A CHAPTER ON SLAVERY.
SECTION I.
GENERAL VIEW OP THE SUBJECT — SLAVERY IN ANCIENT TIMES — IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
It may seem, to the casual observer, strange and unaccountable, that, if there be a great and overruling Providence, a wise and good Being, the Creator and Father of all, He should suffer any of His intelligent creatures — still more, such numbers of them — to be held in bondage, in absolute subjection to the will and caprice of their fellow-men. He wonders that the God above looks on and suffers such wrongs; he wonders that He does not send down His lightning-bolts, and break their chains in an instant. But one who thinks more deeply will take a wider and a wiser view of the subject. Reflecting on the present nature of man, he perceives that slavery is but one of the great black branches, springing from the poisonous root of evil in the human heart; — that it is one of the direct and natural consequences of man's fall.
The essential principle of evil is self-love — a preference of self to others; as the essential principle of x in power. It is simply the result of circumstances so operating as to permit that natural love of rule, which exists in every unregenerate heart, to carry itself into act and unrestrained indulgence. Hence we may expect to find the custom of slavery existing from very ancient times. For as soon as evil was born in the human heart, that self-love, which is its essential principle, would begin to show itself in the desire to bring others into subjection and servitude. The father would tyrannize over his children, the older brother over the younger ones, the stronger over the weaker. The patriarch would seek to exercise absolute sway over his family and dependents; and in the contests, which self-love would soon cause to arise between one shepherd and another, captives would be taken, who would at once be made slaves, — that is, would be compelled to remain in subjection to their conqueror, and labor for his comfort and at his pleasure. Wherever might is made the only law of right, a state of slavery at once ensues. Then, as communities became enlarged, and small kingdoms established, the king or ruler would be the master of his subjects, holding their property and lives at his disposal Such, we know, is the state of nearly all Oriental countries to this day: the inhabitants are all in a manner slaves, — the king is their general master. The example set by the superior would be followed by inferiors: each subject would, in his turn, have slaves, as many as he was able to procure and support. These would be captives taken in war, or sometimes insolvent debtors, or, in fine, any persons whom superior wealth or power could bring into one's possession. Thus slavery, beginning in early times, would become at length a general and almost universal institution. This view we find borne out by all historical testimony. "Slavery and the slave-trade," says an eminent historian, "are older than the records of human society. They are found to have existed wherever the savage hunter began to assume the habits of pastoral or agricultural life; and with the exception of Australasia, they have extended to every portion of the globe. They pervaded every nation of civilized antiquity. The earliest glimpses of Egyptian history exhibit pictures of bondage; the oldest monuments of human labor on the Egyptian soil are evidently the results of slave-labor. The founder of the Jewish nation was a slave-holder and a purchaser of slaves. Every patriarch was lord in his own household. The Hebrews, when they burst the bond of their own thraldom, carried with them beyond the desert the institution of slavery. Slavery planted itself even in the Promised Land. The Hebrew father might doom his daughter to bondage; the wife and children and posterity of the emancipated slave remained the property of the master and his heirs. It is even probable, that, at a later period, a man's family might be sold for the payment of his debts. The countries that bordered on Palestine were equally familiar with domestic servitude; and, like Babylon, Tyre also, the oldest and most famous commercial city of Phœnicia, was a market for the 'persons of men.' The Scythians of the desert had already established slavery throughout the plains and forests of the unknown North. "Old as are the traditions of Greece, the existence of slavery is still older. The wrath of Achilles grew out of the quarrel for a slave; the Grecian dames had crowds of servile attendants; the heroes before Troy made incursions into the neighboring villages and towns, to enslave the inhabitants. Greek pirates, roving, like the corsairs of Barbary, in quest of men, laid the foundations of Greek commerce; each commercial town was a slave-mart; and every cottage near the sea-side was in danger from the kidnapper. Greeks enslaved each other. The Grecian city, that made war on its neighbor city, exulted in its captives as a source of profit; the hero of Macedon sold men of his own kindred and language into hopeless slavery. The idea of universal free labor had not been generated. Aristotle had written that all mankind were brothers; yet the thought of equal enfranchisement never presented itself to his sagacious understanding. In every Grecian republic slavery was an indispensable element.
