# Does the Bible sanction American slavery?/Section 3

SECTION III.
When we come to the time of Moses and his laws, we find society at a more advanced stage. The families have become united in the tribe; and the tribes are fast blending into the nation. All the features of national life will now appear. Classes will be formed, and the difference between the freeman and the bondman will be distinctly felt. The State, though in a rude shape, will take the place of the head of the family as the ruler and protector of all: so that the protection afforded by his master will no longer make up to the bondman for the loss of personal liberty. The time is fast approaching when bondage will become an evil and a wrong.
Still, that time has not yet quite arrived. Society is not yet so settled, nor law so paramount, but that protection may be sometimes better for the poor man than independence. The history of the Book of Judges is filled with violence: and the passages of the Law which speak of the hired labourer and assert his rights ​shew that his condition, before public opinion had begun to guard the poor, was hard, and liable to oppression. Achilles in Homer, when he wishes to express the dreariness of the realms below, says that he would rather be the hired labourer of a poor man than reign over all the Dead.
Accordingly we find that servitude among the Hebrews is sometimes voluntary. “And it shall be, if he (the bondman) say unto thee, I will not go away from thee; because he loveth thee and thine house, because he is well with thee; then thou shalt take an awl and thrust it through his ear into the door, and he shall be thy servant for ever. And also unto thy maidservant thou shalt do likewise.” So in the early part of the Middle Ages, amidst the wild unsettlement of the times, many persons gave up their independence for the protection of a lord.
Slavery was domestic among the Hebrews, as it is generally in the East. The slave would live constantly with his master, have daily opportunities of winning his regard, and derive from his society all the benefits which an inferior can derive from the society of a superior. On the great American plantations, on the contrary, the slaves live in “quarters” of their own, separate from the whites: they work in the field by themselves all day, no white being present but the overseer. The master of the plantation seldom appears upon the scene of labour, and barely knows his human chattels by sight. In fact, the overseer is often the only white with whom the slaves come into ​contact the whole year round, and even he only just knows enough of them to call them by name. So that there cannot possibly be any kind relations between master and slave, nor any mental training and elevation of the slave by intercourse with his master, such as the defenders of slavery would have us suppose to exist, and such as really existed under the Patriarchs and among the Hebrews in the time of Moses. If we want a parallel to the relations of master and slave on the American plantations, we must seek it not among the people of Jehovah, but in the gangs of Athenian slaves who worked the mines of Laurium, or in the “field-hands” who tilled the great estates of Roman nobles, and who dwelt like the negroes in slave quarters and worked in droves under the lash. The Roman writers on agriculture indeed might afford manuals for the American planters. Cato, who was a perfect model of the slave-owning agriculturist, advises his reader to “sell off his old oxen, his discarded cows and sheep, wool, hides, old wagons, old tools, old and sickly slaves.”
The sentiments of the master and bondman, and their education, in the age and country for which Moses made laws, would be much the same. No high-bred contempt therefore would be felt by the master for the slave: there would be none of the pride which breathes through the language held by the American slave-owners as to the expediency of dooming the lower class to slavery that the upper class may have leisure for higher cultivation. Nor had the slightest taint of degradation yet attached to labour, which was ​still the equal lot of all. The seven daughters of Jethro, the priest of Midian, “came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father's flock.” Moses keeps the sheep of his father-in-law. The wealthy Boaz mingles with his reapers in a way in which no great planter would mingle with his slave-gang, and he lies down himself on the threshing-floor to guard the corn at night. In this respect the feelings of men had not changed since that earlier age when Jacob was Laban’s shepherd.
In politics, too, we are far from those aristocratic liberties of republics which make slavery bitter indeed. In the time of Moses, the thought of political liberty has perhaps scarcely awakened in any breast. In the time of the Monarchy all are alike servants of the king.
Long after this the relation between master and servant might serve a sacred poet as the type of a relation which, though that of the most complete dependence, is the most beneficent as well as the holiest of all. “Behold, even as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters, and as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress: even so our eyes wait upon the Lord our God until He have mercy upon us.”
In fact, the state of things among the Hebrews in the time of Moses very much resembles that which the poems of Homer disclose to us as existing in heroic Greece; where society is still in course of transition from the family to the nation; where slavery is domestic and on the whole mild, the lot of the slave under ​an average master being probably not worse than that of the hired labourer; where Paris, a king’s son, keeps his flock on Ida, and Nausicaä, a king’s daughter, goes out with her handmaidens to wash linen at the spring; where the faithful swineherd Eumæus stands almost upon a level with freemen, is treated by Ulysses as a friend, and is deeply attached to his master and his master’s house; but where, nevertheless, “A man loses half his manhood on the day when he becomes a slave.”
Such is the slavery with which the Hebrew Lawgiver deals: and he deals with it, as it was before said that he deals with rude institutions generally, not to establish or perpetuate it, but to mitigate it, restrict it, and prepare the way for its abolition. That he did not introduce it we know; since we see it existing before him in the Patriarchal age.
To keep a Hebrew in perpetual bondage, except by his own consent, is absolutely forbidden. “If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve; and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.” “If thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee.” “It shall not seem hard unto thee, when thou sendest him away free from thee; for he hath been worth a double hired servant to thee, in serving thee six years: and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all that thou doest.” The occurrence of the year of jubilee might cut the term of servitude still shorter. And even ​while that term lasted the servant was not to be treated as a slave, a “living tool” or a “chattel personal.” “If thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant: but as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubilee: and then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return. For they are my servants, which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold as bondmen. Thou shalt not rule over him with rigour; but shalt fear thy God.”
The bondman might choose, as we have seen, at the expiration of his term to remain with his master instead of accepting his liberty; but to that end, and in order that a freeman might be finally divested of his freedom, not a mere tacit continuance of the relation, but a formal consent, and not only a formal consent, but a regular and public ceremony, was required. The bondman is to “say plainly” that he “loves his master,” and that he “will not go out free.” And he is then to be brought before the judges, and his ear is to be bored with an awl, as a sign that he elects to remain in servitude for life.
That the bondman when set free after six years might not fall into bondage again, he was to be liberally provided on leaving his master with the means of subsistence. “And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt ​furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the Lord thy God hath blessed thee, thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing to-day.”
Moreover, the Hebrew who had been driven by poverty to sell himself to a stranger or a sojourner, might be redeemed at any time either by himself, or by his kinsman, on payment of the fair value of his service for the term yet remaining.
A housebreaker, not punished in the fact, and unable to make full restitution, is to be sold for his theft; and it appears, into slavery for life. But this being a case of penal bondage, does not bear upon the present question. It is the counterpart not of modern slavery, but of modern transportation.
Thus, so long as the law of Moses was kept, the bondage of a Hebrew would not be more severe, either in duration or in other respects, than a modern apprenticeship, nor so severe as the forced service of a soldier in a modern army: and he would receive what would be equivalent to wages in the shape of a gift at parting when his term expired. Such servitude was in fact not slavery at all, in the proper sense of the term.
The law of Moses was not always kept in this any more than in other respects; but it was not a dead letter. “This is the word that came unto Jeremiah ​from the Lord, after that the king Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people which were at Jerusalem, to proclaim liberty unto them; that every man should let his manservant, and every man his maidservant, being an Hebrew or an Hebrewess, go free; that none should serve himself of them, to wit, of a Jew his brother. Now when all the princes, and all the people, which had entered into the covenant, heard that every one should let his manservant, and every one his maidservant, go free, that none should serve themselves of them any more, then they obeyed, and let them go. But afterward they turned, and caused the servants and the handmaids, whom they had let go free, to return, and brought them into subjection for servants and for handmaids. Therefore the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel; I made a covenant with your fathers in the day that I brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondmen, saying, At the end of seven years let ye go every man his brother an Hebrew, which hath been sold unto thee; and when he hath served thee six years, thou shalt let him go free from thee: but your fathers hearkened not unto Me; neither inclined their ear. And ye were now turned, and had done right in My sight, in proclaiming liberty every man to his neighbour; and ye had made a covenant before Me in the house which is called by My name: but ye turned and polluted My name, and caused every man his servant, and every man his handmaid, whom he had set at liberty at their ​pleasure, to return, and brought them into subjection, to be unto you for servants and for handmaids. Therefore thus saith the Lord; Ye have not hearkened unto Me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbour: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.”
