Studies on Slavery, in Easy Lessons

by John Fletcher

The first suggestion we would offer on the subject of this production is its total inapplicability to the case. The negro was held a slave in Jamaica. The inquiry was not, whether he was so held in obedience to the British law regulating the institution of slavery in Jamaica. The only question was, whether a slave in Jamaica, or elsewhere, who had by any means found his way into Scotland, was or was not free by operation of law. Not a word is directed to that point. And the court of session must have regarded its introduction before them as an argument in the case, as idle and as useless as would have been a page from his Rasselas. The British government established negro slavery by law in all her colonies, but made no provision by which the slave, when once found on the shores of England, could be taken thence again into slavery.

The object, no doubt, was wholly to prevent their introduction there, in favour to her own labouring poor. The British monarchy retained the whole subject of slavery under its own control. The colonies had no voice in the matter. They had no political right to say that the slave, thus imposed on them, should, after he had found his way into any part of the British Isles, be reclaimed, and their right of property in him restored. Their political condition differed widely from the condition of these United States at the formation of this republic.

They, as colonial dependants, had no power to dictate protection to their own rights, or to insist on a compromise of conflicting interests to be established by law.

Dr. Johnson’s argument is exclusively directed against the political and moral propriety of the institution of slavery as a state or condition of man anywhere, instead of the true question at issue. The argument, taken as a whole, is, therefore, a sophism, of the order which dialecticians call “ignoratio elenchi;” a dodging of the question; a substitution of something for the question which is not; a practice common among the pert pleaders of the day—sometimes, doubtless, without their own perception of the fact. In regard to him who uses this sophism to effect the issue, the conclusion is inevitable,—he is either dishonest or he is ignorant of his subject. And when we come to examine this celebrated production as an argument against the moral propriety of the existence of the institution of slavery in the world, we shall find every pillar presented for its foundation a mere sophism, now quite distinctly, and again more feebly enunciated, as if with a more timid tongue, and left to inquiry, adorned by festoons of doubt and supposition.

We shall requote some portions, with a view to their more particular consideration. And, first, “Yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man.” This clause, when put in the crucible, reads, “Yet slavery can never exist in conformity to the law of God.” Whoever doubts this to be the sense, we ask him to suppose what the sense is! The author did not choose these few words to express the proposition, because the law of God could readily be produced in contradiction: “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant (δοῦλος, doulos, SLAVE) of sin.” Besides, then, he loses the benefit of the sophism,—the substitution of the condition of man in his fallen state, through the ambiguity of the word “natural,” for the condition of the first man, fresh from the hand of the Creator. This sophism is one of great art and covertness; so much so, that it takes its character rather from its effect on the mind than from its language; and we therefore desire him who reads, to notice the whole chain of thought passing in the author’s mind,—lest he forget how our present state is the subject of contemplation offered as data, when, on the word “natural,” as if it were a potter’s wheel, our original condition is turned to the front, a postulate, from which we are left to compare and conclude.

The doctrine of the Bible is, that slavery is the consequence of sin. If “natural” be taken to mean the quality of a state of perfect holiness and purity, then slavery cannot be the natural condition of man; no doubts are required in the case. But if “natural” is used to express the quality of our condition under sin, sinking us under the curse of the law, then the propriety of its use will not be “doubtful,” when applied to slavery, because it is a consequent of the quality of the condition. “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.” The proposition, as thus explained, we think of no value in the argument; but, as left by the author, obscure, its real meaning and intent not obviously perceived nor easily detected, and he may have thought it logical and sound.

“It is impossible not to conceive that men, in their original state, were equal.”

Here is another sophism, which the learned call petitio principii, introduced without the least disguise,—the assumption of a proposition without proof, which, upon examination, is not true. If the author mean, by “original state,” the state of man in paradise, we have no method of examining facts, except by a comparison of Adam with Eve, who was placed in subjection. And if we may be permitted to examine the state of holy beings more elevated than was man,—“For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels,”—then, by analogy, we shall find it possible to conceive that men, in the original state, were not equal, since even the angels, who do the commands of God, are described as those “that excel in strength.”

But if Dr. Johnson mean the state of man after the fall, then Cain was told by God himself, that, if he did well, he should have rule over Abel.

“And very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another, but by violent compulsion.” The object of this singular remark is to enforce the proposition, That slavery is incompatible with the law of God, which is not true.