Slavery in History

by Adam Gurowski

For a long time the difference between serfdom and ancient chattelhood was discernible only with great difficulty. The collar worn by chattels since the time of Augustus remained on the necks of the serfs (and these, too, not adscripti glebæ), with the expression—"I belong," or with the name of the master cut thereon. This was the custom in England with the Anglo-Saxon serfs of the Athelstanes and the Cedrics, so that the ancestry of the haughty Anglo-Saxon slaveholding American barons of the present day wore collars!

The feudal order was firmly established. Below the social hierarchy, composed of free fiefs, and estates belonging to nobles, churches, and monasteries (all of them free from taxation and public servitude), descend another social grade, whose only badges were humiliations, sufferings, toils, and martyrdom. Servitude and serfdom had similar gradations among the peasantry and workmen bound to the soil of their feudal master as existed among the barons, nobles, abbots, etc., in their various relations and duties of vassalage.

A few towns and boroughs began to spring up from the same social soil whence arose those of Germany. But the immense majority of the nobles and owners of cities considered their inhabitants, at the best, as but half free, as tributaries or censitaires, and continually attempted to plunge them deeper into servitude and villeinage. The remnants of the independent yeomanry, free tenantry, copyholders, etc., rapidly disappeared. These descendants of the conquerors—of kindred race, too, with the barons—accepted servitude in order to find patronage and alleviation from further oppression, or else sought refuge in the cities and towns, abandoning their homesteads, which were seized by the feudal baron and annexed to his estate.

All along the twelve or fifteen centuries which extend from the decline of the Greek and Roman republics and the first days of the empire down to the consolidation of feudalism, it is evident that similar causes were ever in operation, depriving the poor of their property, their labor, and finally of their liberty—a result, too, brought about in every case in an identical manner. In this, as in many other things, the history of the human race and its disorders and woes is a record of almost continuous analogies.

The smaller feudal masters, afterward called hoberaux, were generally the most cruel and inhuman then, as well as afterward, during the long protracted centuries of serfdom of the French peasantry. Tyranny always becomes fiercer and more maddened in proportion as the circle of its power and action is diminished. Is it not so also on American slave plantations?

It has been already mentioned, that the kings and the more powerful feudal vassals began to erect towns, and that these towns served as refuges for the homeless, and also for the serfs. The lesser nobles and the feudalized clergy often upbraided the kings for thus depopulating their estates; while the barons who owned the cities soon exasperated their inhabitants by their exactions and cruelties.

Such were the prominent domestic and economic features of the times of feudalism and chivalry in France, as over the whole of Europe. It is for other reasons that, in the minds of some, a halo still surrounds their memory and their name. But, penetrating behind that halo, what a horrid spectacle of tyranny, oppression, and cruelty meets the eye! The sham chivalry of our Slave States has not even the shadow of such an aureola to hide its hideousness. The cruel and reckless barons sprang from a reckless race, in an age of darkness: they had no other traditions from the past, no other example before them. But the American chivalry and knight-errants of slavery spit on all the noble traditions transmitted by their sires. They have before their eyes the spectacle of freedom generating prosperity in all ages. And yet with all this do they deliberately turn their backs upon the light, and rush heedlessly toward dark barbarity.

The feudal rights of the barons in the products and earnings of the tradesmen and workmen, as well as in the person and labor of the serfs, together with their right of civil and criminal jurisdiction, were all the result of successive usurpations.

Toward the end of the eleventh, and especially in the twelfth century, the cities and towns rose against their feudal oppressors. This great movement was not preconcerted, nor was it instigated by outside conspirators. The cities, goaded by exactions and oppressions, rose separately, and each one on its own account. The impulse came from man's natural aspirations for freedom and justice, and his hatred of tyranny. The true conspirators were the nobles who oppressed the cities. Louis VI., of immortal memory, aided the cities in their efforts to form themselves into communes, gave them charters, and relieved them from the power of the barons; in short, he did every thing possible to undermine the power of the nobles, and prevent them from pillaging, torturing, and murdering the people. But the emancipation of the cities was finally achieved only by blood; and the kings, moved by humanity as well as policy, supported the citizens in their efforts, and thus reduced the tyrannic and unruly barons and nobles. The nobles, small and great, in France as in other parts of Europe, resisted with arms the communal emancipation. They proclaimed and treated as rebels and subverters of order and society, all who tried to reconquer their liberty, as well as all those who advocated the cause of the oppressed. Does not the same phenomenon reappear in our own time and country?

With the emancipation of the cities and the formation of communes, civilization began to illumine the horizon of France. But this great social event had not such a direct influence on the condition of the rural populations in France as it had in Italy. Still the serfs found a safe refuge in the now independent cities.