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