SLAUGHTER HOUSE. See Abattoir. S LAVERY. It appears to be true that, in the words of Dunoyer, the economic régime of every society which has recently become sedentary is founded on the slavery of the industrial professions. In the hunter period the savage warrior does not enslave his vanquished enemy, but slays him; the women of a conquered tribe he may, however, carry off and appropriate as wives or as servants, for in this period domestic labour falls almost altogether on their sex. In the pastoral stage slaves will be captured only to be sold, with the exception of a few who may be required for the care of flocks or the small amount of cultivation which is then undertaken. It is in proportion as a sedentary life prevails, and agricultural exploitation is practised on a larger scale, whilst warlike habits continue to exist, that the labour of slaves is increasingly introduced to provide food for the master, and at the same time save him from irksome toil. Of this stage in the social movement slavery seems to have been, as we have said, a universal and inevitable accompaniment.
But wherever theocratic organizations established themselves slavery in the ordinary sense did not become a vital element in the social system. The members of the lowest class were not in a state of individual subjection: the entire caste to which they belonged was collectively subject. It is in the communities in which the military order obtained an ascendency over the sacerdotal, and which were directly organized for war, that slavery (as the word is commonly understood) had its really natural and appropriate place. And, as war performed an indispensable function in human history, our just horror for some aspects of slavery must not prevent us from recognizing that institution as a necessary step in social progress. It is not merely that in its first establishment slavery was an immense advance by substituting for the immolation of captives, often accompanied by cannibalism, their permanent occupation in labour for the benefit of the victor. This advantage, recalled by an old though erroneous overspread the land, and the national appellation of the Slaves has been degraded by chance or malice from the signification of glory to that of servitude” (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. lv. ). The historian alludes to the derivation of the national name from slava, glory. See Skeat’s Etym. Dict., s.v.; see also Slavs. ] etymology, is generally acknowledged. But it is not so well understood that slavery discharged important offices in the later social evolution—first, by enabling military action to prevail with the degree of intensity and continuity requisite for the system of incorporation by conquest which was its final destination; and, secondly, by forcing the captives, who with their descendants came to form the majority of the population in the conquering community, to an industrial life, in spite of the antipathy to regular and sustained labour which is deeply rooted in human nature, especially in the earlier stages of the social movement, when insouciance is so common a trait, and irresponsibility is hailed as a welcome relief. With respect to the latter consideration, it is enough to say that nowhere has productive industry developed itself in the form of voluntary effort; in every country of which we have any knowledge it was imposed by the strong upon the weak, and was wrought into the habits of the people only by the stern discipline of constraint. From the former point of view the freeman, then essentially a warrior, and the slave were mutual auxiliaries, simultaneously exercising different and complementary functions —each necessary to the maintenance and furthering the activity of the other, and thus co-operating, without competition or conflict, towards a common public end. In modern slavery, on the other hand, where the occupations of both parties were industrial, the existence of a servile class, instead of rendering the citizens disposable for social service in a different field, only guaranteed for some of them the possibility of self-indulgent ease, whilst it imposed on others the necessity of indigent idleness.
It was in the Roman state that military action—in Greece often purposeless and, except in the resistance to Persia, on the whole fruitless—worked out the social mission which formed its true justification. Hence at Rome slavery also most properly found its place, so long as that mission was in progress of accomplishment. As soon as the march of conquest had reached its natural limit, slavery began to be modified; and when the empire was divided into the several states which had grown up under it, and the system of defence characteristic of the Middle Ages was substituted for the aggressive system of antiquity, slavery gradually disappeared, and was replaced by serfdom, which again, with the rise of modern industrial life, gave way to personal freedom.
