the Sehu Kings), going back, perhaps, as far as two thousand five hundred years B.C.—contain the most correct and detailed statistical accounts of tribute, and give most reliable geographical notions of China, and of the subdued and neighboring countries—notions superior in exactitude to all similar records transmitted from classical antiquity.The Chinese lived in houses, in orderly communities, were humanized, polished, familiar with the sciences, industries, and all kinds of refinements, at a time, and during countless centuries, when the races of northern Europe—prominently the Slavi, the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons included—did not, in all probability, even understand how to construct huts, and, as savages, roved about in the wilderness.

In a work written by Prince Tscheu-Kong, about one thousand one hundred years B.C., are given the most minute details of the then existing organization of the empire.The administrative mechanism of that distant epoch finds no equal in the whole history of governments or of nations.Several thousand years ago the empire was administered by six supreme state departments, each with perfectly defined attributes, each subdivided into special branches, with directors and all orders of lower officials and functionaries.Chinese civilization passed its periods of youth and maturity many thousand years ago; and its senility has not yet reached total decrepitude.It crumbles not to pieces even now in its comparatively disjointed and disorganized condition.

No one can consider China in any way a model social organism; but its duration is marvellous and unequalled in the history of the race.The absence of hereditary privilege and of chattelhood as social or religious institutions, accounts, among other reasons, for this unique phenomenon.With all its drawbacks and defects, this long-lived civilization, with its schools, its general intelligence, its thousands-of-years old routine, compares, in many respects, favorably with that in the Southern States calling itself Christian, which, having partly inherited the great European development, and receiving influences from the free sections of the Union, has, nevertheless, for the last thirty or forty years, turned on its own crooked tracks, and, now prohibits, under severe penalty, schools for the children of its field laborers, whom it keeps in bondage.It sighs also for a further extension of oligarchic privileges, and for the enslavement of all human labor: re-enslaves the free or expels them; legalizes and sanctifies the sum of all social villanies: whose last word is the Lynch law, and the reckless, lawless persecution of free speech and even of free thought; while assassination becomes more and more frequent.

In the most ancient Asiatic world, the primitive societies generally had analogous beginnings, whatever may have been the regions and climates cradling them, whatever the difference of time, epochs, or race-characteristics.Analogous events and conditions evoked similar developments in the primitive men.The manifestations of man's intellectual and physical activity were everywhere spontaneous: a transmission of the various rudiments of civilization cannot logically be admitted.

Osiris, Cain, Yao, were urged by like necessities, when they inaugurated agriculture in Egypt, in Euphratia, or along the valleys of the Yellow river.On the Nile, on the Euphrates, on the Ganges, on the Hoang-ho, man—red or black, white or yellow—observed nature, utilized even the inundations, regulated and embanked the beds of rivers, cut canals and trenches to irrigate the parched soil.Everywhere—and certainly without imitating each other—but urged by surrounding circumstances, man worked, toiled, constructed habitations with the materials at hand—stone in Egypt; bricks, plaster, wood, etc., in Babylonia and China; raised cities in rich and fertile plains, erected edifices, and invented characters and signs to fix and to transmit to others ideas, notions and facts.Whatever may have been the special nature and form of these characters, whether hieroglyphics or phonetics, etc., undoubtedly they were original and not transmitted creations. These inventions arose at places separated by distances then almost impassable, by the same necessities and thoughts, by observation and imitation of nature, and by many other inner and outer promptings and circumstances. The rudiments of mathematics, astronomy, and other sciences, were created by this contact of man's mind with nature; and it is difficult, if not impossible, to admit that Egyptians or Chaldeans were the instructors of the Aryas or of the Chinese, or vice versa

Of late an attempt has been made to justify American chattelhood by 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.

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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.Phœnician vessels visited the shores, and Phœnician 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnicians, 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 Phœnicians 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 glebæSuch 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.

In Bœotia slaves were not numerous—being only occasionally made and used.Neither serfs, bond-men, nor chattels, were held in Elis, Locris, or by the Arcadians, Phocians, or Achæans, until the downfall of Greek dignity, liberty, and independence, under the Macedonian and Roman rule.The Phocians prohibited slavery by express legislation.

The Ionians in Attica boasted that they sprang from their native soil.They were therefore the primitive tillers and cultivators of their not over-fertile and rather rocky land, of about one hundred and ninety square miles.This land was divided more or less equally into small homesteads worked by yeomen, to whom chattels would have been a burden.Centuries after the heroic or legendary epoch, when Attica possessed wealthier landowners, Hesiod advises the agriculturists to work their lands by the free labor of the Thetes in preference to slave labor.

Athens became very early a commercial city, and perhaps piratical expeditions for the kidnapping of slaves were fitted out from the Piræus.At any rate, slavery, chattelhood, was especially, if not exclusively, fostered when commerce became more extensive.Athens was the seat and focus of domestic slavery.In the course of time almost all trades were carried on by slaves, as also mining, and finally, farming.But all this was the growth of the long process of centuries.

Debtors were enslaved; but Solon abolished this right of the creditor.He likewise abolished the custom of going about armed in the community.Generally it is a sign of a dangerous and very degraded state of society when men carry arms as a necessity.By a strange coincidence, since slavery has been proclaimed a moral and religious duty, the use of bowie-knives, revolvers, and rifles becomes more and more the order of the day in the South.Not against the slave, not against any foreign enemy, not even against the abolitionist, do the men of the South arm themselves, but it is against each other that they have recourse to armed assaults in their private and public intercourse.From the South the savage custom invades the North, and it has in some cases been forced on peaceful Northern members of Congress in self-defence against the assaults of their Southern colleagues.

The Ionic race had no serfs or Helots, either in Attica or elsewhere.But in Attica, as in other Greek communities, and indeed throughout the whole world, from among the primitive yeomen or peasants, emerged those who, more thrifty, more successful, or more brave, accumulated wealth in various ways.Such was one mode in which aristocracy originated. These yeomen growing richer, acquired more land, bought out smaller farmers, and could hire more field hands. Even before Solon the aim of the rich was to transform freeholders into tenants, but Solon stemmed this current for a long period of time.

Parents could sell their children into slavery; Solon reduced this right to such daughters as willingly submitted to seduction.A poor man could sell himself into slavery, and children exposed by their parents were enslaved by the public authorities.

War and traffic furnished the great supplies of slaves or chattels for the Athenians.Such chattels were from all nations and races, and the black slaves constituted an accidental and imperceptible minority.Witness Æsop telling the story of a rustic who bought a black slave and unsuccessfully tried to bleach or to whitewash it.If blacks had been common merchandise, the rustic would have been familiar with its nature.Slavery was transmitted from parents to children, if the prisoner of war was not ransomed or the slave not manumitted.But at any time a slave could receive or buy his freedom, and a chattel once liberated could not, under penalty of capital punishment, again be violently enslaved.In the South they begin to legislate for the re-enslavement of the liberated: the odium no longer falls on the individual but on the whole body politic.All over the ancient world the state watched over and protected the once enfranchised slave: the modern slave-holding polity expels him or legislates for his disfranchisement.In Athens, as all over Greece, the offspring of freemen and slave-women were free.

At first slaves performed domestic service, and afterward, when their number increased, they were employed in various trades.The state used them in public works, sometimes to row the ships.But the greatest number were employed to work the mills and mines of Attica.However, the state itself did not work the mines, but rented them generally without the slave labor; though private individuals rented them for a term of years, together with the slaves who worked them.Slowly chattelhood spread over the rural economy of Attica.

About the time of the Persian wars, rural property was still nearly equally divided among the citizens. Wealth was accumulated and represented in commerce, in various industries, and in the precious metals. But at that time slaves nowhere outnumbered the freemen. At the battle of Marathon the Athenians had ten thousand hoplites or heavily armed able-bodied citizens; at Platea eight thousand; and in both battles nearly as many peltasts or lightly-armed troops—poorer citizens, but not serfs, or retainers, or slaves. Before the invasion of Xerxes, the free population of Attica probably amounted to more than one hundred and twenty thousand of both sexes and all ages. The slave population is estimated at the utmost as sixty thousand.

Athens, like all the other Greek republics, colonized other countries with the surplus of their free—mostly poor—population. Herodotus died in such an expedition. The Dorians very likely colonized Sicily, the Ionians Italy or Magna Grecia. Such colonizations relieved the over-populated mother-country, extended the Hellenic culture, but likewise, in more than one way, fostered and nursed slavery. The Greek colonists in Sicily and in Italy, conquering or pushing into the interior the aborigines of these lands, enslaved, kidnapped and sold them. Then the Greek cities warred with and enslaved each other. Such was the case between Sybaris and Crotona, or in Sicily between Syracuse, Girgentum, etc. The rich men of Athens bought more and more slaves, purchased the lands of the poor, substituted in various handicrafts their gangs of slave laborers for freemen, and exported the impoverished freemen.[13] The increase of large estates and chattels went hand in hand with the decrease of freemen and public spirit in Athens; and the same was the case in other large commercial cities of Greece.

After the Persian war Athens became the wealthiest of commercial cities, and the Athenians a conquering nation. Both circumstances increased the number of slaves. But still the landed property was not yet absorbed. Alcibiades owned only about three hundred plethra, or about seventy-five acres of land in Attica.The wealthy slave-owners and oligarchs were not in power, but they owned mines in Attica and landed estates in various Greek dependencies and colonies. Slavery prevailed in the city, and it became more and more common on the farms. However, on the eve of the Peloponnesian war, democracy still prevailed. The oligarchs, proud of their slaves, mines, plantations and estates, scorned the democracy of Athens, composed of artists, yeomen, operatives, artisans—who really formed the soul of the great Periclean epoch.

