The Brothers' War

by John C. Reed

Now for something of very great importance to us here, which occurred soon afterwards, and before the introduction of African slavery into America. It is that by the Renascence the literature of slaveholding Greece and Rome suddenly acquired and long held commanding influence upon almost every educator of the public in the enlightened world. It was in the last quarter of the fourteenth century—some fifty years after Dante had died—that the classics revived in Italy. Spreading thence over Europe, they are found dominating the great Elizabethan divines, philosophers, poets, and other opinion-forming writers at the end of the fifteenth century. And during all of the time from the landing of the twenty Africans at Jamestown by the Dutch man-of-war in 1619 until slavery had become the solitary prop of southern industry and property, the Greek and Latin ancient writers were in our mother country almost the sole subjects of school or university education, and the main reading of all those that read at all. And every page of this literature, studied with enthusiastic worship and resorted to day in and day out for instruction and inspiration, disclosed that in Greece and Rome the average family was dependent for its maintenance upon slaves; and that so far from slavery being a relic of barbarism, as the American root-and-branch abolitionists afterwards fulminated in a platform, it was the very foundation of the state in those two great nations whose philosophy, learning, science, jurisprudence, poetry, art, and eloquence are still the models in every enlightened land. Naturally the educated classes, now that it had been several hundred years since slavery was a burning question, had forgotten or had never heard of the old disinclination of the church, and could not see any evil in that which their most admired and dearest ones had all practised. The classics did not stop with giving slavery the negative support just mentioned. Although such authors as Quintilian and Seneca, and the later jurists—all of the discredited silver, and not of the glorified Ciceronian and Augustan ages—do express, theatrically and academically, anti-slavery opinions, yet what they say was merely dust in the balance when weighed against the commendations of the institution to be found in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, who had now become the great idols of intellectual society.[12]

The church would not stay out in the cold and dark, whither it had been suddenly and rudely cast by the Renascence. It woke up to discover that as the African was a heathen barbarian it was God’s mercy to kidnap him for a christian master, and thus give him his only opportunity of saving his soul. And although it is not right to enslave other races, the descendants of Ham are an exception, who by reason of Noah’s curse are to be the servants of servants to the end of time—that is what Holy Church taught by precept and example.

“Sir John Hawkins has the unenviable distinction of being the first English captain of a slave-ship, about the year 1552.”[13] His venture proved a great success. Good Queen Bess reproached him for his mistreatment of human beings. He answered that it was far better for the African thus to become a slave in a christian community, than to live the rest of his life in his native home of idolatry; and this was so convincing that “in the subsequent expeditions of this most heartless man-stealer, she was a partner and protector.”[14] Until the end of the seventeenth century the masses regarded the negro as being rather wild beast than man, showing no more scruples in catching and making a drudge of him than later generations did in lassoing wild horses and working them under curb-bit, spur, and whip. And the more understanding ones, who recognized that the negro belonged to humanity, re-enforced Aristotle[15] and Pliny[16] with much that they found both in the Old and New Testaments.[17] The many who preached liberty or the true religion posed as humanitarians, pharisaically comparing themselves with the best characters of Greece and Rome. The citizens of those great republics, they said, in spite of their advanced democracy, tore men and women of their own race and blood away from home and country and forced them with the scourge to toil in chains, while we do that only with savages and heathens, who cannot be civilized or christianized in any other way. We eschew slavery in the abstract. We tolerate it only in the concrete, which is the slavery of those destined for it by God and nature. Slave-catcher, slaveholder, and the public seriously and conscientiously held this creed.

You must now add to the list of influences planting and stimulating slavery in America the protection it got in the constitution under which the federal government started in 1789. As Mr. Blaine says:

“The compromises on the slavery question, inserted in the constitution, were among the essential conditions upon which the federal government was organized. If the African slave-trade had not been permitted to continue for twenty years, if it had not been conceded that three-fifths of the slaves should be counted in the apportionment of representatives in congress, if it had not been agreed that fugitives from service should be returned to their owners, the thirteen States would not have been able in 1787 ‘to form a more perfect union.’”[18]

Think over it until you can fully take in the prodigious favor to slavery which this countenance of it by the American bible of bibles naturally created in the north and south.

The forces rapidly sketched in the foregoing were so powerful in their co-operation to bring in slavery that its establishment and a long era of vigorous growth were inevitable. Note the years during which they met no sensible or only a fitful opposition. The first anti-slavery agitation that shook the entire country was that over the Missouri question, which having lasted a little more than two years ended in 1821, thirty-two years after the adoption of the constitution. This agitation was only against the extension of slavery. It was not until 1835 that the presentation to Congress of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia disclosed to the far-seeing Calhoun alone that serious and mighty aggression upon slavery in the States was commencing. Here we may date the beginning of the abolition movement. But that movement did not become respectable with the great mass of northern people until the application of California in 1850 for admission into the union as a free State widened the chasm between the sections so that it commenced to show to the dullest eye, and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which came out in 1852, stirred the north to its depths. The growth of slavery was then and had been for a quarter of a century complete. The soil, climate, and best agricultural interests of the south, at a time when she was to be wholly agricultural or economically nothing at all, the practice and precepts of the sages of Greece and Rome, of the patriarchs of Israel, of Jesus and his disciples and apostles, of the great and good of modern times,—all these had, with oracular consensus, led her understanding and conscience into adopting, nurturing, and on into extending slavery over her territory. Thus when abolition first emerged into open day, slavery had become the very economical life of the south. It had so permeated and informed the combined property, social, and political structure, that abolition would subvert the community fabric and beggar the population of the southern States now living in content and comfort.

I trust that the foregoing shows you that it is not so strange after all that slavery ran the career just described.

But some one says, how could the southerners as Americans, the especial champions of liberty, stultify themselves by slaveholding? how could they forget the world-arousing words of the declaration of independence that all men are created equal, and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?

This has already been answered. The slaveholding republics of Greece and Rome had advanced in democracy so far beyond anything to be found in Europe at the revival of learning, that from that time on for many years the political doctrine in the recovered classics was the very greatest of all the intellectual influences that made for mere democracy. The celebrated passage in which Burke eulogizes the stubborn maintenance of their freedom by free slaveholders has been the text of speakers from Pinkney, addressing the United States senate on the Missouri question, to Toombs, lecturing in Tremont Temple, Boston, and it has never been confuted. History shows no instance where such men ever reproached themselves for slaveholding, and while it was profitable put it aside because it is undemocratic.