Race also played its part in determining the slave status. There was present more or less from the very beginning of slavery in States like Virginia the tendency to limit such servitude to the Negro race. At first, when both Indian and Negro slaves were found together, there was no a priori ground for discriminating against the Negro in favor of the Indian and designating the status of the slave as the normal status of the Negro. The probable reason is that racial characteristics of the Indian made him a bad subject for slavery. The Massachusetts colonists found the Pequot Indians surly, revengeful and in the words of Cotton Mather unable to "endure the Yoke."[137] The Negro, on the contrary, proved himself much more tractable and therefore more profitable as a slave. These plastic race traits, in fact, have enabled the Negro to survive while the less adaptive Indian has disappeared. Thus the bonds of a servile status hardened from decade to decade about the Negro, being determined partly by economic needs, partly by religious prejudices and partly by the Negro's own peculiar racial traits.
Legislation, which always follows in the wake of status and normally gives expression to it, corroborates what has just been stated. Virginia in the act of 1670 first fixed the legal status of the slave and so worded the act as virtually to protect the Indian from enslavement. By an act of 1705 she made Indian enslavement illegal, thus practically limiting slavery to the Negro. Hence at the time when Virginia drew up her famous Declaration of Rights, in which she affirmed the natural equality and inalienable rights of all men, the prevailing sentiment of the community undoubtedly was that the normal status of the Negro was that of the slave, which status placed him entirely without the scope of these lofty declarations. The protests of such men as George Wythe and Thomas Jefferson were contrary to the drift of the social mind.[138] The last stage in this process of determining status on the basis of race is to be found in the various slave codes that grew up in the Southern States. They were supposed to be done away with forever by the war amendments and Sumner's famous Bill of Rights but the problem is one far too subtle and intricate for regulation by statute, as the Supreme Court has discovered. Status based upon color still exists both North and South though without legal sanction.[139]
The noble conceptions of freedom and equality which were embodied in the bills of rights and the Declaration of Independence were destined in time to triumph over slavery, though not without bloodshed. It is interesting to trace their influence on the status of the slave. The doctrine of human rights found in the Declaration of Independence and in the bills of rights of the State constitutions, despite its metaphysical cast, is not derived from the political philosophy of the French; the key of the demolished Bastile sent by Lafayette to Washington by the hand of Thomas Paine symbolized rather the debt owed to America by France.[140] The Declaration itself perhaps shows closer affiliations with John Locke's Treatise on Civil Government, which may be taken as a statement of the principles contended for in the Puritan Revolution of 1688. But even Locke's ideas of civil and religious liberty were not original with him. They were in reality the result of applying to the sphere of politics the logical implications of doctrines preached by the Protestant reformers of a century or two earlier in their revolt against the authority of tradition. To be sure the masses of men were ignorant of the theological distinctions drawn by Luther and Knox between the democracy of sin under the first Adam and the democracy of grace under the second Adam or Christ. The levelling effect of these ideas, however, was unmistakably felt as in the doggerel of John Ball, the mad Wycliffite priest of Kent,
"When Adam dalf and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
In the next century under the pressure of their struggle against injustice masquerading behind charters and parliaments, the Puritans under the leadership of John Locke made their appeal to natural rights just as the reformers before them had made their appeal to the higher rights and duties that hold in a spiritual kingdom of grace. The appeal, originally religious in origin, now appears stripped of its theological setting and hence with a certain "metaphysical nakedness" which only the enthusiasm and sense of need arising from the necessities of their situation prevented its champions from perceiving. Locke and Blackstone, while insisting upon the absolute and inalienable rights of the individual, never broke with the feeling for precedent inherent in the Englishman. The natural rights they preached were only conceived as having validity within the sphere of the British subject and not for humanity in general.[141]
In very much the same way the colonists, in the struggles against royal oppression, felt the need for a higher and more comprehensive sanction for their conduct and following the precedent set them by the Puritans of the seventeenth century, they fell back upon the notion of inalienable rights possessed by each individual independent of society. Here, too, the inspiration and original setting of these ideas were strongly religious. Religious toleration had gained constitutional recognition in almost all the colonies so that the political movement out of which American freedom was born had the powerful support of religious sanction. To this fact must be attributed in part at least the tone of finality and absoluteness in the American declarations of rights. Out of this universal recognition of liberty of conscience arose the notion of a right of a higher sort not inherited but inherent and inalienable because rooted in man's religious nature—"a God-given franchise."