Oligarchies are alike all over the world; in most of them, slave-holders, however called, live upon the labor of others; all of them scorn the laboring classes.The Southern militant planters and their Northern servile retainers scorn the enlightened masses of working-men, the farmers and operatives of the free states.But it is those masses which exclusively give original signification to America in the history of human development.Athens and the various monuments of the Periclean epoch coruscate over doomed Hellas: so the villages of the free states, with their schools and laborious, intelligent, self-reliant populations, shed their rays now over the Christian world.And the sight of such a village is a far different subject of contemplation from that of the slave-crowded plantation.

Slavery increased rapidly in Athens, as in all the great commercial centres, and in the adjacent isles of Greece.At the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, Attica had a population of about twenty thousand male adults, or a little over one hundred thousand free persons of all ages and sexes. The whole free population of Greece is estimated to have been at that time about eight hundred thousand souls; and the slaves—the Spartan serfs or Helots included—perhaps outnumbered the freemen. Thucydides says that the island of Chios had about two hundred and ten thousand slaves, the largest number next to Sparta; then came Athens, with nearly two hundred thousand human chattels; while other great commercial cities of Greece, as Sycyon and Corinth, likewise contained very large numbers.

The Peloponnesian war was waged with all the violence of a family feud. It spread desolation, impoverishment, carnage and slavery over Greece. Captives made by the one or the other contending party, were sold by tens of thousands into slavery; these captives were principally the small freeholders, the thetes and geomori—operatives, artisans, and, indeed, free workmen of every kind.Their number consequently diminished, and their small estates were either bought or taken violently by the rich, who thus simultaneously increased the number of their chattels and their acres of land.Thus did slavery permeate more and more the Greek social polity, until, at the epoch between Pericles and the beginning of the Macedonian wars, the number of slaves in Athens and Attica was nearly doubled: but the free population did not thus increase.Large landed estates became more and more common, till, in the time of Demosthenes, the soil of Attica, was concentrated in comparatively few hands.At Cheronea, the Athenians fought against Philip with mercenary troops, and even armed their slaves.But the spirit of Marathon and of Platæa was gone, and Athens succumbed.The gold of Philip was acceptable to the rich slave-holders, and went principally into the hands of the oligarchs; but alas!no second Miltiades ever emerged from their ranks.

It is supposed that at the epoch of the Macedonian conquest, the proportion of slaves and freemen was as seven to three.Near the beginning of the reign of Alexander, the free population of Greece amounted to one million, and the slaves to one million four hundred and thirty-five thousand.The census taken in Attica about that time, under the archon Demetrius of Phaleris, gives for Athens and Attica twenty-one thousand adult male citizens, or a little over one hundred thousand persons of all ages and sexes, and four hundred thousand slaves.The slave population pre-ponderated, however, only in the wealthy part of Greece; the poorer agricultural communities, as already mentioned, having been free from its curse.Thus Corinth had four hundred and fifty thousand, and Ægina four hundred and seventy thousand slaves; and this is the reason that Philip, Alexander, Antipater, and other conquerors had such comparatively easy work in destroying Greek liberty.

The Macedonian wars also spread desolation, slavery and ruin; and of Thebans alone, Alexander sold over thirty thousand into slavery.

Thus ended the independent political existence of Greece and Athens.Rich slave-holders, indeed, they still had; but they ceased to have a history of their own, or a distinct political existence; and Greece became a satellite successively of Macedonia, Syria, Egypt and Rome.

To conclude: in Athens, as indeed throughout Greece, the commercial cities inaugurated domestic slavery.Slavery first penetrated into domestic life; then entered into the various trades and industries, and finally, almost wholly absorbed the lands and the agricultural economy.It also penetrated into the functions of state, and various minor offices were held by slaves—which anomaly was afterward reproduced in Rome, especially under the emperors.

In the slave section of our own country the system has already got possession of domestic and family life, of agriculture, and of some of the handicrafts; and slaves are employed on some of the railroads as brake-men and assistant-engineers.This may be a cheering proof of the intellectual capacity of the colored race, but it proves also the analogy which exists everywhere between the workings of slavery, whatever may be the distance of ages or the color of the enslaved.

It was only during the period of the moral, social and political decomposition of Greece that slavery flourished.A certain Diophantus at one period proposed a law to enslave all the laborers, artisans and operatives in Athens—so that those who now so loudly demand the same thing here, had prototypes more than twenty-four centuries ago; for, though history has transmitted to infamous memory only the name of Diophantus, yet undoubtedly he stood not alone.

In Athens and in Greece we see the cancer growing steadily over the whole social and political organism, until all Attica and almost the whole of the ancient world were divided only between slave-holders and chattels.

In the slave marts of Athens and of Corinth, and afterward in that of Delos, the sale of chattels was conducted in precisely the same way as it now is in Richmond, in New Orleans and in Memphis.The proceedings of the auctioneers and the traders, of the buyers and the sellers, were as cruel then as they are now.The same eulogies of the capacities of able-bodied men, the same piquant descriptions of the various attractions of the women, the same tricks to conceal bodily defects, and similar guaranties between vender and buyer, then as now.

When, finally, laborers of almost every kind, handicraftsmen and agriculturists, had thus become enslaved, all the freemen, both rich and poor, were speedily swallowed up in an equal degradation.The family became disorganized; the republics perished.This was completely accomplished when Greece passed from Macedonian to Roman rule: then domestic slavery flourished as never before.In that final struggle the password of the Greek slave-holders was, "Unless we are quickly lost, we cannot be saved." The non-slaveholding mountaineers of Achaia fought against the Romans until they were almost exterminated. But Rome conquered, and large numbers of Greeks were sold into slavery by the Roman consuls. Paulus Emilius alone sold one hundred and fifty thousand Macedonians and other Greeks, while the whole population of Corinth was sold by Mummius; and Sylla depopulated Athens, the Piræus and Thebes. The Roman rule in Greece and over the Greek world was a fierce stimulant to the growth of domestic slavery. The Roman senate and the Roman proconsuls especially favored the large slaveholders, since they were the fittest persons to tolerate the yoke. The Romans helped them to degrade and to enslave as much as possible. Rome wanted not freemen in Greece, but slaves and obedient slave-drivers; and Roman tax-gatherers and the farmers of public revenues sold freemen into slavery for debt. Finally, the celebrated Cilician pirates desolated Greece, carrying away and selling, in Delos, almost the last remnants of the free laboring population.

A small body of free citizens now ruled immense masses of slaves.The normal economy of nature was thus destroyed, and the depopulation of Greece went on rapidly.At the time of Cicero, almost the whole of Attica formed the estate of a single slaveholder, who also owned other estates in other parts of Greece.Many militant slave oligarchs doubtless envy that Athenian slaveholder; at any rate they are doing their utmost to bring the Southern States to a condition similar to that just depicted in Athens and Greece.

During the Peloponnesian wars, insurrections of slaves often took place in Attica, especially in the mines.But the greatest slave rebellion, as far as history has recorded, was under the Roman administration.The revolted slaves then seized upon the fortress of Sunium, and for a long time fought bravely for their freedom.

The Greeks, as in some degree all the peoples of antiquity, considered domestic slavery a social misfortune to the enslavers, and an accursed fatality inherent in human society. They never presented it under the false colors of a normal and integral social element. The striking analogies between the workings of slavery in the ancient world and in the American republic, show that the disease is everywhere and eternally the same, and that it does not ennoble either the community or the individual slaveholder, as the pro-slavery combatants apodictically assert.

If in the despotic oriental empires, domestic and political slavery at times played into each other's hands until they jointly destroyed national life, it was domestic slavery, single-handed, which did the work in Greece, and particularly in Sparta and Athens.Domestic slavery enervated the nation and made it an easy prey to foreign conquest.It converted into a putrescent mass the once great and brilliant Grecian world.

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XII.

ROMANS—THE REPUBLICANS.

AUTHORITIES:

Corpus Juris, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Niebuhr, Arnold, Savigny, Puchta, Mommsen, Jhring, Clinton, Carl Hegel, Zumpt, etc.

The primitive occupants of the Mediterranean peninsula—anciently, and at the present time, called Italy—issued from the same Aryan stock as peopled Greece. These immigrants, almost from the first moment of their arrival, seem to have devoted themselves to agriculture, as all the relics still dimly visible in prehistoric twilight certify to this fact. Thus, the domestic legend of the Samnites makes an ox the leader of the primitive colonies, which is only a different version of another tradition, according to which Vitulus or Italus—a legendary king, from whom the name of "Italy" is derived—brought about among his subjects the transition from shepherds to farmers. The name Italia, in ancient Latin, signified a country full of cattle. The oldest of the Latin tribes has the name of Siculi, Sicani, reapers, and another, Opsci, or field-laborers. Among the Italians (or Italos, Italiots), the legends, creeds, laws, and manners all originate in agriculture; while every one knows the use of the plough in the distant background of the legendary foundation of Rome. The oldest Roman matrimonial rite, the confarreatio, also has its name from rye. With agriculture is primarily connected a fixed abode, and thus springs up the love of home and family. From agricultural life arises the tribe or clan, which is simply a community of individuals descending from the same ancestor. In this primitive condition the field-labors and domestic occupations were performed by various members, first of the family, and then of the clan. The servus or servant of that epoch was no more a chattel in the Latin agricultural family and community than was the primitive servant in the tent of the patriarchs (see "Hebrews" and "Aryas"), or than were the servants of the first colonists in New England, Virginia, or the Carolinas. In these primitive households there were no duties for a chattel, for from the earliest time agricultural and household occupations were as sacred to the yeomen and peasants of Latium and Rome as were the domestic hearth, the father, and the family.

From the left bank of the Tiber to the Volscian mountains, and over the plains of the Campagna, lived the Latins—the prisci Latini. They were divided into numerous distinct families or clans, which afterward were the generators of the Roman people. The region where they first appear, in the most ancient times, was therefore settled by separate families, and divided into separate townships and villages. These clans it was which afterward in "the city" constituted the primitive tribus rusticæ or rural tribes.

