The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

But it has been for the sake of argument only, that I have admitted that God authorized the Jews to enslave the heathen. I now totally deny that He did so. You will, of course, consent that if He did so, it was in a special statute, as was the case when He authorized them to exterminate other heathen: and you will as readily consent that He enacted the statutes, in both instances, with the view of punishing his enemies. Now, in killing the Canaanites, the Jew was constituted, not the owner of his devoted fellow man, but simply the executioner of God's vengeance: and evidently, such and no other was his character when he was reducing the Canaanite to involuntary servitude—that he did so reduce him, and was commissioned by God to do so, is the supposition we make for the sake of argument. Had the Jews been authorized by God to shut up in dungeons for life those of the heathen, whom they were directed to have for bondmen and bondmaids, you would not claim, that they, any more than sheriffs and jailers in our day, are to be considered in the light of owners of the persons in their charge. Much less then, can the Jews be considered as the owners of any person whom they held in servitude: for, however severe the type of that servitude, the liberty of its subject was not restricted, as was that of the prisoners in question:—most certainly, the power asserted over him is not to be compared in extent with that asserted by the Jew over the Canaanite, whom he slew;—a case in which he was, indisputably, but the executioner of the Divine wrath. The Canaanite, whether devoted to a violent death or to an involuntary servitude, still remained the property of God: and God no more gave him up to be the property of the executioner of his wrath, than the people of the State of New York give up the offender against public justice to be the property of the ministers of that justice. God never suspends the accountability of his rational creatures to himself: and his rights to them, He never transfers to others. He could not do so consistently with his attributes, and his indissoluble relations to man. But slavery claims, that its subjects are the property of man. It claims to turn them into mere chattels, and to make them as void of responsibility to God, as other chattels. Slavery, in a word, claims to push from his throne the Supreme Being, who declares, "all souls are mine." That it does not succeed in getting its victim out of God's hand, and in unmanning and chattelizing him—that God's hold upon him remains unbroken, and that those upward tendencies of the soul, which distinguish man from the brute, are not yet entirely crushed in him—is no evidence in favor of its nature:—it simply proves, that its power is not equal to its purposes. We see, then, that the Jews—if it be true that they reduced their fellow men to involuntary servitude, and did so as the Heaven-appointed ministers of God's justice,—are not to be charged with slaveholding for it. There may be involuntary servitude where there is no slavery. The essential and distinguishing feature of slavery is its reduction of man to property—to a thing. A tenant of one of our state prisons is under a sentence of "hard labor for life." But he is not a slave. That is, he is not the thing which slavery would mark its subject. He is still a man. Offended justice has placed him in his present circumstances, because he is a man: and, it is because he is a man and not a thing—a responsible, and not an irresponsible being, that he must continue in his present trials and sufferings.

God's commandments to the Jews, respecting servants and strangers, show that He not only did not authorize them to set up the claim of property in their fellow men, but that He most carefully guarded against such exercises of power, as might lead to the assumption of a claim so wrongful to Himself. Some of these commandments I will bring to your notice. They show that whatever was the form of servitude under which God allowed the Jews to hold the heathen, it was not slavery. Indeed, if all of the Word of God which bears on this point were cited and duly explained, it would, perhaps, appear that He allowed no involuntary servitude whatever amongst the Jews. I give no opinion whether he allowed it or not. There are strong arguments which go to show, that He did not allow it; and with these arguments the public will soon be made more extensively acquainted. It is understood, that the next number of the Anti-Slavery Examiner will be filled with them.

1st. So galling are the bonds of Southern slavery, that it could not live a year under the operation of a law forbidding the restoration of fugitive servants to their masters. How few of the discontented subjects of this oppressive servitude would agree with Hamlet, that it is better to

—"bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of."

What a running there would be from the slave States to the free!—from one slave State to another!—from one plantation to another! Now, such a law—a solemn commandment of God—many writers on slavery are of the opinion, perhaps too confident opinion, was in force in the Jewish nation (Deut. xxiii, 15); and yet the system of servitude on which it bore, and which you cite as the pattern and authority for your own, lived in spite of it. How could it? Manifestly, because its genius was wholly unlike that of Southern slavery; and because its rigors and wrongs, if rigors and wrongs there were in it, bear no comparison to those which characterize Southern slavery; and which would impel nine-tenths of its adult subjects to fly from their homes, did they but know that they would not be obliged to return to them. When Southern slaveholders shall cease to scour the land for fugitive servants, and to hunt them with guns and dogs, and to imprison, and scourge, and kill them;—when, in a word, they shall subject to the bearing of such a law as that referred to their system of servitude, then we shall begin to think that they are sincere in likening it to the systems which existed among the Jews. The law, enacted in Virginia in 1705, authorizing any two justices of the peace "by proclamation to outlaw runaways, who might thereafter be killed and destroyed by any person whatsoever, by such ways and means as he might think fit, without accusation or impeachment of any crime for so doing," besides that it justifies what I have just said about hunting fugitive servants, shows, 1st. That the American Anti-Slavery Society is of too recent an origin to be the occasion, as slaveholders and their apologists would have us believe, of all the cruel laws enacted at the South. 2d. That Southern slaveholders would be very unwilling to have their system come under the operation of such a law as that which allowed the Jewish servant to change his master. 3d. That they are monsters, indeed, into which men may be turned by their possession of absolute power.