We have so far dealt with the political results of ancient slavery, and have found it to have been in certain respects not only useful but indispensable. When we consider its moral effects, whilst endeavouring to the utmost to avoid exaggeration, we must yet pronounce its influence to have been profoundly detrimental. In its action on the slave it marred in a great measure the happy effects of habitual industry by preventing the development of the sense of human dignity which lies at the foundation of morals, whilst the culture of his ideas and sentiments was in most cases entirely neglected, and the spontaneous education arising from the normal family relations was too often altogether denied him. On the morality of the masters— whether personal, domestic, or social—the effects of the institution were disastrous. The habit of absolute rule, always dangerous to our nature, was peculiarly corrupting when it penetrated every department of daily life, and when no external interference checked individual caprice in its action on the feelings and fortunes of inferiors. It tended to destroy the power of self-command, and exposed the master to the baneful influences of flattery. As regards domestic morality, the system offered constant facilities for libertinism, and tended to subvert domestic peace by compromising the just dignity and ruining the happiness of the wife. The sons of the family were familiarized with vice, and the general tone of feeling of the younger generation was lowered by their intimate association with a despised and degraded class. On social morality, properly so called, the habits of cruelty, or at least of harshness, engendered by the relation, had a powerful reaction. Hume observes on “the little humanity commonly observed in persons accustomed from their infancy to exercise so great authority over their fellow-creatures and to trample upon human nature. . . . Nor,” he adds, “can a more probable reason be assigned for the severe, I might say, barbarous manners of ancient times than the practice of domestic slavery, by which every man of rank was rendered a petty tyrant, and educated amidst the flattery, submission, and low debasement of his slaves.” These deplorable results were, of course, not universally produced; there were admirable exceptions both amongst masters and amongst slaves—instances of benevolent protection on the one side and of unselfish devotion on the other, which did honour to human nature; but the evil effects without doubt greatly preponderated.
We proceed to a closer study of the institution of slavery as it existed in the Greek and Roman societies respectively.
We find it already fully established in the Homeric period. The prisoners taken in war are retained as slaves, or sold (Il ., xxiv. 752) or held at ransom (Il ., vi. 427) by the captor. Sometimes the men of a conquered town or district are slain and the women carried off (Od., ix. 40). Not unfrequently free persons were kidnapped by pirates and sold in other regions, like Eumaeus in the Odyssey. The slave might thus be by birth of equal rank with his master, who knew that the same fate might befall himself or some of the members of his family. The institution does not present itself in a very harsh form in Homer, especially if we consider (as Grote suggests) that “all classes were much on a level in taste, sentiment, and instruction.” The male slaves were employed in the tillage of the land and the tending of cattle, and the females in domestic work and household manufactures. The principal slaves often enjoyed the confidence of their masters and had important duties entrusted to them; and, after lengthened and meritorious service, were put in possession of a house and property of their own {Od., xiv. 64). Grote’s idea that the women slaves were in a more pitiable condition than the males does not seem justified, except perhaps in the case of the aletrides, who turned the household mills which ground the flour consumed in the family, and who were sometimes overworked by unfeeling masters (Od., xx. 110-119). Part of the agricultural work was sometimes done by poor hired freemen (thetes), who are spoken of as a wretched class (Od., xi. 490), and were perhaps employed almost exclusively by the smaller landholders. Having no powerful protector to whom they could look up, and depending on casual jobs, they were probably in a less desirable position than the average slave. Homer conceives the lot of the latter as a bitter one (Od., viii. 528; 77., xix. 302); but it must be remembered that the element of change from a former elevated position usually enters into his descriptions. He marks in a celebrated couplet his sense of the moral deterioration commonly wrought by the condition of slavery (Od., xvii. 322).
It is, however, in historic Greece, where we have ample documentary information, that it is most important to study the system of slavery,—and especially at Athens, where the principal work of Greek civilization found its accomplishment. The case of Sparta, in some respects peculiar, must be separately considered.