The Ramnes, Ramneis, Romaneis, Romani or Romans, the founders of Rome, were, in all probability, bold rovers and adventurers from the various tribes and villages of Latium. They lived among the bushes and groves of the Palatine Mount, and what they acquired by depredation was common property. These primitive legendary Romans had no use for slaves; they had no mart in which to sell them, and it is probable that they neither kidnapped nor enslaved any of the neighboring villagers. Neither legend nor history fixes positively how long these Ramnenses or Romans persevered in their wild mode of life. The legend very soon unites them with other settled families, such as the Sabine farmers and peasantry. Then began the specific organized existence of the Romans.

The whole soil of the Roman community constituted an ager Romanus or publicus. Every citizen, as a part of the populus or state, received therefrom a share of the public land for his private use. When the Romans extended their dominions by subduing the neighboring villages and districts, the lands of such districts, their pasturages, etc., were incorporated into the ager Romanus, and the inhabitants were sometimes obliged to settle in Rome or in lands in its vicinity. From these originated the plebeians, who, under certain conditions, received shares or lots in the ager publicus or RomanusThe aim of these primitive wars was neither to kidnap nor enslave the subdued tribes, nor even to transform them into serfs or Helots, at the utmost to make them tributaries.

To the legendary Romulus were attributed the regulations or laws which forbade the massacre or enslavement of the male youth of conquered villages or districts, and prohibited also the transformation of the conquered lands into pasturages, and provided that they should be parcelled into small homesteads for Roman citizens. At first two acres, and afterward seven, constituted such a civic patrimony or homestead. It was the abandonment of this law in after ages which generated slavery and the ruin of the populace.

Only the prisoners made on the battle-field and counted among the spoils, were sold by the state at public auction: sub hasta, "under the spear," and sub corona, "the citizen wearing a crown"—to the citizens or members of the community. Such prisoner, like all other vended booty, became a mancipium, res mancipia, (from manu capere, "taken, caught by the hand." ) Such slaves, in all probability, were not numerous. A more prolific source of slavery was the right to enslave a debtor for life. The debtor became a mancipium; and even when the right to enslave him was abolished, the legal formality of catching him or touching by the hand, was maintained.

The power of the father or chief of the household—patria potestas—was limitless, in the precincts of the house, over both the family and the servants.The father, be he patrician or plebeian, could sell his son into slavery, but the right was very seldom used.So also, the father had the right of life and death over all his family and household.Manumission of slaves was common; it existed from the most ancient times. The slave could also buy his liberty. Subsequently, in the last centuries of the republic and under the emperors, a slave could be emancipated by various positive enactments, and the status of the manumitted slave often passed through various gradations before reaching absolute independence. The fortieth book of the Pandects contains several chapters relating to manumission.

Sometimes, though rarely, under the kings, the public slaves—or 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 Phœdrus, 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.

How domestic slavery degraded the Roman slaveholder is evidenced by the direct statements of history, as well as by the descriptions of manners in the comedies, etc., which have reached us from that epoch.In proportion as the old Roman spirit and courage declined, did violence and rowdyism increase.Among the various deleterious influences of slavery on slaveholders, also, two which are very noticeable at that remote time, may again, after the lapse of ages, be observed under our own eyes: slavery either emasculates the slaveholder physically and mentally, and thus renders him cruel from effeminacy; or else makes him rude and reckless, and full of a coarse and savage ferocity.

The Roman oligarchs had all the polish reflected from general culture covering the most depraved minds; and this told upon their politics as well as upon their domestic economy.As early as the time of Jugurtha, nearly all the senators were venal; and subsequently, those who preserved individually some of the better Roman characteristics, became even more rare.Such an one, toward the end of the republic, was Sextus Roscius, whom history mentions for his good treatment of his bondmen.Whenever a special class of society becomes anywhere predominant, a special type of character is formed as the standard of honor, which, however, is generally quite different from the true standard of an honest man or an upright citizen.But, false criterions aside, the Slave States may, and undoubtedly do, possess many honorable planters and citizens, as Carroll of Carrollton or Aiken and Preston of South Carolina: but none of these men give tone or character to the manners or the laws; their influence is not permitted in Congress or the state legislatures, nor are their opinions reflected in the press or in the sham literature and science of their section.But the customs and manners which now prevail, the laws enacted, the utterances of statesmen, the condition of science and literature, and the statements of the current press, constitute the evidence from which the social condition of the nation is to be judged now, and the historic evidence from which it will be judged by future generations.

The slaveholding oligarchy triumphed over Marius and Sertorius as it triumphed over the Gracchi. And the Roman republic expired composed of slaveholders, capitalists, and beggars. The fury of the indignant and impoverished people carried Cæsar to power over the carcasses and the ruins of the oligarchy, which long before had reduced the liberty and the name of the Roman people to a sham and a mockery. Domestic slavery for several centuries undermined the Roman republic, and its corrosive action increased with the most brilliant periods of conquest, just as the human body, though gnawed internally by a chronic disease, may exhibit, for a longer or shorter period, all the appearances of health and vigor. Oligarchs, slaveholders, and capitalists destroyed a republic founded by intelligent and industrious agriculturists, yeomen, and freeholders.

More than one point of analogy exists between the Roman and American republics.Independent and intelligent small farmers, with artisans, mechanics, etc., were the founders of American independence.And the free states have not only preserved but elevated to a higher social and political significance the original characteristics of her existence; and the reproaches hurled by the militant pro-slavery oligarchs against the free farmers and operatives in the fields and workshops of the north are sacrilegious to liberty and light.Even so the prince of darkness curses the god of day!

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XIII.

ROMANS—POLITICAL SLAVES.

It was an easy matter to engraft despotism upon a society morally, politically, and economically ruined by the slaveholding oligarchy.The Cæsars and the emperors inaugurated and developed it, and at that time nothing else would have suited Rome.Domestic slavery had destroyed the republican spirit, and the vitality of ancient republican institutions.The political condition of the empire—that world-ruling despotism—under the Cæsars and the emperors[14] was the legitimate result of chattelhood and of oligarchism. Political and domestic slavery now went hand in hand, both of them supreme over man and society.

During the reign of the six Cæsars, rural as well as urban slavery rapidly began to be reduced to method and to legal forms. Augustus tried to modify somewhat the cruel treatment of the slaves: he abolished, for instance, the custom of branding their cheeks with a hot iron, and ordered instead that they should wear metallic collars.It came into vogue, also, that a woman who had given birth to three children was free from hard labor the rest of her life; if she had four she became wholly free.

The slave traffic was very active over all the imperial Roman world during the whole period of its existence, and was the most lucrative branch of commerce.It was also strictly adjusted by police regulations.

Augustus likewise made efforts to morally re-invigorate, so to speak, the decaying oligarchy; but this attempt was even more unsuccessful than the former.Every person who is even slightly acquainted with history must be familiar with the absolute degradation of the oligarchs, capitalists, and rich slaveholders of imperial Rome.Tiberius despised them and tyrannized over them with a cold-blooded and contemptuous cruelty only equalled by the manner in which they crushed their chattels, or the populace of Rome, whom they had impoverished and degraded.For then, as for centuries before, the oligarchy looked with as much contempt on the working-classes as the modern slave-drivers do on "greasy mechanics."But, in the eye of history and humanity, it is the "greasy mechanics" and "small-fisted farmers" of the free states who are the glorious lights which redeem the dark side of American polity as embodied in the slave-driving chivalry.

In fact, the Roman oligarchs were far more degraded than their chattels."Turpis adulatio Senatus," said Tacitus; and the names of Druses, Germanicus, Britannicus, Chærea, Trasea, and a few others, can never redeem the infamy of a whole community.

The numbers of slaves owned by the wealthy, was, as it were, proportionate to their degradation. Athenæus says that some rich men had from ten to twenty thousand slaves, and the statement is confirmed by Seneca. Cæcilius Isidorus, a rich particulier living under Augustus, lost a great part of his fortune in the civil wars, and yet left by will 4116 chattels; Elius Proculus, on his estates in Liguria, had two thousand slaves able to bear arms; Scaurus, a wealthy senator, owned 4116 chattels, exclusive of shepherds and tillers; Eumolpus, a simple citizen—not one of the oligarchs or F. F. V.' s of that time, but rather a parvenu—had so large a number of slaves on his estates in Numidia, that with an army of them he could have stormed and taken the city of Carthage, which, although reduced from its former grandeur, was still among the first cities of Africa.Under Nero, half of Africa was owned by six slaveholders: Nero slaughtered them and inherited their estates.

Such was the rapidly developed internal condition of the Roman state when Pliny dolefully exclaimed: "Latifundi perdidere Italiam moxque provincias:" "Large extended estates (cultivated by slaves), ruined Italy, and soon after the provinces," as even Spain and Gaul were quickly devoured by the large slaveholders.

The condition and treatment of the slaves inspired pity even in a Claudius.He prohibited the custom of starving to death the old and disabled slaves, who had generally been exposed on an island in the Tiber, upon which was a temple of Esculapius.By the Claudian edict, such exposition was equivalent to emancipation. Even Nero had some pity for the slaves, though he had none for their masters. The emperors were terrified at the increased ravages of slavery, which spread in continually wider and wider circles over Gaul and Spain as well as in Africa and in the east. Edicts were issued by several emperors—as Adrian and the Antonines—designed to stay the spread of slavery and alleviate the condition of the chattels. These edicts encouraged manumissions either absolute and immediate, or gradual, and conferred the same municipal rights as were enjoyed by the enfranchised. The latifundia, or large estates, nevertheless, still increased their size; and the condition and relations of landed property required new laws and new legal definitions, which were gradually introduced into the jus civile. First in order were the common usages of the people, and then the legalization of their customs. Thus it is not till toward the end of the second Christian century that there are found in the Roman law definitions of slaves as persons attached perpetually to the soil. But their classification was so complicated, that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to define distinctly the various grades, or to exhibit clearly the features in which one differs from another. The necessities of the imperial treasury were probably the cause of such divisions as those of adscriptitii, censiti, perpetui, conditionales, coloni, inquilini—both of old republican origin—simplices, originarii, homologi, tributari, addicti glebæ, agricolæ, aratores, rustici actores, etc. In course of time, also, all these names were merged under the general denomination of serfs, which again assumed various degrees of oppression and servitude.

