The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

The giving of the law at Sinai, immediately preceded the promulgation of that body of laws and institutions, called the "Mosaic system." Over the gateway of that system, fearful words were written by the finger of God—"HE THAT STEALETH A MAN AND SELLETH HIM, OR IF HE BE FOUND IN HIS HAND, HE SHALL SURELY BE PUT TO DEATH." See Exodus, xxi. 16.

The oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, and the wonders wrought for their deliverance, proclaim the reason for such a law at such a time—when the body politic became a theocracy, and reverently waited for the will of God. They had just been emancipated. The tragedies of their house of bondage were the realities of yesterday, and peopled their memories with thronging horrors. They had just witnessed God's testimony against oppression in the plagues of Egypt—the burning blains on man and beast—the dust quickened into loathsome life, and cleaving in swarms to every living thing—the streets, the palaces, the temples, and every house heaped up with the carcasses of things abhorred—even the kneading troughs and ovens, the secret chambers and the couches, reeking and dissolving with the putrid death—the pestilence walking in darkness at noonday, the devouring locusts and hail mingled with fire, the first-born death-struck, and the waters blood, and, last of all, that dread high hand and stretched out arm, that whelmed the monarch and his hosts, and strewed their corpses in the sea. All this their eyes had looked upon,—earth's proudest city, wasted and thunder-scarred, lying in desolation, and the doom of oppressors traced on her ruins in the hand writing of God, glaring in letters of fire mingled with blood—a blackened monument of wrath to the uttermost against the stealers of men.

No wonder that God, in a code of laws prepared for such a people at such a time, should light up on its threshold a blazing beacon to flash terror on slaveholders. "He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall be surely put to death." Ex. xxii. 16. God's cherubim and flaming sword guarding the entrance to the Mosaic system! See also Deut. xxiv. 7[^A].

[A]: Jarchi, the most eminent of the Jewish writers, (if we except perhaps the Egyptian Maimonides,) who wrote seven hundred years ago, in his comment on this stealing and making merchandize of men, gives the meaning thus:—"Using a man against his will, as a servant lawfully purchased; yea though he should use his services ever so little, only to the value of a farthing, or use but his arm to lean on to support him, if he be forced so to act as a servant, the person compelling him but once to do so shall die as a thief, whether he has sold him or not."

The Hebrew word, Gaunab, here rendered stealeth, means the taking from another what belongs to him, whether it be by violence or fraud; the same word is used in the eighth commandment, and prohibits both robbery and theft.

The crime specified is that of depriving SOMEBODY of the ownership of a man. Is this somebody a master? and is the crime that of depriving a master of his servant? Then it would have been "he that stealeth" a servant, not "he that stealeth a man." If the crime had been the taking of an individual from another, then the term used would have been expressive of that relation, and most especially if it was the relation of property and proprietor!

The crime, as stated in the passage, is three-fold—man stealing, selling and holding. All are put on a level, and whelmed under one penalty—DEATH. This somebody deprived of the ownership of man, is the man himself, robbed of personal ownership. Joseph said to the servants of Pharoah, "Indeed I was stolen away out of the land of the Hebrews." Gen. xl. 15. How stolen? His brethren took him and sold him as an article of merchandize. Contrast this penalty for man-stealing with that for property-stealing. Exod. xxii. If a man stole an ox and killed or sold it, he was to restore five oxen; if he had neither sold nor killed it, the penalty was two oxen. The selling or the killing being virtually a deliberate repetition of the crime, the penalty was more than doubled.

But in the case of stealing a man, the first act drew down the utmost power of punishment; however often repeated, or however aggravated the crime, human penalty could do no more. The fact that the penalty for man-stealing was death, and the penalty for property-stealing, the mere restoration of double, shows that the two cases were adjudicated on totally different principles. The man stolen might be past labor, and his support a burden, yet death was the penalty, though not a cent's worth of property value was taken. The penalty for stealing property was a mere property penalty. However large the amount stolen, the payment of double wiped out the score. It might have a greater money value than a thousand men, yet death was never the penalty, nor maiming, nor branding, nor even stripes. Whatever the kind, or the amount stolen, the unvarying penalty was double of the same kind. Why was not the rule uniform? When a man was stolen why not require the thief to restore double of the same kind—two men, or if he had sold him, five men? Do you say that the man-thief might not have them? So the ox-thief might not have two oxen, or if he had killed it, five. But if God permitted men to hold men as property, equally with oxen, the man-thief could get men with whom to pay the penalty, as well as the ox-thief, oxen.

Further, when property was stolen, the whole of the legal penalty was a compensation to the person injured. But when a man was stolen, no property compensation was offered. To tender money as an equivalent, would have been to repeat the outrage with the intolerable aggravations of supreme insult and impiety. Compute the value of a MAN in money! Throw dust into the scale against immortality! The law recoiled from such outrage and blasphemy. To have permitted the man-thief to expiate his crime by restoring double, would have been making the repetition of crime its atonement. But the infliction of death for man-stealing exacted from the guilty wretch the utmost possibility of reparation. It wrung from him, as he gave up the ghost, a testimony in blood, and death groans, to the infinite dignity and worth of man,—a proclamation to the universe, voiced in mortal agony, that MAN IS INVIOLABLE,—a confession shrieked in phrenzy at the grave's mouth—"I die accursed, and God is just."

If God permitted man to hold man as property, why did He punish for stealing that kind of property infinitely more than for stealing any other kind of property? Why did he punish with death for stealing a very little, perhaps not a sixpence worth, of that sort of property, and make a mere fine, the penalty for stealing a thousand times as much, of any other sort of property—especially if God did by his own act annihilate the difference between man and property, by putting him on a level with it?