"The wide diffusion of bondage throughout the dominions of Rome, and the extreme severities of the Roman law towards the slave, contributed to hasten the fall of the Roman commonwealth. The power of the father to sell his children, of the creditor to sell his insolvent debtor, of the warrior to sell his captive, carried the influence of the institution into the bosom of every Roman family, into the conditions of every contract, into the heart of every unhappy land that was invaded by the Roman eagle. The slave-markets of Rome were filled with men of every complexion and of every clime.
"When the freedom of savage life succeeded in establishing its power on the ruins of the Roman empire, the great swarms of Roman slaves began to disappear; but the middle age witnessed rather a change in the channels of the slave-trade, than a diminution of its evils. The pirate, and the kidnapper, and the conqueror, still continued their pursuits. The Saxon race carried the most repulsive forms of slavery to England, where not half the population could assert a right to freedom, and where the price of a man was but four times the price of an ox. The importation of foreign slaves was freely tolerated; in defiance of severe penalties, the Saxons sold their own kindred into slavery on the Continent; nor could the traffic be checked, till religion, pleading the cause of humanity, made its appeal to conscience. Even after the Conquest, slaves were exported from England to Ireland, till the reign of Henry II., when a national synod of the Irish,—to remove the pretext for an invasion,—decreed the emancipation of all English slaves in the island.
"The German nations made the shores of the Baltic the scenes of the same desolating traffic; and the Dnieper formed the highway on which Russian merchants conveyed to Constantinople the slaves that had been purchased in the markets of Russia. The wretched often submitted to bondage, as the bitter but only refuge from absolute want. But it was the long wars between the German and Slavonic tribes, which imparted to the slave-trade its greatest activity, and filled France and the neighboring states with such numbers of victims that they gave the name of the Slavonic nation to servitude itself; and every country of western Europe still preserves in its language the record of the barbarous traffic in 'Slaves,'"[1]
From the account here given we may see how widespread, both in ancient and in modern times, has been the existence of slavery. And the reason already assigned sufficiently explains a fact which would seem otherwise so strange, viz., that slavery, or the disposition to enslave one's fellow-men, springs directly and naturally from the love of rule, which evil passion is the immediate offspring of that self-love which is the essential principle of evil. Hence we see that slavery has been almost as extensive and as universal as evil itself. Here, then, we have the true answer to the question, "Why does God not at once send down His thunderbolts and break all slave-chains at a blow?—why does He permit such wrongs?" He does not destroy it for the same reason that He does not destroy any other evil and all evils: He permits it for the same reason that He permits the existence of evil at all in the world. The essential reason for the permission of any particular evil is to prevent a greater; and the reason for the permission of sin itself, is because it was the only alternative to the destruction of man's mental liberty, and the consequent non-existence of any rational and intelligent creatures in the universe. The possession of reason or rationality, together with mental liberty, is essential to man as man: without it he would be a stock or a statue, or but as one of the lower animals,—either inanimate or irrational. But rationality and liberty imply the power of thought and of choice—the power to turn to this side or that, to look upward or downward, to turn to God or from God. Turning from God to self, and resting in and depending upon self, at length begat self-dependence, self-love, sin. Thus the possession of reason and mental liberty necessarily implied the possibility of sin or evil. God permitted this possibility to go into actuality, — or in other words, permitted evil, because, as just shown, it could not be prevented without destroying reason and liberty, thus destroying the essential human constitution — humanity itself. And He saw it to be better that there should be some bad humanity, than no humanity at all. He saw it to be better that there should be some evil in the world, than no good; some suffering, than no happiness; better, even, that there should be a hell, than no heaven. For what, after all, is that which is called hell, in its essence? It is simply a perverted mental state, into which the evil have themselves brought themselves. Abusing that mental liberty which is given to every man, they have chosen a perverse course, and adhered to it till it has at length become fixed with them: in the solemn words of Scripture, they have “chosen death rather than life."[2] But shall the millions, and millions, and millions more, of the good, who have lived, and have yet to live in the lapse of coming ages, be deprived of that joyous inheritance which the good Creator has provided for all who will accept of it — simply because some do not choose to have it? Surely, not. The whole scheme of existence, in a word, is this: God, in His infinite love, creates myriads and millions of beings, to the end that He may bless them and make them happy forever. But, in order that they may be gifted with the highest kind of blessing and happiness, — a happiness akin to His own Divine joy, — they must be rational and intelligent creatures, formed, thus, after His own image and likeness. Such a high nature implies mental liberty. Now, those who will not abuse this liberty, but keep themselves in the original and healthful order in which they were created, are capable of receiving the eternal happiness which the good Creator designed for them; but those who, abusing their liberty, pervert and disorder their moral natures, render themselves incapable of receiving it, and, on the contrary, bring themselves into a state of unhappiness. This latter state is what is called hell — the former, heaven.