Augustus is proverbially said to have pacified the world; and indeed, with few exceptions, the Roman empire enjoyed internal peace during the first two Christian centuries.But under Claudius, during the war with Tiridates of Pontus, the entire population of some of the captured cities was sold into slavery, as were also one hundred thousand Jews, when Jerusalem fell under Vespasian.There were now, however, no more rich cities or cultivated countries to be conquered, no peoples to be enslaved by millions, as there had been under the republic; wars now were waged only on the outskirts of the empire, and generally with barbarous nations.Prisoners of war, captives and subdued barbarians, were no longer sold into slavery, but the emperors colonized the waste lands with them.They thus attempted to repeople Italy and the provinces, and to revive the ancient mode of rural economy, as also to increase the revenue of the imperial treasury.Such colonizations were frequent after the time of Marcus Aurelius.But all this could not stop the growth of the social cancer.Chattelhood, encouraged, as will be shown by political slavery and taxations, was wildly rampant, and overleaped every barrier to its progress which the emperors attempted to raise.

During the whole epoch of the growth and maturity of domestic slavery in Rome, no one of her moralists, philosophers, poets, priests or satirists ever preached or sang of the idyllic beauties of slavery; none of her statesmen considered it as the foundation, corner-stone or cement of society or of the empire, or even as "ennobling"[15] to the slaveholder, and orations and discourses in exaltation of human bondage were unknown. Pliny, Seneca and Plutarch only spoke of it in extenuating language.

The Roman jurisconsult of the better times of the empire crystallized into legal form the sense of justice and equity inherent in the Roman, nay, in human society. He expounded the law for the de facto existing society, and therefore generally in favor of the owner, slaveholder, etc., and against the thing, the res, which was the chattel.The object of the Roman law was only to regulate existing relations, and such was domestic slavery.But with all its unbending severity, the Roman law, through the conscientious voice of the Roman jurisconsult, declared slavery a condition, "qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subiicitur," and rarely missed an occasion to favor the slave, to alleviate his status, and to facilitate his emancipation.No clause or decision of the law re-enslaved, in any case, the chattel once emancipated.Even if a will provided for the emancipation of a slave in terms like these: "I will and command that my slave A becomes free; but upon condition that he live with my son, and if he refuses or neglects to do this he returns to slavery," the law decided, that "A, being emancipated by the first paragraph of the will, cannot be re-enslaved by the subsequent conditional paragraph; therefore A is free, and he may or may not fulfil the condition."

The child also followed the condition of the mother when born from illicit intercourse, nisi lex specialis alius inducit. If the father was a slave and the mother a free woman, the child was free, quia non debet calamitas matris ei noceri qui in utero est—"the misfortune of the mother shall not bear on the product of the womb."A change of the status of the mother from liberty to slavery during pregnancy was always construed favorably to the child, who thus might be born free if the mother was free for even the shortest time during the period of pregnancy.

Under the emperors, freemen began to sell themselves into slavery—a thing unknown during the existence of the republic.But a freeman who sold himself into slavery, if afterward manumitted, could not become again a full citizen.And whoever was once emancipated could on no pretence be re-enslaved, under penalty of death.

Modern pro-slavery legislators and jurisconsults boldly overthrow all these Roman ideas of justice and equity.

The law established various just causes for emancipation. Among these were, natural relationships, as children, brothers, sisters, mothers, cousins, grandparents, etc., when slaves; and whoever ad impudicitiam turpemque violationem servos compellat, lost his potestas, or power, over the slave.

These facilities for emancipation operated principally in favor of the urban chattels, or those of the household proper, and also rural overseers, but were rarely applied to the rural slaves; consequently, during the most brilliant period of the existence of the empire, the cities were filled with enfranchised slaves of various kinds and various nations. The country, too, was altogether abandoned by the slaveholders, who lived and rioted in the imperial city. Most of these emancipated slaves, as also, indeed, many of the free-born citizens, finally lost their liberty by the operation of those causes which, notwithstanding emancipations and state colonizations, continually increased the latifundia or large estates, and transformed into bondmen the freeholders as well as those who rented land from the state or from private individuals.

The civil administration of the Roman empire, heathen and Christian, down to its last agonies in Constantinople, may be very briefly summed up: it was fiscalityEvery administrative measure aimed at replenishing the imperial exchequer.The imperial treasury was bottomless, and its owners cold, rapacious, cruel and insatiable.All the colonizations of free laborers had for their single aim but to increase the income of the state; and tributes and taxations of every conceivable kind were imposed, first upon the provinces, and in course of time, on Italy itself.These, of course, were principally supplied by the laboring classes in the cities and on the lands.The rapacity of the state was heightened also by the individual greed of the magistrates, from the prefects down to the meanest military or political official or tax-gatherer; indeed, locusts more destructive than the Roman officials never devoured the fruits of toil or the accumulations of industry.These fiscal measures and lawless extortions, fostered chattelhood almost as much as wars and conquests had formerly done.

The inquilini and coloni of the last century of the republic were free, rent-paying farmers (who paid the rent in money), or free laborers. When, after the time of Sylla, the republican oligarchs partially enslaved these farmers, the rent had to be paid in kind, in sign of dependence, if not of absolute bondage. The colonists settled by the emperors also had to pay tribute and submit to various other servitudes; and thus the once free colonists were, by a slow but uninterrupted process, transformed into bondmen, serfs and slaves. As in the last days of the republic, so under Augustus and his successors, the free yeoman or colonist, in order to avoid being violently expelled from his homestead and shut up in the ergastulum with the chattels, frequently sold himself and his little property, on certain conditions, to the rich and powerful slaveholder, and thus secured patronage and protection. In proportion as exaction, oppression and lawlessness increased under the emperors, so also did the forced or voluntary submission of colonists to influential slaveholders. As the imperial tax-gatherer was wont to sell the children of the poor for tax or tribute, the peasant often preferred to become a slave in order to obtain protection from his master, who became responsible to the treasury for the taxes of the bondman and his lands. Frequently whole villages of colonists thus gave up their rights for the sake of patronage and protection.

The exchequer had a roll inscribed with the names of all the colonists on the domains belonging to the state, the cities, or to private individuals. From this census for taxation was derived the legal designation, and afterward the condition of adscriptusAnd the imperial government, whose sole object was to gather taxes and have responsible tax-payers, had little if any objection to this transformation of colonists and their homesteads into the bondmen of the rich.The change was not made at once by any special law,[16] but was brought about by the slow progress of social decomposition. When the serfdom of the colonists first became an object of jurisprudence—a little before and under Theodosius—it had already existed as a fact; and ex facto nascitur jus was an old axiom of the civil law. By and by slaves proper—that is, movable chattels, not persons attached to the soil—both in the city and on the lands, were taxed on the plantation roll; and Constantine prohibited the sale of chattels from one province to another, most probably with the view of facilitating their control by the tax-gatherer.

Rapacious taxation, the first outgrowth of imperial despotism which was originated by the slaveholders, forced into the grip of the oligarch all that remained of free soil and independent labor, or what was intended to be such by the colonizing emperors.The same cause also disorganized the ancient municipal regime in the cities of Italy and throughout the Roman world.

The curia of Italian cities, and afterward of all other cities privileged with Italian law, constituted the body politic of each municipality. The most influential and wealthy citizens, therefore, were curiales; next to them were municipes, common burghers, small traders, etc.; then clients, free plebeian proletarians, the enfranchised, etc. The decurions or city senate, and other dignitaries called patrons, protectors, etc., administered the affairs of the city; these and all other offices were light and honorable while the cities were flourishing, as in the first two centuries of the empire; but even then, various legal immunities released curiales from performing public municipal service. During the peace enjoyed by the Roman world in the early times of the empire, the taxes, tolls, excises, venalicium, etc., imposed on Italianized cities, were moderate.These cities were then rich; they accumulated and loaned capital; they owned slaves and extensive domains.By means of their slaves they erected those public edifices and monuments whose splendor rivalled those of Rome and whose ruins are still in many places preserved; and the administration of the revenues and the honors of the city were in the control of rich oligarchs and slaveholders. The same accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, existed in the cities as in the country, as the same oligarchs generally lived in the city, and indeed necessarily belonged to some municipium; for in the Roman world the whole political and civic status was exclusively embodied in and bestowed on the city; and the country, as such, had no political or civil significance.

