Slavery in History

by Adam Gurowski

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.