Studies on Slavery, in Easy Lessons

by John Fletcher

If what we have before said be true, little need be said on the subject of this paragraph. For we have already seen that the conduct of the ancestor, to an indefinite extent, both physically influences and morally binds the condition of the offspring. It is comparatively but a few ages since, over the entire world, the parent had full power, by law, to put his children to death for crime, or to sell them into slavery for causes of which he was the judge. And it may be remarked, that such is the present law among, perhaps, all the tribes who furnish from their own race slaves for the rest of the world. It is not necessary here to show why a people, who find such laws necessary to their welfare, also find slavery a blessing to them.

Civilization has ameliorated these, to us, harsh features of parental authority; yet, to-day, the world can scarcely produce a case where the condition of the child has not been greatly affected by the stipulations, the conduct, the influences of the parent, wholly beyond its control. The relation of parent has ever been found a sufficient commission to bind these results to the condition of the offspring.

“But our fathers dealt proudly, and hardened their necks, and hearkened not to thy commandments, and refused to obey; * * * and in their rebellion appointed a captain to return to their bondage.”

“The condition which he (the captive) accepts, his son or grandson would have rejected.”

This, at most, is supposititious, and, as an argument, we think, extremely weak; because it implies, either that the acceptance of the parent was not the result of necessity, and the wisest choice between evils, or that the rejection, by the son, was the fruit of extravagant pretension.

“He that is extravagant will quickly become poor, and poverty will enforce dependence and invite corruption.” * * * “I have avoided that empyrical morality that cures one vice by the means of another.” Johnson’s Rambler.

“If we should admit, what perhaps with more reason may be denied, that there are certain relations between man and man, which may make slavery necessary and just, yet it can never be proved, that he, who is suing for his freedom, ever stood in any of these relations.”

We cannot pretend to know what were the particular facts in relation to the slavery of the individual then in Scotland. It is not, however, pretended that the facts in relation to this slave were not the facts in relation to all others. No suggestion of any illegality as to his slavery in Jamaica is made, other than the broad ground of the illegality of slavery itself. This is quite evident from what follows:

“He is certainly subject, by no law but that of violence, to his present master, who pretends no claim to his obedience, but that he bought him from a merchant of slaves, whose right to sell him was never examined.”

In the passage under consideration, we are confined wholly to negro slavery; and had Dr. Johnson been serious in admitting that slavery, under “certain relations,” was “necessary and just,” he would have yielded his case; because, then, the slave in hand would have been placed in the category of proving that he did not exist under these relations. Johnson well knew that slavery existed in Jamaica by the sanction of the British Parliament, and he manifests his contempt for it, by the assertion that the slave was held only by the law of force. He was, therefore, not reaching for the freedom of that particular slave, but for the subversion of slavery as a condition of man.