[242] Cf. Rivière, op. cit. p. 511. Babington says (op. cit. p. 148 sq.) that in the five-hundred pages of Wilkins’ Concilia, which comprise the ecclesiastical documents of the British churches in the thirteenth century, we only find the following regulations concerning the unfree population:—that neither freemen nor villeins are to be impeded in making their wills when death approaches; that monks are not to alienate their less useful slaves (famulos); that Jews are not allowed to possess Christian slaves.—It was said that “he puts a disgrace on God who raises a villein above his station” (ibid. p. 150).
[243] Adalbero, Carmen ad Rotbertum regem Francorum, 291, 292, 297 sqq. (Bouquet, op. cit. x. 70):—“Thesaurus, vestis, cunctis sunt pascua servi. Nam valet ingenuus sine servis vivere nullus…. Triplex ergo Dei domus est, quæ creditur una. Nunc orant alii; pugnant; aliique laborant: Quæ tria sunt simul, et scissuram non patiuntur.” St. Bonaventura, quoted by Laurent, op. cit. vii. 522:—“Non solum secundum humanam institutionem, sed etiam secundum divinam dispensationem, inter Christianos sunt domini et servi.”
[244] Laurent, op. cit. vii. 523.
[245] Laurent, op. cit. vii. 524.
[246] Hettner, Geschichte der französischen Literatur im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, p. 169. Babington, op. cit. p. 108. Sugenheim, op. cit. p. 156 sqq. Laurent, op. cit. vii. 537 sq.
Not long after serfdom had begun to disappear in the most advanced communities of Christendom a new kind of slavery was established in the colonies of European states. It grew up under circumstances particularly favourable to the employment of slaves. Whether slave labour or free labour is more profitable to the employer depends on the wages of the free labourer, and these again depend on the numbers of the labouring population compared with the capital and the land. In the rich and underpeopled soil of the West Indies and in the Southern States of America the balance of the profits between free and slave labour was on the side of slavery. Hence slavery was introduced there, and flourished, and could be abolished only with the greatest difficulty.[247]
[247] Mill, Principles of of Political Economy, i. 311.
From a moral point of view negro slavery is interesting chiefly because it existed in the midst of a highly developed Christian civilisation, and nevertheless, at least in the British colonies and the United States, was the most brutal form of slavery ever known. It may be worth while to consider more closely some points of the legislation relating to it.
In America, as elsewhere, the state of slavery was hereditary. The child of a female slave was itself a slave and belonged to the owner of its mother even if its father was a freeman, whereas the child of a free woman was free even if its father was a slave.[248] When the slave-trade was prohibited, heredity remained the only legitimate source of slavery; but even then a freeborn negro was far from safe. In the British colonies and in all the Slave States except one, every negro was presumed to be a slave until he could prove the reverse.[249] A man who, within the limits of a slave-holding State, could exhibit a person of African extraction in his custody was exempted from all necessity of making proof how he had obtained him or by what authority he claimed him as a slave. Nay more, through the direct action of Congress it became law that persons known to be free should be sold as slaves in order to cover the costs of imprisonment which they had suffered on account of the false suspicion that they were runaway slaves. This law was repeatedly put into effect. “How many crowned despots,” says Professor von Hoist, “can be mentioned in the history of the old world who have done things which compare in accursedness with this law to which the democratic republic gave birth?”[250]
[248] Stroud, Laws relating to Slavery in the United States of America, p. 16 sqq. Cobb, Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America, p. 68. Stephen, Slavery of the British West India Colonies, i. 122. Code Noir, Édit du mois de Mars 1685, art. 13, p. 35 sq.; Édit donné au mois de Mars 1724, art. 10, p. 288 sq. In Maryland, according to an early enactment, which obtained till the year 1699 or 1700, all the children born of a slave were slaves “as their fathers were” (Stroud, op. cit. p. 14 sqq.). In Cuba the nobler parent determined the rank of the offspring (Newman, Anglo-Saxon Abolition of Negro Slavery, p. 17).