Thus, even during the most brilliant periods, the numerous free persons in the cities became more and more impoverished, and lived by panem et circenses, as in Rome. Under this deceitful glitter, the disease slowly undermined the prosperity of the cities, and the first shock revealed the terrible reality. Soon fiscal rapacity seized hold of every thing both in the Italian and Italianized cities. Not only the poorer classes but even the wealthy began to feel it. One after another the cities lost their domains and their treasure, and thus lost the means to sustain their internal administration. With the growing imperial rapacity increased also the danger and the difficulties of public office, as the decurions and other officials were responsible to the imperial treasury for all the taxes and imposts levied upon the city. The rich men, patrons, etc., now used extensively their right of exemption from office, and excused themselves from public service in proportion as the fiscal pressure increased, and as they found it more lucrative to profit from general calamities than to attempt to avert them. Besides, taxes for the central exchequer were to be imposed and levied as well as taxes for the local administration of the cities. All this finally almost entirely crushed the impoverished burghers, and in the second century large numbers of burghers were inscribed in the curia. First the poorer shopkeepers, artisans, and small property holders, and then almost all the viles, with the exception of the infames—that is, those who at any time had undergone any infamous condemnation—became curialesTaxes on lands, houses, and slaves, and also on persons (per capita), increased almost daily, and were imposed under various guises and new names. All handicraftsmen, tradesmen, and merchants, had to pay special taxes, and the poorest plebeian had to pay a capitatio or illatio. When the cities had thus been reduced to poverty, and were obliged to tax themselves heavily to sustain their existence, the severest of all labor was to be a city official, and every one tried to avoid public honors, as even to be a curialis was considered a heavy calamity. The surplus of the poor free population, no longer supported by the magistrates or decuriones, abandoned the cities and became colonists on the imperial domains, on the remaining city domains, or on private lands; and there sank deeper and deeper into the mire of slavery. Soon the curiales began to follow the plebeians, in order to escape from their privileges and dignities. With this, however, an imperial edict interfered, and small proprietors, curiales, etc., were prohibited from selling their property. The eventual acquirer of such property was made ipso facto curial, and responsible for both past and current taxes, and the other exactions and servitudes imposed. The law put various other impediments on the personal liberty of poor but taxable curiales: they became bondmen of the state or of their own municipality; they could not change their residence, and suffered innumerable annoyances. The curiales, thus goaded, often preferred even the hateful military service on the utmost frontiers of the empire: they voluntarily entered the legions, in order to be exempted from taxation and the grip of the imperial and municipal tax-gatherer. More of them, however, chose rather to seek patrons, and became bondmen to the rich, the slaveholders, and exempted persons, giving both themselves and their property to their protectors. Thus frequently the impoverished descendants of former honoratiores became first bondmen and then slaves. During that long epoch of grinding oppression and taxation, the division and subdivision of the community into classes and grades originated. This classification was based on pursuits and occupations, and also according to the imposts levied on each class, from the magnate—as the rich social successors of the oligarchs were now called—down to the lowest laborer and chattel. Finally, the whole property in the Roman world—the country, the city, the lands, houses, and slaves—was centred in the hands of a few magnates, who owned incalculable numbers of colonists, bondmen, serfs, and chattels.

The famous Roman legions were recruited from yeomen, plebeians, workmen and colonists; in one word, from the free population. When freemen diminished, foreigners and barbarians were hired and enrolled. Sylla's military murderers were in great part Spanish Celts; and after Sylla and Marius, foreigners entered more and more into the composition of the Roman armies. Caligula had a kind of body-guard composed of Germans; and soon all the nations conquered by Rome were represented, not only in the armies, but even under the imperial canopy. Then arose the intestine wars for imperial power carried on by pretenders, each proclaimed by some province or legion. These wars resulted in slaughter, devastation, ruin and universal misery; and thus enlarged the number of slaves, and powerfully revived the slave traffic, which survived the downfall of heathenism and the Roman world.

Domestic slavery, acting through long centuries, brought about a thoroughly diseased and depraved condition of society, which, in turn, reacted upon its producing cause, exacerbating and intensifying it.The result was, that domestic slavery quite overmastered the ancient Roman world.At the melancholy period of Rome's disruption, the high-souled, patriotic citizen—that compact and columnar type of character—had become quite extinct, and in his place were large slave-owners, slave-drivers, and slave-traders.The masters and protectors of Rome were foreigners and barbarians. The slaveholders could not defend the empire, and beneath them was a degraded population of so-called freemen, and millions of serfs and slaves, all of them without a spark of love for their country, and destitute even of material incitements to urge them to defend their homes or uphold the existing condition of society. None of them had any interest to sustain their slaveholding masters or the fiscality of the empire; and at times the lower classes, the slaves especially, even joined the invaders. Thus, when Alaric appeared before Rome, over forty thousand slaves joined his camp.

Such was the condition of the Roman world and its western provinces, Spain and Gaul, when the avalanche from the north burst upon it with its torrent of invaders.The oligarchic slaveholders, having destroyed the republic, transmitted to the Cæsars a society which had through their means become utterly degenerate and depraved.The emperors, in their turn, transmitted to the new era a world putrescent with domestic slavery.Often does a virus eat its way so deeply into a healthy organism, as to change its very character and the conditions of its existence.Then the morbid disorganization becomes an apparently normal condition, until finally life is altogether extinct.Such was the effect of chattelhood on the Roman world, and especially on Italy, which was the soul and centre of the system.Nor does it require any great apprehension to see how the tragic analogy holds in the case of the Southern States of the North American confederacy.

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XIV.

CHRISTIANITY: ITS CHURCHES AND CREEDS.

AUTHORITIES:

General History, Ecclesiastical History, Councils, Bulls, etc.

Christianity appeared for the purpose of effecting a regeneration in man's moral nature; this necessarily included also his social regeneration.

The primitive Christians, apostles, and martyrs, by their words, actions, and death, taught charity, brotherly love, and equality before God; and thus slowly but powerfully undermined slavery.They consoled in every possible way their lowly and suffering brethren, and tried to inspire the slaveholders with feelings of charity and benevolence toward their bondmen; but as the apostles did not attack any prevalent social or political evil, nay, even seemed to countenance, by their silent recognition or their advice, the existing imperial despotism, so, for obvious reasons, they could not directly attack domestic slavery nor proclaim universal emancipation.They preached to slaves and slaveholders, made converts from both, and considered and treated both as equal before God and the law.The few words of apostolic consolation which have been transmitted to us as referring especially to chattels, logically and morally contain a condemnation of slavery, for it is only misfortune and evil that inspire pity or require consolation.So that the apostles and primitive Christians, by advising slaves to bear their yoke patiently, thereby proclaimed slavery to be an evil, like any of the sufferings, losses, or misfortunes of life.

When, under Constantine, Christianity was embodied in a national ecclesiasticism, the Church watched more directly over the condition of the slaves.In various ways it tried to alleviate their condition and effect their manumission; and this it urged the more earnestly as the Christians belonged mostly to the poorer classes, and also numerous serfs and slaves.

But the Church had now become a material fact, and henceforward, beside its legitimate moral aims, it had also worldly and selfish desires.It received imperial and private donations, became a large proprietor of lands, and therefore also a holder of slaves and serfs.It could therefore take no distinct interest in emancipation, but nevertheless still continued to inspire slaveholders with a milder spirit, and tried to prevent, as far as possible, the slave traffic, at least in Christian chattels.

None of the apostles, fathers, confessors, or martyrs of the Church ever affirmed slavery to be a moral and divine institution, or ever attempted to justify it in any way.These primitive Christians and holy fathers never once thought to refer to the curse of Noah as a justification of slavery.The Biblical story of Noah and his curse was first dragged into this question by the feudalized mediæval clergy, to justify the enslavement, not of black Africans but of white Europeans, among whom, undoubtedly, were the ancestors of many blatant American supporters of the divine origin, on Biblical authority, of slavery.

When the Roman empire was broken in pieces by the northern invaders, the body of the Roman Church and clergy belonged to the subdued and enslaved race.The Franks, Northmen, and Anglo-Saxons were then altogether heathen; but many of the invaders—as the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Vandals, Burgundians, Heruli, and Longobards—were Christians; but, being Arians (Unitarians), they were enemies of the Trinitarians, and treated the Roman clergy as they did the rest of the subdued population.The Roman clergy, however, finally succeeded in superseding the Arian dogmas by their own, and they then constituted the sole expounders of Christian doctrine.Moved then by the Christian spirit, as well as by consanguinity with the enslaved population, they never failed to impress on the conquerors, whether heathen or Christian, their duties toward their slaves.They also continued to promote manumissions by declaring them meritorious before God.These manumissions were performed at the sacred altar with all the pomp and impressive rites of the Church, and were often extorted from the slaveholding barbarian in his last agonies.

As before, so during the first centuries of the Germanic settlements of Western and Southern Europe, the Church never recognized the right of one man to enslave another; but rather through the voice of Gregory the Great, bishop, pope, or saint, reaffirmed the ancient axiom of the Roman jurist: "Homines quos ab initio natura creavit liberos—et jus gentium jugo substituit servitutis." The efforts of Gregory the Great, as also those of his predecessors and successors, were directed toward stopping the infamous slave traffic, first in Christian slaves, and then in Jews, Mussulmans, and all heathen. The Roman Church and its leaders unceasingly condemned the slave-trade, and the popes menaced with excommunication the traffickers in Mussulman prisoners in Rome, Lyons, Venice, etc., as also those Germans who afterward, in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, enslaved the prisoners of war which they made among the Slavonic tribes, Christian and heathen. The popes have likewise perpetually condemned the African or negro slave-trade, from its beginning down to the present day. Gregory XVI. interdicts "all ecclesiastics from venturing to maintain that this traffic in blacks is permitted under any pretext whatsoever;" and prohibits "teaching in public or in private, in any way whatever, any thing contrary to this apostolic letter." Explicit words of this tenor, coming from the pope, were generally considered as expressing the spirit of the Papal Church. In the Roman, as in all other churches and sects, however, both clergy and laity were wont to interpret all such mandates according to their own convenience.

For reasons formerly alluded to, the various national ecclesiastical councils held in countries politically reconstructed by German invaders—as Spain, France, and England—repeatedly and explicitly legislated on slavery. These councils had it constantly in view to moderate the general treatment of slaves and bondmen, and to prevent mutilation and other cruel modes of punishment. The churches were proclaimed inviolable places of refuge for fugitive slaves, and while emancipation was urged as meritorious, the enslavement of freemen was visited with excommunication.