This sense of the inherent and inalienable nature of the rights of conscience was, under the stress of the immediate political exigencies of the struggle with England, very easily and naturally extended from the sphere of religion to that of civil and political rights. It provided the sanction for the break with the mother-country that was contemplated. Virginia's declaration of rights was intended to be law, for the preamble states that these rights "do pertain to them (the people of Virginia) and their posterity as the basis and foundation of government." And what are these rights? They are first of all, "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they can not by any compact deprive or divest their posterity, etc."[142] Thus, from the logic of events and not as a result of a philosophical speculation, the Revolutionary fathers were forced to take advanced ground in their definition of human rights. Leaving the fixed social order of the old country for the wilderness, where the only society was that of the savage, they naturally looked upon government as arising out of a compact behind which lay the sovereign autonomy of the individual by virtue of inalienable rights given him by God. What more natural in their revolt from the old country than to make this doctrine the political and moral sanction of their course?
The rich emotional life aroused by the war for national independence as well as the struggle of over half a century later for the emancipation of the slave have given to these ideas of inalienable human rights a hold upon the conscience of the nation altogether incommensurate with their actual validity. It would be a thankless task and yet an altogether feasible one to show that the Revolutionary fathers did not break with English traditions in their declarations of rights. They simply stripped these principles of their original religious and political setting and persuaded themselves that through a fresh and rigorous restatement of them they had established their finality and originality. A stream is not changed by altering the name it bears at its fountain head. The very enthusiasm and loyalty of the men of '76 for what has been called "metaphysical jargon" leads one to suspect that the ultimate basis of these ideas lay in the social consciousness of the people. The democratic ideals they expressed in institutional forms—social, political or religious—belonged, of course, to the social heritage they brought with them from the old country. They did not, therefore, discover these "lost title deeds of the human race." It would be much nearer the truth to say they merely stated them clearly because by virtue of previous training and a new environment they had succeeded best in realizing those conditions, social and political, which alone make their clear statement possible. The measure of success and validity of any social doctrine, no matter how abstract, is to be found in its harmony with the background from which it springs and in the extent to which it actually succeeds in effecting needed social adjustments. It was perfectly natural that our forefathers should wish to proclaim as a new and unalterable truth, the everlasting possession of themselves and of all free people, what they already enjoyed. This did not alter the fact that the only guarantee for the perpetuity of these rights was the vigorous democracy of which they were the expression. "The Americans," writes Jellinek, "could calmly precede their plan of government with a bill of rights, because that government and the controlling laws had already long existed."[143]
As these great notions of human rights first took hold of the Anglo Saxon through religion, so it was through religion also that the ideals of freedom and equality first affected the status of the slave. We have already seen what was the prevailing doctrine of Christendom at the time of the discovery of the new world. It was that infidels and heathen were without the Christian fold and so did not come under those sanctions of conduct that prevailed in the dealings of Christians with each other. The colonists, therefore, assumed "a right to treat the Indians on the footing of Canaanites or Amalekites" with no rights a Christian need regard.[144] The same was held true of the Negroes. In time, however, petitions began to be received from slaves desiring to be admitted to baptism and this raised the question concerning the status of the slave after conversion to Christianity.[145] The dilemma faced by the slave-owner with religious scruples was as follows: To confer baptism would be in accordance with the contention of pious churchmen that slavery was but a means to bring about the salvation of the heathen.[146] On the other hand, to admit to baptism would, according to the doctrines of the Reformation, destroy the slave status entirely. By virtue of having entered the democracy of grace represented by the Church of Christ, the distinction of bond and free disappeared. To keep out the slave would be to hamper the spread of Christianity; to admit him would be to eliminate slavery.
This problem, however, seems never to have troubled the Puritan's conscience greatly.[147] From his stern, high Calvinistic point of view he was the elect of the earth, to whom the Almighty had given the heathen for an inheritance, and in this he found a satisfactory justification for his harsh and high-handed dealings with weaker races such as the Indian and the Negro. Yet the germ of freedom contained in the limited democracy of the elect of Calvinism was bound in time to break the hard theological moulds in which it was originally cast. It did this subsequently under the stress of external events in the effort to throw off the shackles of British oppression. Nowhere did the essential injustice of slavery become more evident to the minds of men than in the healthful humanizing and socializing atmosphere of the progressive industrial democracy of New England.