You, perhaps, suppose, (and I frankly admit to you, that there is some room for the supposition,) that the servants referred to in the 15th and 16th verses of the 23d chapter of Deuteronomy, were such as had escaped from foreign countries to the country of the Jews. But, would this view of the matter help you? By taking it, would you not expose yourself to be most pertinently and embarrassingly asked, for what purpose these servants fled to a strange and most odious people?—and would not your candid reply necessarily be, that it was to escape from the galling chains of slavery, to a far-famed milder type of servitude?—from Gentile oppression, to a land in which human rights were protected by Divine laws? But, as I have previously intimated, I have not the strongest confidence in the anti-slavery argument, so frequently drawn from this passage of the Bible. I am not sure that a Jewish servant is referred to: nor that on the supposition of his being a foreigner, the servant came under any form of servitude when entering the land of the Jews. Before leaving the topic, however, let me remark, that the passage, under any construction of it, makes against Southern slavery. Admit that the fugitive servant was a foreigner, and that he was not reduced to servitude on coming among the Jews, let me ask you whether the law in question, under this view of it, would be tolerated by the spirit of Southern slavery?—and whether, before obedience would be rendered to it, you would not need to have a different type of servitude, in the place of slavery? You would—I know you would—for you have been put to the trial. When, by a happy providence, a vessel was driven, the last year, to a West India island, and the chains of the poor slaves with which it was filled fell from around them, under freedom's magic power, the exasperated South was ready to go to war with Great Britain. Then, the law against delivering up foreign servants to their masters was not relished by you. The given case comes most strikingly within the supposed policy of this law. The Gentile was to be permitted to remain in the land to which he had fled, and where he would have advantages for becoming acquainted with the God of the Bible. Such advantages are they enjoying who escaped from the confessed heathenism of Southern slavery to the island in question. They are now taught to read that "Book of life," which before, they were forbidden to read. But again, suppose a slave were to escape from a West India island into the Southern States—would you, with your "domestic institutions," of which you are so jealous, render obedience to this Divine law? No; you would subject him for ever to a servitude more severe than that, from which he had escaped. Indeed, if a freeman come within a certain portion of our Southern country, and be so unhappy as to bear a physical resemblance to the slave, he will be punished for that resemblance, by imprisonment, and even by a reduction to slavery.

2d. Southern slaveholders, who, by their laws, own men as absolutely as they own cattle, would have it believed, that Jewish masters thus owned their fellow-men. If they did, why was there so wide a difference between the commandment respecting the stray man, and that respecting the stray ox or ass? The man was not, but the beasts were, to be returned; and that too, even though their owner was the enemy of him who met them. (Ex. 23. 4.) I repeat the question;—why this difference? The only answer is, because God made the brute to be the property of man; but He never gave us our noble nature for such degradation. Man's title deed, in the eighth Psalm, extends his right of property to the inanimate and brute creation only—not to the flesh and bones and spirit of his fellow-man.

3d. The very different penalties annexed to the crime of stealing a man, and to that of stealing a thing, shows the eternal and infinite difference which God has established between a man and property. The stealing of a man was surely to be punished with death; whilst mere property was allowed to atone for the offence of stealing property.

4th. Who, if not the slave, can be said to be vexed and oppressed! But God's command to his people was, that they should neither "vex a stranger, nor oppress him."

5th. Such is the nature of American slavery, that not even its warmest friends would claim that it could recover itself after such a "year of jubilee" as God appointed. One such general delivery of its victims would be for ever fatal to it. I am aware that you deny that all the servants of the Jews shared in the blessings of the "year of jubilee." But let me ask you, whether if one third or one half of your servants were discharged from servitude every fiftieth year—and still more, whether if a considerable proportion of them were thus discharged every sixth year—the remainder would not be fearfully discontented? Southern masters believe, that their only safety consists in keeping down the discontent of their servants. Hence their anxious care to withhold from them the knowledge of human rights. Hence the abolitionist who is caught in a slave state, must be whipped or put to death. If there were a class of servants amongst the Jews, who could bear to see all their fellow servants go free, whilst they themselves were retained in bondage, then that bondage was of a kind very different from what you suppose it to have been. Had its subjects worn the galling chains of American slavery, they would have struggled with bloody desperation for the deliverance which they saw accorded to others.