Neither the Greek nor the Roman had any scruple in reducing one of his own countrymen to that permanent bondage which alone can be properly called slavery. In the early times both of Athens and Rome, we find numbers of the poor reduced to slavery by the rich. And in the wars between Grecian states, whole communities when vanquished are swept into hopeless and irredeemable bondage by the people of their own race. Greece must have swarmed with Greek slaves after the Peloponnesian war.
Foreign slaves the Hebrew was permitted to hold. “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over ​another with rigour.” These words are the continuation of those before quoted from Leviticus respecting the liberation of Hebrew bondmen, and must be construed in connection with them. The object of the whole passage is to forbid the holding of Hebrew, not to command or encourage the holding of foreign, slaves. We shall presently see whether the Mosaic institutions tended practically to the multiplication of slaves of any kind.
Fortunate, probably, in a world of bondage, was the bondman who served in a Hebrew household and under the Hebrew law; nor would he have been morally the gainer by being sent back from the kingdom of Jehovah into that of Moloch, Baal, Kimmon, or Astarte. The Lawgiver knew the abominations of the heathen, and we shall see that he was not without regard for the religious interests of the foreign slave.
It must be remembered also that in war, as carried on in ancient times, the lot of the vanquished was slavery, or death. To have prohibited slavery then, as regards foreign captives, would have been in effect to enact that every prisoner, of whatever age or sex, taken in war, should be put to death.
The reason, however, why a Hebrew was allowed to hold a foreigner while he was not allowed to hold another Hebrew as a slave, is clear from the words of the law; and it is equally clear that it is one which has long since passed away. The Hebrew was his brother, the foreigner was not his brother. But under ​the Christian dispensation all men are brethren in Christ.
It would be the reverse of the truth to say, with the Roman satirist, that the Hebrews, compared with the other nations of antiquity, were exclusive and inhospitable towards foreigners and people of other religions: that they “would not direct on his road the man who did not worship as they did, nor guide to the spring any but the circumcised.” Their law, on the contrary, breathes a spirit of kindness and hospitality towards the stranger quite unexampled in that hard and inhospitable world. The Greek, though his mind was large and his intercourse varied, called all nations but his own by a name of opprobrium and contempt; and his treatment of them was quite in accordance with that name, till one of them conquered him, when his former pride towards all sank into sycophancy towards the conqueror. The humane Athenians, in the time of Pericles, Phidias, and Sophocles, revised the list of citizens, and having discovered that five thousand persons not of pure Athenian blood had crept into the register, not only expelled them, but sold them all as slaves. The Roman had one word for foreigner and enemy, nor was his language belied by his conduct towards his neighbours. The Hebrew is repeatedly and most emphatically enjoined by his law to be kind to the stranger and never to oppress him; and this on the ground, so humbling to national pride, that he had been himself an oppressed and despised dweller in a strange land. “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of ​Egypt.” “Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And in a still more solemn passage: “For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country: for I am the Lord your God.” But nevertheless the Hebrew did not understand, nor, without a miracle which would have made the shadow go down two thousand years on the sundial of history, could he have understood the brotherhood of man; much less that higher brotherhood by which all men are united in Christ.
When the scene of history opens, the nations are simply competitors for existence, bound together by no laws or sympathies, but preying on each other like the wild beasts of the forest, and having each its own national God, who is an enemy to the Gods of the other nations. Devotion to his nation was the most comprehensive, and therefore the highest, bond of affection which man then knew; and his moral eye could see nothing but patriotic virtue in the deeds of Scævola and Ehud, or in the triumphal song of Deborah over the fall (it mattered not by what means) of the grand ​enemy and oppressor of Israel. And this patriotism, narrow as it seems to our enlarged perceptions, was a step in the training of humanity midway between devotion to the tribe and devotion to the kind. The rivulet found its river; perhaps, at some far distant day, the river may find its sea; and as the tribe was merged in the nation, the nation may be merged in the community of man. Already the sharp outline of national distinction begins to be blurred by religious, intellectual, and commercial union. The time may come when our views may seem as narrow and our conduct as selfish to posterity, as the views of antiquity seem narrow and its conduct selfish to us. However that may be, whether the movement which has been going on since the beginning of history has now found its term or not, gradual progress, in which human effort should play its part, not miraculous anticipation of the future, was, as we have before said, the rule of Providence in dealing with the Hebrews as well as with other races. And a Hebrew broke no law of affection known to him, he did no violence to his moral nature, no injury to any one who to him was a brother, by holding a man of another nation as a slave.
An American even if he had lived in the time of Moses, and under the Mosaic law, would not have been allowed by the spirit of that law to sell or hold as a slave a man or woman as white and essentially of the same race as himself, much less his own child. But the Americans do not live in the time of Moses, nor under the Mosaic law. They live in times when the brotherhood of man is known, and the duty of ​treating all men as brethren is understood; they live under, and will be judged by, the law of Christ.
There is indeed one passage (Exod. xxi. 7) which is cited by American defenders of slavery as divinely authorizing a Christian to sell his own child as a slave: “And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.” But read on, and it will appear that the passage has nothing to do with this matter. “If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her into a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money.” Clearly this refers to the sale and purchase of a woman, not as a slave, but as a wife; though a wife of an inferior kind, such as the concubine of the Levite in the Book of Judges who has fled from her lord, and whom he pursues to her father’s house. Such a mode of providing for a daughter and obtaining a wife was familiar enough to the coarseness of primitive antiquity not only in the Jewish but in other nations. The Anglo-Saxons in the earliest times regularly sold their daughters as wives, and their laws speak of buying women in the plainest terms. The recognition of the practice in the Mosaic law is important to the present question, as shewing us that it is with the earliest and rudest ​state of society that we are dealing. But it in no way authorizes a Christian to sell his daughter as a slave.
Among the Romans the master had absolute power of life and death over the slave. Still more had he the power of punishing him to any extent, and doing him any bodily injury he pleased. It was not till the time of Seneca, when influences closely connected with Christianity, if not Christianity itself, had begun to work on Roman Jurisprudence, that the power of the master was in any way limited, or that the person of the slave received any protection from the law. Vedius Pollio, a wealthy Roman, and a friend of Augustus, used, when his slaves displeased him, to throw them alive into his fishpond to feed his lampreys. One day a slave who had broken a crystal goblet, flung himself at the feet of the Emperor, who was supping with Pollio, praying, not that his life might be spared, but that he might not be given as food to the fishes. Augustus rebuked, but did not punish or even discard, his friend. “If,” says Horace, “a man is thought mad who crucifies his slave for having filched something from a dish which he has taken off the table, how much more mad must he be who cuts his friend for a trifling offence.” The Roman lady in Juvenal orders a cross to be set up for a slave, and when her husband asks the reason of the punishment, and desires her to pause before she takes away a man’s life, she ridicules the notion that a slave is a man, and says that her will is reason enough.
​The Hebrew Lawgiver does not set aside the general constitution of the family, and the general prerogatives of its head. He could not have done so without tearing up the very foundations of society in that age. But he places the life and limb of the slave for the first time under the protection of the law. “And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.” “And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake. And if he smite out his manservant’s tooth, or his maidservant’s tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth’s sake.”
This, no doubt, is one of the things given to the Jews because of the hardness of their hearts; because they had not as yet attained, nor could they as yet have attained, the high social morality of modern and Christian times. The protection afforded by this law to the person of the slave is small in itself; but it is a great step in humanity compared with his totally unprotected condition among the Romans, far more advanced in general civilization as they were, and even with the protection afforded him among the Anglo-Saxons, not only in their heathen state, but after their conversion to Christianity. “In the earliest period,” says a writer on Anglo-Saxon institutions, “the master had the power of life and death over the slave, and with it all the inferior rights which flow from it. ​In the exercise of this terrible power, both the early continental Germans and their Anglo-Saxon descendants abstained from acts of deliberate cruelty. It was not usual with the Germans to punish their slaves with whips or chains, or to oppress them with uncertain exactions. No law, however, protected their lives; and though they were never put to death deliberately, they were often slain in fits of passion. The earliest laws of the Anglo-Saxons were in accordance with Germanic customs. They permitted the master to put his slave to death when, where, and how he pleased; and the first modification of this barbarous right, which emanated from the clergy, was so slight, that it could have but little influence on national manners.” Even the intentional beating to death of a slave was punished only by penitential fasting, the rigour of which Anglo-Saxon casuistry found means effectually to evade. And for the knocking out an eye or tooth the Church advised the master to give the slave his freedom, but the law did not compel it.