Soon, however, the Church, that is, the priesthood and hierarchy, came to form an integral part of the feudal system. The higher clergy shared the public spoils, and had fiefs and other estates stocked with serfs and chattels. Then the fervor for emancipation abated; nevertheless, the clergy generally recommended a humane treatment of the enslaved. The Irish clergy and councils perhaps proved themselves the most disinterested at that early mediæval epoch: they were the "underground railroad" of the period—assisting in the escape of slaves from bondage; and a council held in Armagh in 1172, gave liberty to all English (that is, Saxon) slaves in Ireland. Nowadays, on the contrary, the immense majority of the Irish Roman clergy on this continent support and sanction chattel slavery.

In the course of time the clerical hierarchies, monasteries, etc., inoculated with the feudal and baronial spirit, became as zealous for the preservation of even the most revolting forms of servitude imposed upon the bondmen, as the most rapacious lay barons could possibly have been. Nowhere did the clergy raise its voice for either a total or a partial abolition of bondage.

Serfdom, which had long previously vanished from Italy, was, at the appearance of Luther, on the point of dissolution in England.The father of the religious reformation of Germany rather avoided blending social with spiritual reform; but the French and Swiss reformers, as well as the anabaptists and other sects, kept especially in view the amelioration of the condition of the oppressed masses.In general, the great movements for a freer spiritual activity which characterized the sixteenth century, contributed to promote the emancipation of serfs: and this first by purifying and elevating the public conscience, and then by bringing about the secularization of church property.The state, on becoming the heir of the clergy, was everywhere foremost in abolishing servitude: the ecclesiastical corporation, on the other hand, never labored for its abolition.

Among the various religious bodies—the Quakers and the modern Unitarians excepted—the absoluteness of Christian doctrine and morals has always been greatly modified by worldly interests.Not the Episcopal nor Scottish churches, nor indeed any other denomination, can claim the merit of having begotten the noble sentiment so universal in England on the subject of human bondage.The Roman clergy continues, as it always has done, to oscillate between duty and interest; and the various Protestant sects do the same. And it is a significant feature that in the American Union almost every religious denomination has its pro-slavery and its anti-slavery factions.

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XV.

GAULS.

AUTHORITIES:

Cæsar, Dieffenbach, Picot, Amadee Thierry, etc.

The Gauls (Gadhels, Gaels or Gals), a branch of the Aryas, were the first historic race which peopled Central and Western Europe.It is supposed that the Gauls (afterward wrongly called Kelts) emigrated from Asia to Europe before the Greeks, Latins, or Slavonians, as undoubtedly they did long previous to the Teutons or Germans.Already, in prehistoric times, from the regions of the Danube to the Atlantic, on the Alps and the Pyrenees as well as on the British and Irish islands, these first wanderers left their marks in the names of rivers and mountains.Gallia (Gaul) finally became their home, and from thence they repeatedly issued forth and shook the ancient world, ravaged Greece and extended their empire to Asia Minor on the east, and Italy on the south.They burnt republican Rome in its very infancy, and for centuries the Roman republic struggled for life and death with them, until they were finally subdued by Cæsar.

The whole of Gaul was occupied by tribes more or less consanguineous, and their internal social organization was in many respects similar.Cæsar, in his bird's-eye view, says that the two dominant classes were the druids and nobles, while under them were the "plebs, pœne servorem habetur loco, quæ per nihil audet et nullo adhibitur consiglio."This only explains the absence or perhaps dormancy of political rights."Plerique (not all, it will be noticed, but many, and these mainly such as had suffered reverses of fortune) sesse in servitutem DICANT nobilibus—in hos eadem omnia sunt jura quæ dominis in servis."This latter phrase only means that certain relations between the chief and his dependents were similar to those of master and chattel—being the only form of servitude known to Cæsar, who did not understand the tribal organization on which the authority of the chief was based.

Parke Godwin, in his highly elaborate and valuable History of France, says very justly that "the Gallic society was a mere conglomeration of chieftains and followers." After giving a picture of Gallic family life and exhibiting the nature of the chieftain's power and functions, that eminent writer thus continues: "The other members of the clan consisted of a number of dependents in various degrees of subordination, and of adherents whose ties were more or less voluntary." Among the dependents were "bondmen (attached to the soil), debtor-bondmen, obaerati, strangers found in the country without a protector or lord, and slaves, captives of war or purchased in the open market."Thus far Parke Godwin.

Slaves, if indeed such existed among the Gauls at the time of Cæsar, were certainly exceedingly limited in number, and chattelhood was not an inherent condition of any part of the people. In his history of his long wars with the Gauls, Cæsar makes no allusion to a slave-element in the population—an omission which shows how insignificant it must have been.

The commercial relations of the Gauls with the Phœnicians and with the Greek colony of Massilia, or Marseilles, probably tended to encourage slavery among them.But although our knowledge of their internal relations and domestic economy is very scanty, there are a few facts which prove that domestic slavery was hardly even in an embryonic stage at the epoch when the Gauls, by their contact with Rome and Cæsar, entered the general current of history.The Massaliotes (or colonists established at Marseilles), trafficked in slaves.They also had them in their houses, but did not employ them on lands situated beyond the precincts of the city.For field laborers they hired the Ligurians, who, at given seasons, descended with their wives from the mountains and worked for wages.Lands belonging to Gallic clans or districts were no more worked by slave labor than were the fields of the Massaliotes.Even in the households of the chieftains or nobles, domestic slavery, if it existed, must have been hidden from sight.Possidonius, tutor of Pompey, Cicero, and other eminent Romans, gives a description of the mode of life and domestic customs of the Gauls, in whose country he travelled.He observed, that at their luxurious feasts the guests were served by the children of the family, instead of domestic slaves; which fact authorizes the conclusion that the number of chattels was very small, and that they had no place in family life.

Gallic slaves consisted of criminals, vagabonds, foreigners imported from Massilia, and prisoners of war principally made from nations beyond the Alps and the Rhine.Even after the invasion of the Kimbri and Belgæ, Gaul was inhabited by tribes more or less akin to each other.It was therefore the theatre of almost uninterrupted domestic war between tribes and federations.But when one tribe was conquered by another, the subject people and those who escaped the fury of battle were not reduced to slavery, but simply became tributary, and received their laws from the conqueror.Exceptions to this rule must have been exceedingly rare.If an invading tribe was subdued, it received lands and was obliged to settle among the conquerors.The founders of Rome, as we saw (see "Romans: Republicans"), acted in a similar manner.Prisoners of war were absorbed into the clan, and were held, perhaps exclusively by the chieftain, in the condition of serfs bound to the soil, but not as chattels or marketable objects; and they were neither deprived of personality nor the rights of family.

The arable lands, forests, and pasturages were owned by the clan collectively—the chiefs, of course, receiving the lion's share when distributed for cultivation; and each clan lived on its own lands.These agricultural clansmen it was who constituted the terrible armies which, under various Brenni (chiefs, leaders, kings), so often terrified and scourged almost the whole known world.

With the increase of the wealth and power of the chieftains, their relations with the poorer clansmen became more aggressive, and the lands were held by the latter under conditions more and more onerous.But when Cæsar invaded Gaul, no large estates (latifundia) existed, and the soil was in the hands of a numerous peasantry inspired with patriotism and love of independence.This peasantry flocked to the standard of Vercingetorix, and, to the last, sustained him in his deadly struggle against Cæsar.

The living acoustic telegraph used by the Gauls during the wars with Cæsar is another proof that great estates did not exist in Gaul, and that the soil was tilled by freemen possessed of homesteads: for each peasant, from the limit of his homestead, shouted the news to his next neighbor, he to the next, and so on; and thus intelligence was swiftly carried hundreds of miles even during the shortest day of the year.An important event occurring in any one tribe was thus spread in a twinkling all over Gaul.Now, if the country had been divided into large estates worked by slaves, such a mode of communication would of course have been impossible.

As the clans and their land were governed by chieftains and nobles, so also were the cities under oligarchic rule.The free population in the cities had no independent rights, and was obliged to have patrons. The poor, the defenceless, and even the artisans, willingly enrolled themselves for life under the clientship of the powerful nobility, depending on them as the rural clansmen depended upon the chieftains or rural nobles. But the condition of a client in the city was not hereditary or transmissible, as was clanship in the country. The family of the client held no relations of dependency upon the patron; and a son was not bound by obligations contracted by his father. When the patron died, the bonds of his clients were severed, and they were free to select another patron.

Such were the relations between the chieftains and clansmen, between the nobility and the people, between the soil and its tiller, between client and patron, when the Romans commenced the conquest of Gaul.Impoverishment, debts contracted to their chiefs, and exactions of one kind and another, may have transformed many independent clansmen into partial bondmen; but they always preserved their family and village rights.

After the numerous evidences already pointed out in the history of the Greeks and Romans, it is unnecessary here to show how similar morbid causes produced correspondingly destructive effects in the crude civilization and social condition of the Gauls.The development of these germs brought the Gauls almost to serfdom, if not yet to chattelhood, at the same time degrading the character of the oligarchs—future slaveholders—to the extent described by Cæsar. This perversion of the internal economy of the Gauls prepared them for domestic slavery. Thus often an insignificant derangement in the human economy, or a trifling lesion in its organism, may find its ultimate result only in permanent disorganization or in death

The Roman conquest and the subsequent oppressive administration, contributed to establish the same relations between the population in Gaul as existed in Italy and Spain, and which have been already described.The city (municipium) became all and every thing; the clan, the district, the country nothing.The former chiefs of the clans became the senators of their respective centres.The imperial Roman administration favored the concentration of landed estates into a few hands, and consequently the impoverishment of small landholders and free laborers and operatives of every kind; and thereby greatly increased the growth of slavery.The collective ownership of the land by the clan and its chiefs became wholly transformed into the individual property of the chief, who was now also a municipal senator or magnate.A striking analogy to this is found in the Highlands of Scotland, which, in the same way have become the property of a few powerful families.The Gallic clansmen before being transformed into chattels, first became tenants (coloni)—similar to those in imperial Italy—of their chiefs (or tierns), who, on becoming senators, lived in the cities, and were surrounded, not by clients and clansmen, but by slaves.The estates now began to be worked by bondmen and chattels, and thus a servile population succeeded to the free and sturdy yeomanry of ancient times.