The sources of slavery in Greece were :—1. Birth, the condition being hereditary. This was not an abundant source, women slaves being less numerous than men, and wise masters making the union of the sexes rather a reward of good service than a matter of speculation (Xen., (Econ., ix. 5). It was in general cheaper to buy a slave than to rear one to the age of labour. 2. Sale of children by their free parents, which was tolerated, except in Attica, or their exposure, which was permitted, except at Thebes. The consequence of the latter was sometimes to subject them to a servitude worse than death, as is seen in the plays of Plautus and Terence, which, as is well known, depict Greek, not Roman, manners. Freemen, through indigence, sometimes sold themselves, and at Athens, up to the time of Solon, an insolvent debtor became the slave of his creditor. 3. Capture in war. Not only Asiatics and Thracians thus became slaves, but in the many wars between Grecian states, continental or colonial, Greeks were reduced to slavery by men of their own race. Thus Spartans were slaves at Tegea, and Gelon sold out of their country the commonalty of Hybaean Megara. At Plataea, at Scione, in Melos, the men were massacred or deported, the women enslaved. Athenians were sold at Samos, and in Sicily after the failure of the expedition. In the struggle of parties at Corcyra, each faction, when triumphant, condemned the other to massacre or slavery. Callicratidas pronounced against the enslavement of Greeks by Greeks, but violated his own principle, to which, however, Epaminondas and Pelopidas appear to have been faithful. Philip sold his Olynthian captives, and, after Thebes was taken by Alexander, 30,000 women and children are said to have been sold. 4. Piracy and kidnapping. The descents of pirates on the coasts were a perpetual source of danger; the pirate was a gainer either by the sale or by the redemption of his captives. If ransomed, the victim became by Athenian law the slave of his redeemer till he paid in money or labour the price which had been given for him. Kidnappers (andrapodistae) carried off children even in cities, and reared them as slaves. Whether from hostile forays or from piracy, any Greek was exposed to the risk of enslavement; it was a sword of Damocles suspended over all heads. 5. Commerce. Besides the sale of slaves which took place as a result of the capture of cities or other military operations, there was a systematic slave trade. Syria, Pontus, Lydia, Galatia, and above all Thrace were sources of supply. Egypt and Ethiopia also furnished a certain number, and Italy a few. Of foreigners, the Asiatics bore the greatest value, as most amenable to command, and most versed in the arts of luxurious refinement. But Greeks were highest of all in esteem, and they were much sought for foreign sale. Greece proper and Ionia supplied the petty Eastern princes with courtesans and female musicians and dancers. Athens was an important slave-market, and the state profited by a tax on the sales; but the principal marts were those of Cyprus, Samos, Ephesus, and especially Chios.
The slaves were employed either in domestic service—as household managers, attendants, or personal escorts—or in work of other kinds, agricultural or urban. In early Attica, and even down to the time of Pericles, the landowners lived in the country. The Peloponnesian War introduced a change; and after that time the proprietors resided at Athens, and the cultivation was in the hands of slaves. In manufactures and commerce, also, servile gradually displaced free labour. Speculators either directly employed slaves as artisans or commercial and banking agents, or hired them out, sometimes for work in mines or factories, sometimes for service in private houses, as cooks, flute-players, &c., or for viler uses. There were also public slaves; of these some belonged to temples, to which they were presented as offerings, amongst them being the courtesans who acted as hierodules at Corinth and at Eryx in Sicily; others were appropriated to the service of the magistrates or to public works; there were at Athens 1200 Scythian archers for the police of the city; slaves served, too, in the fleets, and were employed in the armies,—commonly as workmen, and exceptionally as soldiers.
The number of slaves in Greece, or even at Athens, can scarcely be determined with any tolerable approach to certainty. It is stated by Athenaeus (vi. 20), on the authority of Ctesicles, that the census of Demetrius Phalereus gave for Athens 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics (resident foreigners), and 400,000 slaves. It is also stated by the same author that Corinth had possessed 460,000 slaves and Aegina 470,000. Hume, in his Essay “On the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” maintained that the assertion of Athenaeus respecting Athens is quite incredible,—that the number of Athenian slaves “is at least augmented by a whole cipher, and ought not to be regarded as more than 40,000.” Boeckh and Letronne have since made the question the subject of fresh studies. The former has fixed the number of Attic slaves at about 365,000, the latter at 100,000 or 120,000. M. Wallon has revised the labours of these scholars, and adduced further considerations of his own. He estimates the number of slaves employed in all Attica in domestic service at 40,000; in agriculture at 35,000; in the mines at 10,000; in manufactures and commerce at 90,000. To these must be added, for old people and children under twelve years of age, 6000 and 20,000 respectively, and also the public slaves, of whom, as we have said, 1200 were Scythian archers. He thus arrives at the conclusion that the servile population of Attica was comprised between the limits of 188,000 and 203,000 souls, the free population being about 67,000, and the metics amounting to 40,000. The slaves thus bore to the free native population the ratio of 3 to 1. The numbers given by Athenaeus for Corinth and Aegina, though accepted by Boeckh, appear to be excessive, and are rejected by Clinton and by M. Wallon; the true numbers were no doubt large, but we have no means of determining them even approximately. Next after these cities in the magnitude of their slave population came, on the mainland, Megara, and, amongst the insular states, Chios and Rhodes. Miletus, Phocaea, Tarentum, Sybaris, and Cyrene also had numerous bodies of slaves.