The expression “he shall be surely punished” in the Hebrew law just cited, is indefinite; and Michaelis thinks that it cannot be taken as meaning capital punishment, though no fine or other secondary punishment is specified. But it must be observed that the law speaks not of wilful murder, but of excessive chastisement inflicted by the “rod” of the master and unintentionally resulting in death. There seems to be nothing to take the wilful murder of a bondman, whether by his master or by any other person, out of ​the general sentence “Whosoever sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed.” This sentence is repeatedly and emphatically ratified by the Mosaic Law, “He that smiteth a man so that he die, he shall surely be put to death.” “He that killeth any man shall surely be put to death.” It is expressly enacted that the punishment of death shall be inflicted on the murderer of an alien as well as on the murderer of a Hebrew. It is not likely that more protection would be given to the life of the alien than to that of the Hebrew bondman, who is treated throughout as a member of the commonwealth, though his labour for a certain time belongs to another. And the law draws no distinction in these respects between the Hebrew bondman and the foreign slave.
By parity of reasoning both classes of bondmen would seem to be protected, as against any one but their master, by the general law respecting personal injuries. “And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him; breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.”
To the Hebrew slave the fact that he was his master’s money would always be a real, though not always a sufficient protection. The interest of the master would never lead him to use his slaves up, as it appears slaves are sometimes used up by capitalists on the great Cuban plantations. To this kind of slow murder, against which it would be scarcely possible for any ​slave law to guard, Hebrew agriculture could offer no temptations.
Plato in his Laws prescribes that if a slave kills a freeman he shall be given up to the kinsmen of the slain man, who are not permitted on any account to spare his life, but are to be allowed to put him to death in any way they please. If a man kills the slave of another, the philosopher would have him pay double the slave’s price to the master; but if he kills his own slave he is only required to go through the ceremony of purification, in order that the land may not be defiled with blood. But the law of Moses says, “Ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land; and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.” If we look at the Mosaic dispensation in itself we may regard it as peculiarly ceremonial, but if we compare it with any other dispensation except the Christian we shall probably find that instead of being peculiarly ceremonial, it is peculiarly moral.
And moreover, it is to be remembered that if the servant or slave was the “money” of his master, so, as we have seen, in some cases, was the wife; and that if the head of the family had a power which civilized morality would not endure over his servants, he had also, as we have likewise seen, a power which civilized morality would not endure over his child. In the Roman family all these prerogatives of the household despot hung together. American writers on the “ ​Philosophy of Slavery,” drawing their philosophy from the domestic system of the Romans, borrow the principles of barbarism and heathenism as regards the position of the servant, but they forget to extend those principles to the position of the wife and son.
The last of the Ten Commandments which we continue to use instead of the Two, shews us what was the general state of the society for which the code was framed, and fixes the real position of the slave in the household. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighhour’s.” We see that the wife is as completely a subject of property and a part of a man’s estate as a manservant or a maidservant. And when this is seen, all thought of degradation as attaching to the condition of the slave is at an end. His lot under a bad lord might be hard, and so under a bad lord might be the lot of the wife. “The institution of slavery,” says one of its eulogists, “operates by contrast and comparison.” It is most true: and there would be no contrast or comparison when a man’s bondservant stood on the same footing as the heir of his house or the wife of his bosom.
In the Southern States of America the murder of a slave, which was formerly punishable by a fine only, is now by law a capital offence. With regard to personal injuries, the laws of the different States vary. But it seems that both with regard to murder and with regard to personal injuries the laws are practically void. Slaves are murdered, but nobody is hanged. ​Slaves are brutally beaten and tortured, yet no punishment is inflicted.
Indeed, in most cases, it would be impossible to convict the criminal, since the evidence of a slave is not received against a freeman, and slaves must commonly be the only witnesses of murders or outrages committed by planters or overseers. Severe laws may be safely passed where the only available evidence is to be rejected. In Greece and at Rome the slave lay under the same incapacity of appearing as a witness, saving that his evidence might be taken under torture, and was then regarded by the learned in the law as forming a useful supplement to the evidence given upon oath by the freeman. “You know, gentlemen,” says a Greek advocate to an Athenian court, “that the strongest evidence is produced when there are a number of witnesses both slave and free; and when the freeman can be compelled to speak by the administration of an oath, for which a freeman cares most, and slaves by pressure of a different kind, which, even though they may die under it, forces them to speak the truth.” And an Attic comedian recites, with ghastly pleasantry, the different modes in which the torture was applied to the slave witness by the most civilized of mankind. But the law of Moses, when it fixes the number of witnesses requisite to convict a murderer, draws no distinction between the evidence of a freeman and that of a slave.
​If an ox gores a manservant or a maidservant, the owner of the ox is to pay thirty shekels of silver to the owner of the servant: but besides this, the ox is to be stoned. The value of the latter enactment is that it asserts the sanctity of the servant’s life: the ox is to be put out of the way as an accursed thing because it has shed the blood of man. Too much stress can scarcely be laid on this when we consider that the Hebrew lawgiver is dealing with a barbarous nation, and introducing into their rude hearts the first principles of civilization.
“I do not think,” says Mr. Olmsted, “that I have ever seen the sudden death of a negro noticed in a Southern newspaper, or heard it referred to in conversation, that the loss of property, rather than the extinction of life, was not the evident occasion of interest.”
We have no trace in the criminal law of Moses or in Hebrew history of the infliction upon the slave of any cruel or servile kind of punishment from which freemen were exempt, such as the punishment of crucifixion among the Romans, or such as the punishment of burning alive, which has been sometimes inflicted on slaves, and but for the indignant protests of civilized humanity, might perhaps be still more often inflicted on them, in the Southern States. The Hebrew ​freeman is punished with stripes for secondary offences as well as the slave.
At Rome, the slave being a mere “chattel personal,” could have none of the rights of a husband or a father: he could not contract a legal marriage, nor did the woman who bore him children, or the children she bore, stand in any relation whatever to him in the eye of the law. The same was the case, we may venture to say, in all other heathen nations where slavery prevailed. It is the case also, as is too well known, in the Slave States of America, where in law a slave’s marriage is a nullity, and where, in practice, husbands are sold away from their wives, children from their parents: where the human cattle are bred like sheep or swine for the market: where, in shorty the whole system is a standing defiance of nature and humanity, such as it is strange to see defended or excused, under whatever stress of political passion, by English men, and still more strange to see defended or excused by English women. But the law of Moses treats the bondman in this respect also as a person, not a thing, though his labour is the property of his master, and vindicates for him the rights of a husband and a father. “If he (the servant who is let go free in the seventh year) came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have borne him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself.” The ​servant’s love for his wife and children is mentioned as one of the reasons why he may choose to remain in his servitude when the six years have expired. Thus the husband would never be forcibly separated from his wife and children, though in case he had received a wife from his master (which he would do with his eyes open to the legal consequences) he might have to remain in bondage in order to retain her. The amount of personal right given to the slave by this and the other provisions in his favour is probably as large as would consist with the radical constitution of society in those times: but, as has been said before, the amount of right given was not so important as the principle of giving the slave personal rights at all, which in effect makes him no longer a slave.
The existence of legalized polygamy would tend to save female slaves from becoming the victims of lawless lust, as they were in the Slave States of heathen antiquity, and as they are in the Slave States of America. The general favour shewn by the Mosaic law to purity would tend in the same direction. And so, still more, would the equal distribution of property which it encourages, and which could not fail to bring with it a general simplicity of life, and a freedom from the luxury of which slaves were the wretched ministers in the later age of Rome.