Not without a struggle, however, was this accomplished. The oppressive taxation, the tyranny of the domestic oligarchs, and the devastations committed by barbarians—the vanguards of the future destroyers of the Roman empire—generated in the third century the repeated insurrections of the Bagaudes (the Gallic name for insurgent), that is, of the peasantry against the cities.All the oppressed small land-owners, tenants, serfs and slaves united in these insurrections.

The slave traffic was now very brisk.The Roman prefects, tribunes, etc., sold the prisoners of war made in the German invasions; while the Germans, in their turn, when successful, carried away or sold their booty to the human traffickers from various regions.Thus Aurelian, who was a military tribune previous to becoming emperor, sold several hundred Franks, Suevians, etc., probably in the city of Maguncia (Mayence).Soon the forays became more and more destructive, and for several centuries invasion succeeded invasion until the impoverishment and ruin of the people were accomplished.The issue of a long train of interacting social circumstances was the same in Gaul as in Italy: senators and oligarchs owned the lands and the cities, and proudly domineered, while the rest of the population sank into tenants, serfs, and bondmen, and most of them into chattels.These last had, of course, nothing to defend against the invaders, who even at times in many ways alleviated their condition: therefore the invaders were often received with open arms by the enslaved populations.When the destroyers of the Roman rule over Gaul finally settled therein, many of the nobles and rich magnates understood how to ingratiate themselves with their new masters, and thus shared in their spoils of lands and slaves.By far the greater number, however, were themselves ruined and enslaved.

In Gaul, as over the whole ancient and Roman world, not the slaveholders but their slaves survived the general destruction, nay, finally stepped into the places once occupied by their enslavers and masters.

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XVI.

GERMANS.

AUTHORITIES:

Tacitus, Codex Legum Antiquorum Barbarorum, Jacob Grimm, Mentzel, Wirth, Puetter, Zimmerman, etc.

The Germans, in all probability, were the last of the Aryan stock who immigrated into Europe.History first discovers them finally settled in central Europe; and for how long a time they had previously roamed in the primitive forests of these regions it is impossible to conjecture.With the exception of the left bank of the Rhine, Switzerland, and the northern slopes of the Tyrolean Alps—which regions, in the course of centuries were conquered from various Keltic tribes—the Germany proper of to-day is about the same as when Cæsar met the barbarians on the Rhine.Then the Germans were rude savages, with but little agriculture; living on milk, cheese, and flesh; and their condition was in many respects similar, perhaps even inferior, to that of the Tartars, Kalmucks, and Bashkirs, who still rove over northern and central Asia.

Neither clanship nor patriarchate existed among the Germans, but the rule of individual will strengthened by the family ties.Divided into numerous tribes, the Germans seem to have spent many centuries in hunting the wild beasts of their primitive forests, and in making war upon each other. Most probably these almost uninterrupted domestic wars created and developed aristocracy and slavery, both of which were firmly established among the Germans when they first appear on the record of history. Among the European descendants of the Aryas, the primitive Germans reflect most strikingly the Euphratic story of Nimrod, "the strong," "the hunter," subduing the feeble and preying on his person and labor. A bitter hatred between the tribes prevailed from time immemorial; and consequently feuds and wars were perpetual. The conquered was compelled to labor for the conqueror; and thus originated, very probably, bondage and domestic slavery, as well as the aristocratic contempt which the fighting part of the population had for the subdued and enslaved laborers of a tribe. When one German tribe subdued another, the victors either seized on the lands of the conquered and settled thereon, transforming the former occupants into bondmen; or, if they did not settle among the subdued, they made them tributaries, carrying away a certain portion of the population as slaves. Thus the Germans, in their wild forests, were mainly divided into two great social elements—the freemen, or nobles, possessed of all rights, and the bondmen possessed of none. But all, free and slave, were of kindred race and lineage.

All the German dialects have a specific denomination for the chattel. Schalch, scalch, schalk, is the word for slave, and seneschalk for the overseer. Afterward, in mediæval times, seneschalk was an office, dignity, or title.

Besides wars and conquests, there were other sources which fed and sustained slavery: thus certain crimes were punished with slavery, and even freemen gambled away their liberty—a custom found among no other race or nation; a freeman, likewise, could at any time sell himself into slavery. Any one condemned to compound in money for murder or any other offence, if he had no money, gave himself as a slave into the hands of the family or individual whom he had offended, or to the man who loaned him money to pay the composition. The schalks were more absolutely in the power of their master than were the Roman slaves under the empire, or even, if possible, than the chattels of the American slave states. Although Tacitus says that masters killed their slaves only when intoxicated or otherwise maddened with passion, the barbarian codes and other historic evidence show that the schalks were treated with the utmost cruelty, and even subject to be maimed in various ways. Some historians who hold up the Germans as models of social and civic virtue, attribute this cruelty to their contact with the Romans, whose example they followed. But the influence of Roman polity on Germany began only toward the end of the fourth century; and many of the northern tribes, as the Saxons, Frisians, etc., did not come under the influence of Roman, Christian, or any foreign civilization till about the eighth century. Some of these barbarian codes were written when the barbarians had settled on the Roman ruins; then, undoubtedly, they incorporated some Roman ideas, and contained laws bearing on existing relations; but still they were principally the embodiment of their own immemorial usages. The Visigothic code, for instance, was written very soon after they settled in Gaul and Spain, long before the destruction of the Western empire, and consequently could not have been seriously influenced by the legal conceptions or customs of Rome.

Tacitus says that little difference existed between the mode of life of masters and slaves: Inter eadem pecora in eadem humo degunt. At the time of Diodorus Siculus, youthful male and female schalks served at the tables of masters, who were always willing to sell them for a jug of wine.

In this primitive epoch of German historical existence, the pride of blood and descent seems to have been deeply ingrained in the German mind; and there was a strong aversion against corrupting the lineage by intermarriage with a schalk man or woman, even although they were of the same race and family. Among the Saxons immemorial custom even punished a mesalliance with death. Thus the very ancestors of many American slaveholders, now so proud of their Saxon blood, were considered unworthy of marriage with their masters. But concubinage with slave women was then common (as it now is in the South), whatever Tacitus may say concerning German conjugal fidelity. The bastards of parents one free the other slave, became serfs to the soil. If a freeman married a slave woman, their children were schalks, and sometimes the father even was reduced to slavery.A free woman marrying a slave, might be killed by her parents or became a slave of the king—when the Germans had kings in their new, post-Roman monarchies.Most of these cruel legal customs, and many others found in the codes, belong to the heathen epoch, to the period of pure Germanic existence unadulterated by contact with the corruptions of civilized life.They prove how deep was the Germanic contempt for the ignoble or unfortunate among their own brethren; they show also the very ancient appearance of slavery among them, and its violent and criminal origin, like that of slavery always and everywhere.

Ancient usages and laws regulating inheritance perpetuate themselves remarkably among peoples and nations. From their forests the Germans transplanted the right of primogeniture over Europe. The land was given to the males, while the daughters received the movables, mancipia, and the schalks—a conclusive evidence that not alone bondage to the soil, but positive chattelhood, prevailed in the primitive forests of Germany.

Cities and organized industry had then no existence. Freemen, i.e., masters, had but a few crude wants, and these were supplied by the work of the schalks in the dwelling or in the hof (court) of the master. In primitive prehistoric times, as in the time of Tacitus and afterward, all the male and female household menials, peasants and workmen, were schalks

Manumissions were common, but depended wholly on the will of the master.They could be obtained in various ways—might be bought with labor, produce, money, etc. The manumitted did not, however, enter at once into full enjoyment of the rights of freeman or master; indeed, only his descendants of the third generation became fully purified and capable of entering into the noble class.They then constituted, probably, the inferior nobility or freemen, who were followers and companions of the first class; and perhaps from them sprang the free yeomanry, who originally possessed but small property and a small number of schalks and serfs.

The fighting-men, or warriors, who subdued and enslaved other tribes, or transformed into schalks the weaker members of their own tribe, frequently located some of them on lands or homesteads which they permitted them to cultivate for their own use, on condition of paying a rent, generally in kind, and performing various other acts of servitude. Such was the origin of the German liti, who afterward constituted the common people.

The free, that is originally the strong, the subduer, was at the summit of the whole German social structure. He was free because he was absolute master over the weak, who had no power or strength in himself or family, and therefore was rightless. The genuine meaning of the word frow (from which is derived fri, free, freedom,) is "the right to own" land, liti and schalks. From frow comes the frowen "freemen," "rulers," "masters,"—the caste for which all others existed. Land and schalks constituted the wealth of frowen or nobleman, and to acquire them the German tribes exerted all their warlike energies. All the remote Teutonic invasions, as well as those of the mediæval times, were made principally for the acquisition of land and slaves. The lands, conquered by the swords of the frowen, were worked by the schalks

The slave traffic existed and was highly developed among the primitive Germans.It was carried on at the time of Tacitus, and some investigators maintain that for long centuries it was the only traffic known among the barbarous Germans; and slavery in its worst form was in full blast in Germany when her tribes dashed themselves against the Western empire.The slaves constituted more than half of the whole Germanic population.Wirth, the most conscientious investigator of the primitive social condition of the Germanic race, estimates the proportion of freemen to slaves as one to twenty-four.All of them—frowen, adelings, nobles of all degrees, followers, vassals, liti and schalks, lived the same simple, agrestic life.Rude in mind and of vigorous bodies, in comparatively small numbers they shattered in pieces the rotting Roman empire.