The condition of slaves at Athens was not in general a wretched one. Demosthenes (In Mid., p. 530) says that, if the barbarians from whom the slaves were bought were informed of the mild treatment they received, they would entertain a great esteem for the Athenians. Plautus in more than one place thinks it necessary to explain to the spectators of his plays that slaves at Athens enjoyed such privileges, and even licence, as must be surprising to a Roman audience. The slave was introduced with certain customary rites into his position in the family; he was in practice, though not by law, permitted to accumulate a private fund of his own; his marriage was also recognized by custom; though in general excluded from sacred ceremonies and public sacrifices, slaves were admissible to religious associations of a private kind; there were some popular festivals in which they were allowed to participate; they had even special ones for themselves both at Athens and in other Greek centres. Their remains were deposited in the family tomb of their master, who sometimes erected monuments in testimony of his affection and regret. They often lived on terms of intimacy either with the head of the house or its younger members; but it is to be feared that too often this intimacy was founded, not on mutual respect, as in the heroic example of Ulysses and Eumaeus, but on insolent self-assertion on the one side and a spirit of unworthy compliance on the other, the latter having its raison d’être in degrading services rendered by the slave. Aristophanes and Plautus show us how often resort was had to the discipline of the lash even in the case of domestic slaves. Those employed in workshops, whose overseers were themselves most commonly of servile status, had probably a harder lot than domestics; and the agricultural labourers were not unfrequently chained, and treated much in the same way as beasts of burden. The displeasure of the master sometimes dismissed his domestics to the more oppressive labours of the mill or the mine. A refuge from cruel treatment was afforded by the temples and altars of the gods and by the sacred groves. Nor did Athenian law leave the slave without protection. He had, as Demosthenes boasts, an action for outrage like a freeman, and his death at the hand of a stranger was avenged like that of a citizen (Eurip., Hec., 288), whilst, if caused by his master’s violence, it had to be atoned for by exile and a religious expiation. Even when the slave had killed his master, the relatives of the house could not themselves inflict punishment; they were obliged to hand him over to the magistrate to be dealt with by legal process. The slave who had just grounds of complaint against his master could demand to be sold; when he alleged his right to liberty, the law granted him a defender and the sanctuaries offered him an asylum till judgment should be given. Securities were taken against the revolt of slaves by not associating those of the same nationality and language; they were sometimes fettered to prevent flight, and, after a first attempt at escape, branded to facilitate their recovery. There were treaties between states for the extradition of fugitives, and contracts of mutual assurance between individuals against their loss by flight. Their inclination to take advantage of opportunities for this purpose is shown by the number that escaped from Athens to join the Spartans when occupying Decelea. There were formidable revolts at the mines of Laurium, and more than once in Chios. The evidence of slaves—women as well as men—was often, with the consent of their masters, taken by torture; and that method is generally commended by the orators as a sure means of arriving at the truth, though sometimes, when it suits their immediate object, they take a different tone. The several forms of the “question” are enumerated in the Frogs of Aristophanes. If the slave was mutilated or seriously injured in the process, compensation was made, not to him, but to his master by the person who had demanded the use of torture.