Such, then, we see, is the reason for the permission of evil in general. Slavery, as one of the natural fruits of evil — the natural offspring of man's selfishness and sin — was necessarily permitted also: the tree must bring forth its own fruit.
For that social disease, however, the Savior, when he came into the world, brought a remedy, which, in his Divine wisdom, he knew would be gradually but certainly effectual. He did not violently attack the institution of slavery, though existing all around him, and indeed throughout the known world, at that time; he made no Open assault upon it, for “he knew what was in man," — he knew better how to reach the human heart. He laid down a great law, the law of love: “Whatsoever ye would that. men should do to you, do ye even so to them." As this seed of heavenly truth became sown, and took root in the human heart, and expanded and grew, he knew that it would gradually up-root and cast out the weeds—he knew that selfish and evil passions could not endure its celestial atmosphere, and that the poisonous fruits and flowers of those Upas trees would one by one wither and drop off. This would be the case, both individually and nationally. As the individual received into his mind the law of love, and, aided by the Divine strength, strove to bring that law into action, and thus sought to do to others as he would wish others to do to him,— he could not wilfully hold his fellow-man in slavish bondage, feast indolently on the fruits of another's toil, and deprive his brother of that liberty which was to himself so dear: the law of love forbade it. Again, as a nation, or political society (which is, in fact, but an aggregate of individuals), became impressed with the same thought, and imbued with the same spirit, it would not willingly suffer any institution or order of things to exist within its bosom, which stood Opposed to that Divine principle. It would freely and of its own accord, and without any need of violence or assault from without, throw out from its midst those bonds, which, while they enchained others, were also fetters on itself, and clogs to its own prosperity and peace. It would do so, however, not merely from policy or from selfish calculation of effects and consequences, but from high principle. The national heart, impressed with the great law, "love thy neighbor as thyself," could not bear to see men within its borders oppressed and trodden down under the feet of fellow-men,—slaves to another's will, toiling day and night for another's advantage. The injustice of such a state of things would. strike them forcibly: the public conscience, enlightened from above, could not endure this wrong, and they would meet together and resolve, with one heart and one voice, to put an end to it. And, in that State or Nation, slavery would cease. And thus would the ball of light and heavenly fire roll on from nation to nation, dissipating the dark stains of slavery as it went, till at length the whole earth would be purified; and then would this orb of ours go glittering on its way through the heavens, worthy to be looked upon by angels’ eyes.
This effect the All-Wise Savior foresaw when he announced that law of love: "A new commandment give I unto you, — that ye love one another." And this result, though not yet complete, is, nevertheless, in great part accomplished. Most of Europe is now enfranchised. Greece, which, at the time our Lord was upon earth, was full of slaves, has now not one. Rome, whose "slave-markets," as shown in the testimony before adduced, "were filled with men of every complexion and every clime," has no slave-market now. Other forms of oppression, indeed, yet exist there; but that of domestic servitude, at least, is wanting. Most of the other nations of Europe — Northern Italy, France, Germany, England, which during the middle ages, all contained hordes of bondmen — are now delivered from this evil and purged from this stain. And this is all the direct result of the influence of Christianity, working quietly but deeply in the heart of society; accomplishing its great purposes without' violence or noise or rude attack; acting, not as the storm but as the sunshine, — melting the frosty bonds by the power of love; and by the warmth of genial charity, causing man to cast from him the cloak of selfishness, which the blasts of abuse would 'have only made him wrap more closely about him. Enfranchisement, effected in this gentle and gradual manner, is, like mercy,
"Twice blessed;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."
And this, we are persuaded, is the only way it ever has been or can be accomplished, to the lasting good and advantage of both or either of the parties concerned, the master or the slave.