First the incursions, then the definite invasions and conquests—Attila's forays from one end of Europe to the other—gave a vigorous impulse to slavery, both abroad and at home. Abroad, the invaders enslaved all that they reached—destroying, burning, devastating, impoverishing the population, and increasing the number of those forced to seek in chattelhood a remedy against starvation. At home, immense tracts of land were depopulated and abandoned, and old and new frowen, masters, seized upon them. Of course schalks were in demand, and were supplied by traffic and kidnapping.

The wars among the Germanic tribes, which were continued more or less vigorously, and the wars with neighboring populations, increased the number of slaves thrown upon the market.

The transition of a great part of Europe from the Roman to what may be called the German world, was so terrible that for several centuries the most unparalleled destruction, desolation, and slavery constituted the principal characteristics of the first mediæval epoch.

But Europe, the Christian world, and humanity were not to be submerged in the foul mire of chattelism.The awful crisis lasted through many generations, and bloodshed and superhuman suffering were their lot.But finally, the turning-point of the disease was reached: the disorder began to yield.Often after such a crisis the malignant symptoms do not abate at once, nay, they sometimes reappear with renewed force, and a long period is needed for a complete recovery.So in the evolution of Europe, overflowed by the German tribes, the most malignant symptoms of chattelhood continued and reappeared for a long time in their worst characteristics, before the social body entered the stage of convalescence.

The bloody throes of the German world redounded to the benefit of the nobles abroad and at home. Liti and schalks increased, and land rapidly accumulated in the hands of the few during the first centuries of the German Christian era. Thus Saxony belonged to twenty, some say to twelve nobles, who kept thereon half-free vassals, liti, and schalks.

As the oligarchs of Greece and Rome and Gaul, so the German frowen, the powerful, the rich, in all possible ways, per fas et nefas, seized upon the homesteads of the poor; and the impoverished freemen or ahrimen, smaller nobles, and vassals, became liti and schalks. Analogous conditions produce analogous results in usages as in institutions and laws; and often that which appears to have been borrowed by one nation or people from another, is only a domestic outgrowth germinating from similar circumstances.

When the German lay and clerical founders of the feudal system possessed more land than they could cultivate, and when the iron hand of Charlemagne prevented domestic feuds and the supply of slaves from that source, then they kidnapped right and left, heathen and Christian, poor freeman or schalk. Some of the feudal barons of the time of Charlemagne owned as many as twenty thousand liti and schalks.

Karl, Karle (the correct name), or Charlemagne (the more common one), in one of his numerous edicts or capitularies, prescribes as follows to those who received lands, baronies, abbeys, etc., as fiefs or grants: "Et qui nostrum habet beneficium diligentissime prevideat quantum potest Deo donante, ut nullus ex mancipiis (chattels) ad illum pertinentes beneficium fame moriatur, quod superest ultra illius familiæ necessitatem, hoc libere rendat jure prescripto."

Manumissions were promoted, in various ways, by the civil and clerical authorities. Many free yeomen were created from manumitted slaves, as well as from poor vassals or followers. But such were soon impoverished by wars and devastations, and were, from various causes, reduced to the condition of liti and chattels.

Serfdom and slavery were generally more severe in the northern portion of Germany, as Saxony, etc., than in the southern; but in both, the peasantry were crushed, oppressed, and, when it was feasible, enslaved.When Lothair I., grandson of Charlemagne, revolted against his father, Louis the Pious, he appealed for help to the oppressed peasantry, tenants, and chattels.

The centuries of the faustrecht—"right of the fist," that is of the sword, of brute force—soon succeeding all over Germany to Charlemagne's orderly rule, the strongholds of dynasts, barons, nobles and robbers, shot out everywhere like mushrooms; and from them radiated oppressions and exactions of every kind.The ancient practice of ruining the poor freemen and tenants, then transforming them into serfs, and then the serfs into chattels, went on as of old. In proportion as the forests were cleared, however, the baron found he could not profitably work the extensive estates with schalks alone, and that it would be more economical to transform these chattels into serfs, tenants, etc., and establish them on small parcels of his property. This was the first feeble sign of amelioration. Villages formed in this way by dynasts, or princes, and by barons, then received some rudiments of communal, rural organization.

A more powerful engine of emancipation, however, were the cities.In the course of the tenth century, dynasts, princes and emperors began everywhere to found cities, endowing them with various franchises and privileges.The legitimate flow of events, the necessities created by a settled organic existence which could only be supplied by the regular movements of industry and commerce, together with the influence of Gaul, and above all, of Italy, stimulated the German rulers.To the emperor Henry I., of the house of Saxony, belongs the glory of having given the first impulse to commerce, and thus the first blow to chattelhood and serfdom.

The population of the newly-founded cities consisted of inferior people of all kinds—laborers, operatives, small traders, poor freemen, and persons manumitted on condition of residing in the cities—the founders of the cities originally peopling them with their own retainers and with vagabonds of all kinds.Of course no nobles even of the lowest kind became burghers, and thus the first municipal patricians were of very inferior birth. Thus antagonism to barons and feudal nobles generally formed the very cornerstone of the cities.

Among the privileges granted to the first cities was that a serf, schalk, or, in a word, any bondman, seeking refuge in the precincts of a city, became free if not claimed within a year.This respite to the fugitive soon became a common law all over Germany, even between nobles in relation to their fugitive serfs; and the hunter of a fugitive lost caste even among the free masters—freiherrnWhen a legal prosecution was attempted, every difficulty, legal and illegal, was thrown in the way of the claimant—the cities willingly resorting to arms for the defence of their right of refuge.

The first Crusades emancipated large numbers of persons, as the taking of the cross was the sign of liberty for serf and for slave.But in Germany as in France, the great and permanent influence of the Crusades on emancipation consisted in their strengthening the cities and impoverishing the nobles, and thus producing a salutary change in internal economic relations.

The wars of the Germans with their neighbors, and above all with the Slavonians, Maghyars, etc., in the tenth and eleventh centuries, again gave vitality to the slave traffic; and war prisoners and captives, not now of their own kindred, but of foreign birth, were brought to the markets for sale.

Nevertheless, chattelhood was slowly dying out, and about the twelfth century but few traces of it remained: prisoners of war began to be ransomed or exchanged, and villeinage, with various services attached, altogether superseded domestic slavery.

The villein possessed the rights of family, of village, and partially of communal organization.But many of the galling characteristics of chattelhood were transfused into serfdom and villeinage.The nobles became, if possible, more insolent, exacting and oppressive.But the villeins and peasants began to feel their power, and to combine and act in common in the villages, and afterward in the communes.

Partial insurrections followed each other in various parts of Germany; here against one baron or master, there against another. Every insurrection, even if suppressed, nevertheless gave an impulse, though sometimes imperceptible, to amelioration and emancipation. Insurrections of the down-trodden and oppressed classes are like feverish efforts of diseased physiology to resist the disorder, to throw out the virus, and restore the normal condition in the economy of life. The whole world admires the glorious insurrection of the Swiss-German peasantry against their insolent masters. Then the bondmen, villeins, etc., individually or in small bodies, by the axe, by fire, and in every possible manner, protested their imprescriptible right to liberty. So also did the celebrated Münzer when the reformation dawned over Germany and Europe. He firmly believed that religious reform, to be beneficial to the poor, must go hand in hand with social ameliorations. The most notable insurrection, however, was the great uprising of the German peasantry in the sixteenth century. From the Vosgese mountains, from the Alps to the Baltic, numerous isolated forces rose in arms, each inspired by the same great idea. They had no centres, no possibility of a combination of effort, but all of them recognized the same covenant: 1. The gospel to be preached in truth, but not in the interest of their masters—nobles and clergy. 2. Not to pay any kind of tithes. 3. The interest or rent from landed property to be reduced to five per cent. 4. Forests to be communal property. 5. All waters free. 6. Game free. 7. Serfdom to be abolished. 8. Election of communal authorities by the respective communes. 9. Lands robbed from the peasantry to be restored to the original owners.

This great war of the peasants was terrible, pitiless, bloody.More than one thousand strongholds, burghs, and monasteries were destroyed; but the peasants were finally overpowered, the nobility being aided by the forces of the empire.Luther, too, thundered against the poor peasants.[17] But not in vain did they shed their blood. The oppression by the old frowen, strengthened by feudality, was finally broken at the roots.The imperial German diet declared to the nobles, that if they did not cease their cruelties, at the next revolt they should be abandoned to their fate.

Serfdom was not yet abolished, but was moderated in various ways.The direct and indirect influence of the Reformation on the condition of the peasantry has been already mentioned.Mild reforms were introduced in the dominions of various German sovereigns.Certain liberties were granted to rural communes, and the number of free tenants slowly but uninterruptedly increased.The conditions of villeinage on private estates began to be regulated by the respective governments; and absolute serfdom was slowly dying out.The prosperity of Germany increased proportionally with the emancipation, though but partial, of rural labor, and the freedom of the soil.On an average, those regions were most prosperous which contained the greatest number of emancipated rural communities, or where the villeinage was reduced, systematized, and made more and more free from the arbitrary exactions of the master.

The peculiar political organization of Germany prevented any unity of action in the extinction of rural servitude.Many of its features—some relating to the person, but principally to the soil—survived even to the present century in certain parts of the smaller German states; and in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, there is still room for infinite improvement in the condition of the peasantry.But the mortal disorder exists no more: the fundamental rights of man are recognized.Governmental maladministration, injustice, oppressive taxation, exactions by officials and landlords, are unhappily common; but all these are in flagrant violation of established laws. And, bad though they are, they cannot for a moment compare with the blighting influences of chattel slavery.

For long centuries, and with persistent pertinacity, have slavery and the oppression of man and his labor gnawed at the German vitals; and centuries must elapse before the recovery of a normal condition.But the Germans of the present day—moralists, statesmen, savants and professional men, as well as artisans, mechanics and agriculturists—are unanimous in condemning human bondage, whatever may be the race enslaved.Few, indeed, are there of the great German race whose minds are inaccessible to the nobler promptings of freedom and humanity.