The slave could purchase his liberty with his peculium by agreement with his master. He could be liberated by will, or, during his master’s life, by proclamation in the theatre, the law courts, or other public places, or by having his name inscribed in the public registers, or, in the later age of Greece, by sale or donation to certain temples—an act which did not make the slave a hierodule but a freeman. Conditions were sometimes attached to emancipation, as of remaining for life or a definite time with the former master, or another person named by him, or of performing some special service; payments or rights of succession to property might also be reserved. By manumission the Athenian slave became in relation to the state a metic, in relation to his master a client. He was thus in an intermediate condition between slavery and complete freedom. If the freedman violated his duties to his patron he was subject to an action at law, and if the decision were against him he was again reduced to slavery. He became a full member of the state only, as in the case of foreigners, by a vote in an assembly of six thousand citizens; and even this vote might be set aside by a graphe paranomon. Slaves who had rendered eminent services to the public, as those who fought at Arginusae and at Chaeronea, were at once admitted to the status of citizens in the class of (so-called) Plataeans. But it would appear that even in their case some civic rights were reserved and accorded only to their children by a female citizen. The number of freedmen at Athens seems never to have been great.
It is well known that Aristotle held slavery to be necessary and natural, and, under just conditions, beneficial to both parties in the relation—views which were correct enough from the political side, regard being had to the contemporary social state. His practical motto, if he is the author of the Economics attributed to him, is—“no outrage, and no familiarity.” There ought, he says, to be held out to the slave the hope of liberty as the reward of his service. Plato condemned the practice, which the theory of Aristotle also by implication sets aside as inadmissible, of Greeks having Greeks for slaves. In the Laws he accepts the institution as a necessary though embarrassing one, and recommends for the safety of the masters that natives of different countries should be mixed and that they should all be well treated. But, whilst condemning harshness towards them, he encourages the feeling of contempt for them as a class. Xenophon also, in urging a mild treatment of them, seems to have in view, not their own well-being, but the security of the masters. The later moral schools of Greece scarcely at all concern themselves with the institution.
The Epicurean had no scruple about the servitude of those whose labours contributed to his own indulgence and tranquillity; he would at most cultivate an easy temper in his dealings with them. The Stoic regarded the condition of freedom or slavery as an external accident, indifferent in the eye of wisdom; to him it was irrational to see in liberty a ground of pride or in slavery a subject of complaint; from intolerable indignity suicide was an ever-open means of escape. The poets—especially the authors of the New Comedy—strongly inculcate humanity, and insist on the fundamental equality of the slave. The celebrated “homo sum” is a translation from Alexis, and the spirit of it breathes in many passages of the Greek drama. A fragment of Philemon declares, as if in reply to Aristotle, that not nature, but fortune, makes the slave. Euripides, as might be expected from his humanitarian cast of sentiment, and the “premature modernism” which has been remarked in him, rises above the ordinary feelings of his time in regard to the slaves. As Mr Paley says, he loves "to record their fidelity to their masters, their sympathy in the trials of life, their gratitude for kindness and considerate treatment, and their pride in bearing the character of honourable men. . . . He allows them to reason, to advise, to suggest; and he even makes them philosophize on the follies and the indiscretions of their superiors” (compare Med., 54; Orest., 869; Hel., 728; Ion, 854; Frag. Melam, 506; Phrix., 823). But we are not to suppose that even he, latitudinarian and innovator as he was, could have conceived the possibility of abolishing an institution so deeply rooted in the social conditions, as well as in the ideas, of his time.