It has also been truly said that such laws as that against muzzling the ox that treads out the corn, and against seething a kid in its mother’s milk, which were intended to soften the heart of the people, and dispose them to a kind treatment even of the animals in their ​power, would tend with still greater force to make them humane in their dealings with the slave.
It appears also from Levit. xxv. 49 that the slave might legally acquire property, since it is there said that “if he be able he may redeem himself.”
If the book of Job may be taken as in any measure an index of Hebrew sentiment, the laws of the Hebrew Commonwealth were not without effect in training its members to look on the bondman not as a thing, but as a person possessing rights, and having claims to justice. “If I did despise the cause of my manservant or of my maidservant when they contended with me; what then shall I do when God riseth up? and when He visiteth, what shall I answer Him? Did not He that made me in the womb make him? And did not One fashion us in the womb?”
An eminent writer speaking of Roman slavery observes, that “in earlier times religious considerations had exercised an alleviating influence, and had released the slave and the plough-ox from labour on the days enjoined for festivals and for rest.” “Nothing,” he goes on to say, “is more characteristic of the spirit of Cato and those who shared his sentiments than the way in which they inculcated the observance of the holyday in the letter, and evaded it in reality, by advising that while the plough should certainly be allowed to rest on these days, the slaves should even then be incessantly occupied with other labours not expressly prohibited.”
Perfect rest from labour on every seventh day was ​secured to the Hebrew bondman, not by any ordinary law, but by one of the Ten which, delivered amidst the thunders of Sinai, formed the religious and moral groundwork of the nation.
This law alleviated the lot of the feudal serf as well as that of the Hebrew bondservant. We know that by the Hebrews it was observed even with an exaggerated strictness. The observance of Sunday is legally enjoined in the Southern States, and it appears that the injunction is generally obeyed. But in Louisiana, as at Rome, property seems to have found a way in some measure to resume its rights. “There is a law of the State,” said a gentleman of Louisiana to Mr. Olmsted, “that negroes shall not be worked on Sundays; but I have seen negroes at work almost every Sunday, when I have been in the country, since I have lived in Louisiana. I spent a Sunday once with a gentleman who did not work his hands at all on Sunday, even in the grinding season; and had got some of his neighbours to help him build a schoolhouse, which was used as a church on Sunday. He said there was not a plantation on either side of him, as far as he could see, where the slaves were not generally worked on Sunday; but that after the church was started several of them quitted the practice and made their negroes go to the meeting. This made others discontented; and after a year or two the planters voted new trustees to the school, and these forbade the house to be used for any other than school purposes. This was done, he had no doubt, for the purpose of breaking up the meetings, and to lessen ​the discontent of the slaves which were worked on Sunday.” Mr. Olmsted adds in a note that he also saw slaves at work every Sunday that he was in Louisiana. “The law permits slaves to be worked, I believe, on Sunday; but requires that some compensation shall be made to them when they are, such as a subsequent holyday.” And who is to fix or enforce the compensation? It is scarcely possible that the same protection should be given to the slave’s day of rest in a modern community, as in a community ruled by the strict and inexorable Hebrew Law.
The most important point of all remains to be mentioned. In Greece and at Rome the slave took no part in the public worship of the State. At some of the holier rites, his presence would have been a pollution. If he was employed in the temples it was for menial service. We may be sure that never except as a menial did he stand near the Consul sacrificing to Latian Jupiter on the Alban Mount. He can never have been present at the dramatic festivals of Dionysus, which, under the form of a religious ceremony, were the highest school of mental culture for the Athenian people: nor can he have mounted the Acropolis in the sacred procession on the day holy to Athene. He was ​not without a Deity indeed, for Mercury was supposed to protect his thefts. He was permitted and encouraged to offer gifts to his master’s household Gods, and to pray to them for blessings on his master’s store, in which he had the same sort of interest as the ox. The festival of Saturn, the God of the primitive and conquered races from whom many of his class had sprung, brought him a season of chartered equality and license—an equality which only mocked his hopeless degradation; a license which was the seal of his bondage, since it proved that his master’s power was secure. That despotism, whether social or political, must be strong, which can afford to allow its slaves a Saturnalia.
It will be seen, then, that the Hebrew law does no small or common thing for the Slave when it makes him a member of the Congregation, and expressly enjoins that he shall take part with the freeman in the most solemn acts of national worship. “And thou shalt keep the feast of weeks unto the Lord thy God with a tribute of a freewill offering of thine hand, which thou shalt give unto the Lord thy God, according as the Lord thy God hath blessed thee: and thou shalt rejoice before the Lord thy God, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite that is within thy gates, and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are among you, in the place which the Lord thy God hath chosen to place His name there. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt: ​and thou shalt observe and do these statutes. Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine: and thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates. Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the Lord thy God in the place which the Lord shall choose: because the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice. Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the Lord thy God in the place which He shall choose; in the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles: and they shall not appear before the Lord empty: every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing of the Lord thy God which He hath given thee.”
The bondman came up to stand with the freeman before the Lord. The gift of the bondman was mingled with that of the freeman, and was equally accepted. Perfect religious equality was thus proclaimed, and that in a Commonwealth of which religion was the foundation, and of which Jehovah was King. No cruel division of classes, no aristocratic pride on one side, or degradation on the other, could well hold its ground against such a law.
The place of the festival is to be “that which the Lord shall choose;” and to that place the ​bondman is to come, whatever inconvenience his absence from home may cause to his master: the interests of the master being in this case, as in the case of the Sabbath, set aside with a high hand in favour of the slave’s interest as a moral being, and of the claims of religion.
And the bondman of a priest ministering in holy things was not to be a mere “slave of the temple.” Whatever measure of sanctity attached to the rest of the priest’s household was to attach also to him. “There shall no stranger eat of the holy thing: a sojourner of the priest or an hired servant shall not eat of the holy thing. But if the priest buy any soul with his money, he shall eat of it, and he that is born in his house: they shall eat of his meat.”
Still more momentous perhaps than the ordinance which makes the slave a partaker with the rest of the nation in its public worship, is the ordinance which makes him a partaker with the rest of the family in the Passover:—“This is the ordinance of the Passover: There shall no stranger eat thereof: but every man’s servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof.” The Lawgiver goes on to enact that “a foreigner and an hired servant shall not eat thereof;” as though to make it clear that the reason why the bondman is to partake is that he is in the fullest sense a member of the family. No one could eat of the passover who had not been circumcised; but, as we have seen before, the head of a family was required by the command originally given to Abraham to circumcise all his household, “whether ​born in his house or bought with his moneys.” And “in the selfsame day was Abraham circumcised, and Ishmael his son. And all the men of his house, born in the house, and bought with, money of the stranger, were circumcised with him.” The servants whom Abraham had bought with his money must have been strangers to his blood and that of his tribe. We know that in heathen communities, during the early period of their history, membership of the community depended on kinship by blood, real or traditional. A certain number of Families or Houses, the members of which claimed a common ancestor, made up the Tribe, and a certain number of Tribes made up the Commonwealth. When the circle was first enlarged, it was by adoption. Not to be a member of a family and tribe was to be a political outcast. The families or houses were bound together by religious rites, participation in which was the sign and test of membership. Primitive Rome was the most striking type of this order of things. But primitive Athens also afforded an instance of it. In the same way the Hebrew Commonwealth, in the time of Moses, consists of families or houses, grouped into tribes, the family and the tribe alike being the offspring of a common ancestor. In the Numbering of the people they are taken by their tribes, and then numbered “by their generations, after their families, by the house of their fathers.” The family or house is the elementary group and the basis of the whole. “It may be affirmed,” says Professor ​Maine, “of early commonwealths, that their citizens considered all the groups in which they claimed membership to be founded on common lineage.” “The history of political ideas,” says the same writer, “begins in fact with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions; nor is there any of those subversions of feeling which we emphatically term revolutions, so startling and so complete as the change which is accomplished when some other principle—such as that, for instance, of local contiguity—establishes itself for the first time as the basis of common political action.” The revolution of which Professor Maine here speaks was effected both at Rome and at Athens by struggles between the men of the privileged lineage and those who were strangers to it, which shook the Commonwealth to its centre: and the family rites, from their hereditary character, were a stronghold of exclusion, and made religion a source of division and injustice in the State.
Among the Hebrews, the rite of circumcision administered to all alike, and the participation of the whole household in the family rite of the Passover, combined with the law requiring the presence of all males at the solemn seasons before the Lord, effectually incorporated even the foreign slave into the community, without doing violence to the ideas on which, at that period, society was necessarily based.
The fitness of the Passover especially for this great ​social purpose is very striking. It stands in marked contrast not only to the mock association of the slave with the master in the Saturnalia, but to sacrifices offered by the head of a family as its priest on behalf of the household. It is a holy meal at which the master must eat with the slave: its religious meaning is such as to secure that participation in it shall be a serious bond: it links together all who partake in it, by the memory of the most solemn event in the national history, to the destinies of the nation: it recalls the time when all the members of that nation were alike bondmen of the stranger in a foreign land. Never, surely, did Providence so thwart its own design, if the design of Providence was to widen and perpetuate the distinction between the freeman and the slave.
In America the slave is made a Christian in a sense of which we may have more to say hereafter. But practically he can scarcely be said to belong to the same Church any more than to the same State with his master. He sometimes sits in a separate part of the same place of worship, and receives the Communion separately from the same hands. But generally speaking, his religious exercises are carried on apart in his own quarters. Mr. Olmsted says, that “though family prayers were held in several of the fifty planters’ houses in Mississippi and Alabama, in which he passed a night, he never in a single instance saw a field-hand attend, or join in the devotion of the family.” A friend of the present writer staying in the house of a planter who ​was a religious man, was surprised to find that the servants did not come to prayers.
Slavery, in Greece and at Rome, may in the earliest times have been a social necessity and a sound relation, as it was in the Patriarchal East. But in more civilized times it became a manifest wrong: and then theories were invented to appease the moral misgivings of the slave-owners by shewing that the wrong which conduced so much to their advantage, when viewed by the eye of reason, was the perfection of right. The philosophic Greek feigned that there were certain races of men doomed by their natural inferiority to be the slaves of the superior race; and among the races so doomed he included some which were of the same stock as himself, and certainly would have included those which have become the founders of modern civilization. The ​Roman, a soldier and a lawyer, pretended that servitude was the ransom paid by the vanquished for a life legally forfeited to the victor in war. The American Slave-owner, since he has cast off shame, and embraced as good that which he once excused as a transient evil, has borrowed the theory of the Greek; and he has so far improved upon it as to assert that a negro is not a man: an assertion which, if he really believed it, would take away a shade of darkness from his cruelty only to add a deeper shade of darkness to his lust. All these theories tend to ratify the degradation of the slave, and those which describe his lot as an ordinance of nature tend to make it unchangeable and hopeless. But in the Old Testament we have no theory or suggestion of the kind. On the contrary, the Hebrew master is often reminded that he was himself brought “out of the house of bondage,” and adjured, by that remembrance, to love mercy and do justice.
Did the Hebrew Lawgiver encourage, or did he discourage, the multiplication of Slaves? We have seen already that he provided for the constant reduction of their number by requiring that every Hebrew ​bondman should be set free in the seventh year, and that, if he had brought a wife and children with him into bondage, he should take them out with him. This, however, is not all. We may reckon four principal sources from which the nations of antiquity derived their slaves: (1) Conquest, which was the greatest source of all; (2) Piracy and kidnapping, which was a great source of slaves in early times among the Greeks, and in later times at Rome; (3) Penal servitude for crime, which was a less but still a considerable source; (4) Debt, which, under harsh laws, made the debtor, in default of payment, the slave of the creditor. The early period of Roman history is filled, as is well known, with the troubles caused by the cruelty of creditors, who, having lent money to the poor at usurious interest, seized for the debt the property, the families, and the persons of their insolvent debtors. This was in fact the source of a desperate conflict between classes, ending in a great political revolution. The same thing took place in Attica, where multitudes of the peasant proprietors, overwhelmed with debts contracted by borrowing money of the rich at a high rate of interest, had not only lost their holdings, which they had mortgaged for the money, but were themselves being sold into slavery; till at last affairs came to a desperate crisis, and the government was put, with extraordinary powers, into the hands of Solon, who could only cure the evil by a moderate use of the sponge. The lower orders in ancient Gaul had been in like manner reduced by debt to become bondmen to the nobility when the Romans entered the country, and ​there can be little doubt that this degradation of the mass of the people must have aided the arms of the invader. The Hebrew nation was liable to the same evil. “Now there cried a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets unto Elisha, saying, Thy servant my husband is dead… and the creditor is come to take unto him my two sons to be bondmen.”
Now (1) as to war, we have seen that the Hebrew Lawgiver, without forbidding war, practically discouraged it; and that he almost prohibited conquest by prohibiting the means of it, forced service in war, and a standing army of chariots and horsemen: (2) as to kidnapping, he enacts that not only the stealer of a man, but the receiver of a man who has been stolen, shall be punished with death: (3) as to penal servitude, we have seen the single instance in ​which he prescribes it, his general penalties for secondary offences being fines and corporal punishment: and (4) he absolutely forbids the lending of money upon usury to a brother in want, the source of the debts which crushed the Attic and Roman peasantry, and caused them and their families to become slaves. “If thou lend money to any of My people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.” “And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee. Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase. I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, and to be your God.” Laws against usury are absurd in the present state of society. But in the state of society with which the Hebrew Lawgiver had to deal, they might, as we learn from the example of Greece and Rome, be the salvation of the people.
The first step towards the enslaving of the peasant’s person at Rome and Athens was the mortgaging and forfeiture of his little plot of land. Against this likewise the Hebrew lawgiver guards. “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is Mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with Me. And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land. If thy brother be waxen poor, and hath sold away ​some of his possession, and if any of his kin come to redeem it, then shall he redeem that which his brother sold. And if the man have none to redeem it, and himself be able to redeem it; then let him count the years of the sale thereof, and restore the overplus unto the man to whom he sold it; that he may return unto his possession. But if he be not able to restore it to him, then that which is sold shall remain in the hand of him that hath bought it until the year of jubile: and in the jubile it shall go out, and he shall return unto his possession.”
This law, like that against retaining a brother in bondage, though not regularly observed, did not become a dead letter. We have its practical effect in Nehemiah, ch. v.: “And there was a great cry of the people and of their wives against their brethren the Jews. For there were that said, We, our sons, and our daughters, are many: therefore we take up corn for them, that we may eat, and live. Some also there were that said, We have mortgaged our lands, vineyards, and houses, that we might buy corn, because of the dearth. There were also that said, We have borrowed money for the King’s tribute, and that upon our lands and vineyards. Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children: and, lo, we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants, and some of our daughters are brought into bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them; for other men have our lands and vineyards. And I was very angry when I heard their cry and these ​words. Then I consulted with myself, and I rebuked the nobles, and the rulers, and said unto them, Ye exact usury, every one of his brother. And I set a great assembly against them. And I said unto them, We after our ability have redeemed our brethren the Jews, which were sold unto the heathen; and will ye even sell your brethren? or shall they be sold unto us? Then held they their peace, and found nothing to answer. Also I said, It is not good that ye do: ought ye not to walk in the fear of our God because of the reproach of the heathen our enemies? I likewise, and my brethren, and my servants, might expect of them money and corn: I pray you, let us leave off this usury. Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their oliveyards, and their houses, also the hundredth part of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye exact of them. Then said they, We will restore them, and will require nothing of them; so will we do as thou sayest.”
The Hebrew Lawgiver founds a people of peasant proprietors, among whom the land is equally divided. Such seemed the surest way of producing a moral, religious, and patriotic nation. And the paramount object of the property law is to preserve these peasant proprietors, and prevent their homesteads from being engrossed, as the homesteads of the peasant proprietors in Italy were engrossed, by the rich capitalists, “who join house to house and lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.” “The Land is Mine” warns off the ​cupidity of the capitalist, and places each, little inheritance under the guardianship of God. But a system of small properties is not only adverse, but fatal, to slave culture, which can be profitably carried on only by large gangs of slaves working upon great estates, like the Roman latifundia or the plantations of the South.