The case of the Helots of Laconia was different from that of the slaves in most Grecian communities. The origin of this class is disputed, and we cannot here enter into the controversy. They were regarded as the property of the state, which gave their services to individuals but kept in its own hands the power of emancipating them. The domestic servants of the Spartans were all Helots, and they waited on their masters at the syssitia or public meal. But they were in the main serfs, living in small country villages or in detached farms, cultivating the lands of the Spartan proprietors, and paying to those proprietors a proportion of the produce which could not be increased. They enjoyed their homes, wives, and families, could acquire property, were not to be sold out of the country, and perhaps could not be sold at all. They were, doubtless, employed in public works; in war they commonly acted as light-armed troops attending on the Spartan or Perioecic hoplites, but in particular emergencies themselves served as hoplites (Thucyd., iv. 80). They were sometimes rewarded for good service by emancipation, which, however, did not make them Perioeci, but introduced them into a special class known as neodamodeis. The condition of the Helot does not seem to have been economically onerous; but his consciousness of Grecian lineage, which Grote regards as an alleviation of his lot, must surely have been one of its bitterest elements, whilst it constantly kept alive the fear and consequent hatred of his Spartan masters, and made the relation between the two classes less natural than that of the ordinary Greek masters with slaves of foreign and less civilized races. By the ruling powers of Sparta the Helots were never trusted, and in one memorable case some two thousand of them, selected for special military merit, were massacred in secret (Thucyd., iv. 80). According to Plutarch, whose statement, however, has not always been credited, the ephors declared war against the Helots every year, and there was a practice, known as the kryρteia, of detailing a number of young Spartan citizens for the purpose of assassinating such of them as were considered formidable. Wallon estimates the number of the Helots at 220,000, that of the Spartans being 32,000. The Penestae in Thessaly and the Clarotae in Crete seem to have occupied a position somewhat similar to that of the Helots in Laconia.
We have already observed that the Roman system of life was that in which slavery had its most natural and relatively legitimate place; and accordingly it was at Rome that, as Blair has remarked, the institution was more than anywhere else “extended in its operation and methodized in its details.” Not only on this ground is it especially deserving of our study, but because out of the slave-class, as it was organized by the Romans in the countries subject to the empire, the modern proletariate has been historically evolved.
We must distinguish from the later slavery at Rome what Mommsen calls “the old, in some measure innocent” slavery, under which the farmer tilled the land along with his slave, or, if he possessed more land than he could manage, placed the slave— either as a steward, or as a sort of lessee obliged to render up a portion of the produce—over a detached farm. Though slaves were obtained by the early victories of Rome over her Italian neighbours, no large number was employed on the small holdings of those periods. But the extension of properties in the hands of the patricians, and the continual absences of citizens required by the expanding system of conquest, necessarily brought with them a demand for slave labour, which was increasingly supplied by captives taken in war. Of the number furnished from this source a few particulars from the time of the mature republic and the first century of the empire will give some idea. In Epirus, after the victories of Aemilius Paullus, 150,000 captives were sold. The prisoners at Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae were 90,000 Teutons and 60,000 Cimbri. Caesar sold on a single occasion in Gaul 63,000 captives; Augustus made 44,000 prisoners in the country of the Salassi; after immense numbers had perished by famine and hardship and in the combats of the arena, 97,000 slaves were acquired by the Jewish war. But slavery, as Hume has shown, is unfavourable to population, and even the wars of Rome were insufficient to maintain the supply. Hence a regular commerce in slaves was established, which was based on the “systematically-prosecuted hunting of man,” and indicated an entire perversion of the primitive institution, which was essentially connected with conquest. The pirates sold great numbers of slaves at Delos, where was the chief market for this kind of wares; and these sales went on as really, though more obscurely, after the successful expedition of Pompey. There was a regular importation at Rome of slaves, brought to some extent from Africa, Spain, and Gaul, but chiefly from Asiatic countries—Bithynia, Galatia, Cappadocia, and Syria. A portorium—apparently one-eighth for eunuchs, one-fortieth for others—was paid on their import or export, and a duty of 2 or 4 per cent. on their sale.
There were other sources from which slavery was alimented, though of course in a much less degree. Certain offences reduced the guilty persons to slavery (servi poenae), and they were employed in public work in the quarries or the mines. Originally, a father could sell his children. A creditor could hold his insolvent debtor as a slave, or sell him out of the city (trans Tiberim). The enslavement of creditors, overwhelmed with usury in consequence of losses by hostile raids or their own absence on military service, led to the revolt of the Mons Sacer (493 b.c.). The Poetelian law (326 b.c. ) restricted the creditor’s lien (by virtue of a nexum) to the goods of his debtor, and enacted that for the future no debtor should be put in chains; but we hear of debtors addicti to their creditors by the tribunals long after—even in the time of the Punic Wars.