The interests of the free labourer are guarded with as much care as that of the small proprietor. “Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.” “Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates: at his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it: lest he cry against thee unto the Lord, and it be sin unto thee.” The spirit of these precepts lived in the nation. Jeremiah denounces “Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.” And so in Malachi (iii. 5), “I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not Me, saith the Lord of hosts.” To “use your neighbour’s service without wages,” and ​thereby degrade the free labourer into a serf, was the practice of feudal kings and tyrants as well as of the Oriental despots round Judæa. The Statutes of Labourers passed by the feudal Parliaments of England to compel the Labourer to serve at old rates in spite of a rise in prices and in the value of labour, were an instance of a kind of oppression which has widely prevailed when the lower classes have been in the power of the higher. And these parts of the Mosaic law are not to be read as vague moral precepts or general sentiments, but as specific provisions pointed against the besetting evils of society in that age.
The following law also shews the most tender and touching care for the interests, and even for the dignity, of the poor man: “When thou dost lend thy brother anything, thou shalt not go into his house to fetch his pledge. Thou shalt stand abroad, and the man to whom thou dost lend shall bring out the pledge abroad unto thee. And if the man be poor, thou shalt not sleep with his pledge: in any case thou shalt deliver him the pledge again when the sun goeth down, that he may sleep in his own raiment, and bless thee: and it shall be righteousness unto thee before the Lord thy God.”
“If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren within any of thy gates in thy land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: but thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in ​that which he wanteth. Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought; and he cry unto the Lord against thee, and it be sin unto thee. Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest unto him: because that for this thing the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine hand unto. For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.” This and the like precepts of charity and liberality all tend not only to save the poor from the destitution which led to bondage, but to throw round their persons a religious sanctity which would guard them from the indignity of being made serfs or slaves. The same is the tendency of the injunctions in favour of the gleaner: “When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands. When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. And thou shalt ​remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing.”
The ordinance requiring the appointment of regular judges throughout the nation, and enjoining them to “judge righteously between every man and his brother,” “not to respect persons in judgment,” “not to be afraid of the face of man, for the judgment is God’s,” would also, besides its more obvious benefit, tend to preserve the independence of the poor; since it assured them the protection of the law in place of the protection of great men, which in unsettled and dangerous times they are tempted to purchase, and in the early feudal period did habitually purchase, at the price of their personal liberty.
“Let our Legislature,” says The Southern Democrat, “pass a law that whoever will take these parents, (parents unable to educate their children out of their own pockets,) and take care of them and their offspring, in sickness and in health, clothe them, feed them, and house them, shall be legally entitled to their services.” “We have got,” says the same journal, “to hating everything with the prefix free, from free negroes up and down through the whole catalogue, free farms, free labour, free society, free will, free thinking, and free schools. But the worst of all these abominations is the modern system of free schools.” “We have asked the North,” says The Richmond Inquirer, “has not the experiment of universal liberty failed, are not the evils of free society insufierable? Still no answer. Their universal silence is a conclusive proof, added to ​many others we have furnished, that free society in the long run is an impracticable form of society. It is everywhere starving, demoralizing, and insurrectionary. Policy and humanity alike forbid the extension of the evils of free society to new people and coming generations.” Free society, according to a kindred authority, is nothing but “a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists.”
It appears that the author of the Hebrew Law was not of this opinion. It appears from his enactments that he did not think free labour, to use the phrase of another Southern writer, “the great cancer” and “the offensive fungus” of civilized society, though he was as well aware as any advocate of Slavery that the lot of the free labourer was precarious, and that the poor would be always in the land.
​In one thing, however, the American Slave-owner and the Hebrew Lawgiver are agreed. Both think, and with good reason, that Slavery and Free Labour cannot well exist together. The Hebrew Lawgiver therefore takes measures to diminish Slavery in his country. The American Slave-owner proposes to put an end to the freedom of labour all over the world.
There is one thing more to be mentioned. Decisive experience has shewn that Slavery cannot hold its ground without a fugitive slave law. Now the law of Moses says, “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.” Southern theologians try to get rid of the apparent immorality of this passage by maintaining that it relates only to slaves who have fled from a foreign country. It is difficult to see any ground for this gloss, more especially as even in heathen Greece the right of asylum in certain temples was allowed, alone of religious privileges, to the slave. But suppose it were so, the law would in effect enjoin the Hebrews to risk a quarrel and perhaps a war with a foreign country rather than give up fugitive slaves. A singular mode of impressing the sanctity and beneficence of Slavery on their minds.
Lastly, let us ask what was the practical effect of the Mosaic legislation in the matter of Slavery? Was the nation of Moses a Slave Power?
​The social marks of a Slave State lie on the surface. At Athens we have the slaves running away by thousands to an invader when he takes post in the country. We have the slaves in the mines of Laurium rising, seizing the fortress of Sunium, and holding out there against their masters. At Sparta we have the servile population taking advantage of an earthquake to break out in desperate insurrection; and on another occasion the government takes off by secret assassination two thousand Helots, whose valour, displayed in its own military service, it sees reason to fear. At Rome we have a series of the most sanguinary servile wars; and after the final victory of the masters the road from Rome to Capua is garnished with sixteen thousand crosses, on which writhe the bodies of the vanquished slaves. The serfdom of the Middle Ages was signalized by the Jacquerie, the Peasants’ War, and the revolt of the English villains under Wat Tyler. There were frequent disturbances among the slaves in our West Indian colonies. There was a dreadful insurrection in St. Domingo. There have been insurrections in the Southern States; and the panics caused by them among the whites have led to cruel reigns of terror.
​Not only so, but over Slave States there has always brooded an atmosphere charged with the fear which springs from the consciousness of a great wrong. The laws and customs of Sparta, for fear of the Helots, were those of a city in a perpetual state of siege. Whatever may have been the exact nature of the Crypteia, it certainly was an instrument of terrorism put in action each year against the servile class. Plato himself, when, not without a deep moral pang, he has acquiesced in the necessity of Slavery, sanctions the inhuman policy of mixing together as much as possible slaves of different races and languages, that they may not be able to communicate and conspire with each other. This policy, and that of encouraging ​dissensions among them, were in fact parts of the economic system of antiquity. The Roman was, as usual, plain in his sentiments and practical in his measures. “So many slaves,” he said, “so many enemies;” and it was a maxim of the Roman writers on agriculture that “a good watch-dog ought not to be on too friendly terms with his fellow-slaves.” The Senate feared to let the slaves wear the same dress, lest they should become conscious of their own numbers. If a master was found dead, every slave in the household was at once and without trial put to death: and the number of victims on one occasion to this horrible safeguard of tyranny was no less than four hundred. Of the relations in which the feudal lords as a class stood to their serfs, the Statute-book of the later Plantagenets and the earlier Tudors is the record. In the Southern States the law forbids the education of slaves, a precaution which goes beyond the cruel fear of the Roman slave-owner; for at Rome not only was the education of slaves freely permitted, but many of them received the highest education, and were employed in callings of the most intellectual kind. The jealousy of the police in the Slave States, as described by Mr. Olmsted, also marks the constant presence of a great social danger. “In Richmond, and Charleston, and New Orleans,” says that writer, “the citizens are as careless and as gay as in Boston or London, and their servants a thousand times as childlike and cordial to all appearance, in their relations with them, as our servants are with us. But go to the bottom of this ​security and dependence, and you come to police machinery, such as you never find in towns under free government; citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public whippings of the subjects for accidental infractions of police ceremonies. I happened myself to see more direct expression of tyranny in a single day and night at Charleston than at Naples in a week; and I found that more than half the inhabitants of this town were subject to arrest, imprisonment, and barbarous punishment, if found in the streets without a passport after the evening gun-fire. Similar precautions and similar customs may be discovered in every larger town in the South.” Mr. Olmsted says that it is not in reality much better in the rural districts: that the apparent freedom of the slaves in those districts is the apparent freedom of convicts in a dockyard, an armed force, invested with more arbitrary and cruel power than any police in Europe, being always ready to act if not always in service. He adds that the security of the whites, however, depends less on the patrols than on the instinctive, habitual, and constant surveillance exercised by all the whites over all the blacks. He has seen a gentleman without commission or authority oblige negroes to shew their passports, merely because he did not recognise them as belonging to any of his neighbours. He has seen a white girl, twelve years old, stop a black man on the public road, demand to know whither he was going, and by whose authority, order him back to his plantation, and when he demurred, threaten to have him whipped. Fear has even driven the American Slave-owners into ​practices which rival in cruelty the Roman practice of crucifying slaves. A slave who had killed his master “was roasted alive at a slow fire on the spot of the murder, in the presence of many thousand slaves, driven to the ground from all the adjoining counties; and when at length his life went out, the fire was intensified until his body was in ashes, which were scattered to the winds and trampled under foot.” Mr. Olmsted gives the words of newspapers, even newspapers which from their moderation lie under the reproach of abolitionism, justifying such burnings of negroes as acts at once deliberate and indispensable. One editor, a Methodist preacher, says, “that the punishment was unequal to the crime, and that, had he been there, he would have suggested that the negro should be torn limb from limb with red-hot pincers, and that the limbs should afterwards have been burnt in a heap.” The burning of slaves alive, as well as crucifixion, was a part of the system of terror practised by the Romans. The American master, it is said, sleeps with open doors. So did the Roman master: his guards were the vengeance of his class, the stake and the cross.
In the First Book of Kings (i. 39), two of the servants of Shimei run away to Achish, King of Gath. This, it is believed, is the sum total of the slave disturbances recorded in the annals of the Hebrew nation. The churlish Nabal, to excuse himself for refusing hospitality to David and his followers, pretends to believe ​that they may be runaway servants, for “there be many servants now a days that break away every man from his master.” But when we inquire who were with David in the cave of Adullam, we find that they were men “in distress,” “in debt,” and “discontented,” not runaway slaves.
The economical marks of a Slave State are almost as clear as its political marks. “The great plantations,” (latifundia,) says a Roman writer, “have ruined Italy, and they are ruining the provinces too.” “Slave labour,” says Pliny, “makes bad husbandry, like everything that is done by despair.” Within sixty years after the death of Constantino, Campania, once the garden of Italy, was surveyed by the government, and an exemption from taxes was granted in favour of three hundred and thirty thousand acres of desert land. “As the footsteps of the barbarians,” says Gibbon, “had not yet been seen in Italy, the cause of this amazing desolation which is recorded in the laws, can be ascribed only to the administration of the Roman Emperors.” A blight more deadly to the fruitfulness of the land than that of imperial administration had been there. In America, as is well known, Slavery subsists by moving forwards to fresh soil, and it leaves a desert, like that of ruined Campania, where it has been. But the land of the Hebrews appears to have been cultivated with a care which carried fertility to the ​hilltops, and which bespeaks not only free labour, but the love of a peasant proprietor for his own land.
Solomon imposed, for his great works generally, a tribute of bond-service on the nations of alien blood which were under his sway. But to build the Temple, he raised a great levy out of all Israel: and it must have been a levy of freemen, since we are expressly told that “of the children of Israel Solomon made no bondmen.” It is not probable, then, that he had a great amount of slave labour at his command. Nor, though his palaces were great and costly, did he or his successors indulge in Pyramids, Labyrinths, Towers of Belus, or any of those wasteful freaks of despotic architecture which a great command of slave labour naturally inspires. The description of the Temple, grand and sumptuous, but without anything colossal or monstrous, bespeaks the work of freedom, which spares labour and seeks effect, not by magnitude, but by art. When the Temple is repaired, under Josiah, the work is done by free labourers receiving wages. “Go up to Hilkiah the high priest, that he may sum the silver which is brought into the house of the Lord, which the keepers of the door have gathered of the people: and let them deliver it into the hand of the doers of the work, that have the oversight of the house of the Lord: and let them give it to the doers of the ​work which is in the house of the Lord, to repair the breaches of the house.”
There is not, it is believed, in the Hebrew annals any trace of the existence of a slave-market, nor anything else indicating a trade in slaves. Sion, therefore, probably presented no counterpart to the auctions and advertisements of the South.
In Slave States labour is always looked upon by freemen as a degradation. No Spartan would have thought of engaging in any work but war. Even at Athens, which was much less of a Slave State than Sparta, the name mechanic was, as in nations infected with feudal sentiments, a term of reproach. The poor freeman at Rome despised labour, and lived by selling his suffrage at elections, by sponging on a rich patron, and by the dole which he received out of the tribute paid by the provinces to the conquering people. No member, however indigent, of a feudal aristocracy would have stooped to touch a plough. The poor whites of the South in like manner refuse to do the same work as the negro, and subsist as dependants of the great planters, or by occupations which, however wretched and precarious, are not those of the slave. There is not a trace of any such sentiment in the records of the Hebrew nation, any more than in those of its patriarchal sires. On the contrary, every mention of labour indicates that it was had in honour. “Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord; that walketh in His ways. For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and well shall it be with ​thee.” “Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase.” “And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.” Not only the honoured founders of the nation, as we have said, but its heroes, kings, and prophets were sons of labour, and had taken part in the work of that class which American Slave-owners call the fungus and cancer of society. Gideon, when the angel of the Lord appeared to him, was threshing wheat by the winepress. Saul was in search of his father’s asses when he was anointed king of Israel. David was taken from following the flocks. Elisha was called from the plough. Amos was a herdsman.
The spirit of a slave-owning aristocracy is insolent, as we know by the example of Lacedæmon and of the Southern States. But that of slave-owners under a despotism is doubly slavish, as we know by the example of Imperial Rome. The spirit of the Hebrew people in its dealings with its kings is high and free. Solomon in all his power does not dare to treat them as bondmen, and they at once break the yoke of his tyrant son. Their undying patriotism, their unfailing hope for their country, the tenacity of national life which brings them back from Babylon and restores their Commonwealth and Temple, would never, it may safely be said, have been found in a Slave State. Nothing of the kind was shewn even by the indomitable Roman when once his character had been corrupted by the possession of wealth and a multitude of slaves.
​The hearts of the Hebrews were “hard.” In matters of social humanity and justice they fell away from the beneficent precepts of their lawgiver in their dealings with their neighbour, as in matters of religion they fell away from their allegiance to the true God. Judaism was not Christianity, nor was Judæa Christendom; yet it may perhaps be safely said, that no two communities in the history of the world have been more different from each other than the community of great capitalists and landowners with their droves of slaves which covers the Southern States of America, and the community of peasants “dwelling each under his own vine and his own fig-tree,” and each “going forth to his labour until the evening,” which in the happy days of the Hebrew people lay around the Holy City and worshipped together in the Courts of Sion. It was among this peasantry, true sons of labour yet free of soul, pure, simple-minded, religious, and though devoid of the wisdom of the world, not uninstructed in religion, that when the time for the fulfilment of their long-cherished hope was come, the Saviour of the world appeared. It was from their cottages and fishing-boats that He called the open and ardent natures, neither corrupted by riches nor debased by Slavery, which were destined to confront a world in the strength of conviction, and to become the founders of Christendom.
* ↑ Deut. xv. 16, 17.
* ↑ Olmsted, Journey in the Back Country, p. 72.
* ↑ Edox. ii. 16.
* ↑ Ps. cxxiii. 2.
* ↑ Grote, vol. ii., p. 133.
* ↑ Exod. xxi. 2.
* ↑ Deut. xv. 12.
* ↑ Levit. xxv. 41.
* ↑ Levit. xxv. 39–43.
* ↑ Deut. xv. 13–15.
* ↑ Levit. xxv. 47.
* ↑ Exod. xxii. 3.
* ↑ Jer. xxxiv. 8–17.
* ↑ Levit. xxv. 44–46.
* ↑ Exod. xxii. 21.
* ↑ Ibid. xxiii. 9.
* ↑ Deut. x. 17–19.
* ↑ Levit. xxiv. 22.
* ↑ Dion Cassius, liv. 23; Senec. De Ira, iii. 40; De Clem. xviii.
* ↑ Hor. Sat., I. iii. 80.
* ↑ Exod. xxi. 20.
* ↑ Ibid. xxi. 26, 27.
* ↑ Thrupp’s Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 126.
* ↑ Levit. xxiv. 22.
* ↑ Ibid. xxiv. 19, 20.
* ↑ Laws, bk. ix., p. 868.
* ↑ Goodell’s American Slave Code, chap. xiii., xiv.
* ↑ Antiphon, Περὶ τοῦ Χορευτοῦ, p. 144.
* ↑ Aristoph., Ran., 618.
* ↑ Numb. xxxv. 30; Deut. xvii. 6.
* ↑ A Journey in the Back Country, p. 63. Mr. Olmsted quotes some paragraphs, one of which (from The Rogersville Times,) is, “Mr. Tilghman Cobb’s barn at Bedford, Va., was set fire to by lightning on Friday, the 11th, and consumed. Two negroes and three horses perished in the flames.”
* ↑ Exod. xxi. 3, 4.
* ↑ Job xxxi. 13–15.
* ↑ Mommsen’s Rome, vol. ii., p. 368, Eng. Trans.
* ↑ Journeys and Explorations, vol. ii., p. 47.
* ↑ See on this subject M. Wallon’s Histoire de l’Esclavage dans l’Antiquité, a work which gives the fullest account of Slavery in ancient Greece and Rome, and to which the author of this Essay has to acknowledge his obligations.
* ↑ Even aliens were condemned to menial services (Hydriaphoria, Skiadephoria, Scaphephoria,) at the Panathenæa. There is in Demosth. in Mid. (c. 15) a response of the Dodonean oracle to the Athenians commanding that on a certain day all the people, slaves as well as freemen, should wear chaplets and rest (στεφανηφορεῖν κοὶ ἐλινύειν) on a certain day: but this is little more than loosing the ox from the plough.
* ↑ Deut. xvi. 10–17.
* ↑ Levit. xxii. 10.
* ↑ Exod. xii. 43.
* ↑ Gen. xvii. 13.
* ↑ ἀφρήτωρ, ἀθέμιστος, ἀνέστιος. ὃς ἑπτέτης ὢν οὐκ ἔφυσε φράτορας.
* ↑ Ancient Law, p. 129.
* ↑ A Journey in the Back Country, p. 108.
* ↑ If I am told that the negroes are treated, in the matter of public worship or in other matters, as a Pariah class in the North as well as in the South, I must answer that the thing here discussed is not the consistency of the North, but the validity of a plea for slavery put forward by the South. I may add that the degradation inflicted by slavery in the South must naturally cling to the negro, except in the eyes of very high-minded men, in the North. Further, I would ask, are those who maltreat the negro in the North the enemies or the friends of slavery? And if they are the enemies of slavery, is their conduct the consequence of their principles or a departure from them?
* ↑ See Maine’s Ancient Law, p. 162.
* ↑ A gentleman who was among my audience at Manchester, and has done me the honour to send me some criticisms on the lecture, complains that I did not notice the inferiority of the negro race, which seems to him to be “a matter of fact” greatly affecting the question. The inferiority of the negro cannot be more manifest to him, than his inferiority and the consequent propriety of making him a slave would have been to Aristotle, the father of natural science. What race would not be “inferior” while it was kept in a state of degradation?
* ↑ “The wide-spread delusion that Southern institutions are an evil, and their extension dangerous—the notion so prevalent at the North that there is a real antagonism, or that the system of the South is hostile to Northern interests; the weakened Union sentiment, and the utter debauchment, the absolute traitorism of a portion of the Northern people, not only to the Union but to Democratic institutions and to the cause of civilization on this Continent; all these with the minor and most innumerable mischiefs that this mighty world-wide imposture has engendered or drags in its midst, rest upon the dogma, the single assumption, the sole elementary foundation falsehood, that a negro is a black man.”
* ↑ 2 Kings iv. 1.
* ↑ That is, of course, when they had once conquered the land of Canaan. And, as the Canaanites were to be destroyed, this conquest would not be a source of slaves, like those of the Dorians and other tribes who reduced the old inhabitants of the conquered country to bondage. This is not the place to discuss the tremendous moral questions connected with the penal destruction of the Canaanites. But it may be remarked that had they been spared and reduced to slavery, the result, judging from analogy, would have been the deep corruption of the Chosen People. With abundance of slave labour, the Jews would not have taken to industry, nor have acquired the virtues which industry alone can produce and guard. Their fate would have been like that of the Turks and other conquering hordes of the East, which, the rush of conquest once over, not being forced to labour, have sunk into mere sloth and abject sensuality. And if the morals of the Canaanites are truly painted in the Pentateuch, the possession of such slaves would have been depraving in the highest degree.
* ↑ “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.”—Exod. xxi. 16.
* ↑ Exod. xxii. 25.
* ↑ Levit. xxv. 35–38.
* ↑ Levit. xxv. 23–28.
* ↑ Levit. xix. 13.
* ↑ Deut. xxiv. 14, 15.
* ↑ Jer. xxii. 13.
* ↑ Deut. xxiv. 10–13.
* ↑ Deut. xv. 7–11.
* ↑ Deut. xxiv. 19–22.
* ↑ “The institution of slavery operates by contrast and comparison; it elevates the tone of the superior, adds to its (sic) refinement, allows more time to cultivate the mind, exalts the standard in morals, manners, and intellectual endowments; operates as a safety valve for the evil-disposed, leaving the upper race purer, while it really preserves from degradation, in the scale of civilization, the inferior, which we see is their uniform destiny when left to themselves. The slaves constitute essentially the lowest class, and society is immeasurably benefited by having this class, which constitutes the offensive fungus, the great cancer of civilized life—a vast burden and expense to every community—under surveillance and control; and not only so, but under direction as an efficient agent to promote the general welfare and increase the wealth of the community. The history of the world furnishes no institution under similar management, where so much good actually results to the governors and the governed as this in the Southern States of North America.”—From an Address on Climatology, before the Academy of Science, by Dr. Barton of New Orleans, quoted by Mr. Olmsted, Journeys and Explorations, vol. ii., p. 277.
* ↑ Deut. xxiii. 15, 16.
* ↑ Thucyd. iv. 80.
* ↑ One of these reigns of terror is thus described by a slave:—“It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and shew their subserviency to the slave-holders; not reflecting that the power which trampled on the coloured people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation. Those who never witnessed such scenes can hardly believe what I know was inflicted at this time on innocent men, women, and children, against whom there was not the slightest ground for suspicion. Coloured people and slaves who lived in remote parts of the town suffered in an especial manner. In some cases the searchers scattered powder and shot among their clothes, and then sent other parties to find them, and bring them forward as proof that they were plotting insurrection. Everywhere men, women, and children were whipped till the blood stood in puddles at their feet. Some received five hundred lashes; others were tied hands and feet, and tortured with a bucking paddle, which blisters the skin terribly. The dwellings of the coloured people, unless they happened to be protected by some influential white person, who was nigh at hand, were robbed of clothing and every thing else the marauders thought worth carrying away. All day long these unfeeling wretches went round, like a troop of demons, terrifying and tormenting the helpless. At night, they formed themselves into patrol bands, and went wherever they chose among the coloured people, acting out their brutal will. Many women hid themselves in woods and swamps, to keep out of their way. If any of the husbands or fathers told of these outrages, they were tied up to the public whipping-post, and cruelly scourged for telling lies about white men. The consternation was universal. No two people that had the slightest tinge of colour in their faces dared to be seen talking together.”—The Deeper Wrong; or, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself. Edited by L. Maria Child, pp. 98, 99.
* ↑ A Journey to the Back Country, p. 443.
* ↑ Olmsted, Journey to the Back Woods, p. 443.
* ↑ Plaut., Capt., III. iv. 65.
* ↑ 1 Sam. xxii. 2. The manservants and maidservants of the people, on their return from the Captivity, were in number 7,337. (Nehem. vii. 67.)
* ↑ “Coli ruba ab ergastulis pessimum est, et quiequid agitur a desperantibus.”
* ↑ 1 Kings ix. 21.
* ↑ Ibid. v. 13.
* ↑ The taste of the Greeks would probably have preserved them from colossal extravagance in art under any circumstances; but it is not probable that, at the time when the type of Greek architecture was fixed, the nation possessed many slaves.
* ↑ 2 Kings xxii. 4, 5.
* ↑ οὐ γὰρ βάναυσον τὴν τέχνην ἐκτησάην, &c.
* ↑ Judges vi. 11.