There were servi publici as well as privati. The service of the magistrates was at first in the hands of freemen; but the lower offices, as of couriers, servants of the law courts, of prisons, and of temples, were afterwards filled by slaves. The execution of public works also came to be largely committed to them,—as the construction of roads, the cleansing of the sewers, and the maintenance of the aqueducts. Both kinds of functions were discharged by slaves, not only at Rome, but in the rural and provincial municipalities. The slaves of a private Roman were divided between the familia rustica and the familia urbana. At the head of the familia rustica was the villicus, himself a slave, with the wife who was given him at once to aid him and to bind him to his duties. Under him were the several groups employed in the different branches of the exploitation and the care of the cattle and flocks, as well as those who kept or prepared the food, clothing, and tools of the whole staff and those who attended on the master in the various species of rural sports. A slave prison (ergastulum) was part of such an establishment, and there were slaves whose office it was to punish the offences of their fellows. To the familia urbana belonged those who discharged the duties of domestic attendance, the service of the toilet, of the bath, of the table, of the kitchen, besides the entertainment of the master and his guests by dancing, singing, and other arts. There were, besides, the slaves who accompanied the master and mistress out of doors, and who were chosen for their beauty and grace as guards of honour, for their strength as chairmen or porters, or for their readiness and address in remembering names, delivering messages of courtesy, and the like. There were also attached to a great household physicians, artists, secretaries, librarians, copyists, preparers of parchment, as well as pedagogues ,and preceptors of different kinds,—readers, grammarians, men of letters and even philosophers,—all of servile condition, besides accountants, managers, and agents for the transaction of business. Actors, comic and tragic, pantomimi, and the performers of the circus were commonly slaves, as were also the gladiators. These last were chosen from the most warlike races—as the Samnites, Gauls, and Thracians. Familiae of gladiators were kept by private speculators, who hired them out; they were sometimes owned by men of high rank.
As to the numbers of slaves belonging to individual masters, though we have no distinct general statement in the Roman writers, several special examples and other indirect indications serve to show that the wealthier men possessed very large familiae. This may be inferred from the columbaria of the house of Livia and of other great houses. Vettius armed four hundred of his own slaves when he entered on the revolt which was a prelude to the Second Servile War. The slaves of Pedanius Secundus, who, in spite of a threatened outbreak of the indignant populace, were all put to death because they had been under their master’s roof when he was murdered, were four hundred in number. Pliny tells us that Caecilius, a freedman of the time of Augustus, left by his will as many as 4116. The question as to the total number of slaves at Rome or in Italy is a very difficult one, and it is not, perhaps, possible to arrive with any degree of certainty at an approximate estimate. Gibbon supposes that there were in the Roman world in the reign of Claudius at least as many slaves as free inhabitants. But Blair seems right in believing that this number, though probably correct for an earlier period, is much under the truth for the age to which it is assigned. He fixes the proportion of slaves to free men as that of three to one for the time between the conquest of Greece (146 b.c. ) and the reign of Alexander Severus (222-235 a.d.). The entire number of slaves in Italy would thus have been, in the reign of Claudius, 20,832,000, that of the free population being 6,944,000.
By the original Roman law the master was clothed with absolute dominion over the slave, extending to the power of life and death, which is not surprising when we consider the nature of the patria potestas. The slave could not possess property of any kind; whatever he acquired was legally his master’s. He was, however, in practice permitted to enjoy and accumulate chance earnings or savings, or a share of what he produced, under the name of peculium. A master could not enter into a contract with his slave, nor could he accuse him of theft before the law; for, if the slave took anything, this was not a subtraction, but only a displacement, of property. The union of a male and female slave had not the legal character of a marriage; it was a cohabitation (contubernium) merely which was tolerated, and might be terminated at will, by the master; a slave was, therefore, not capable of the crime of adultery. Yet general sentiment seems to have given a stronger sanction to this sort of connexion; the names of husband and wife are freely used in relation to slaves on the stage, and even in the laws, and in the language of the tombs. For entering the military service or taking on him any state office a slave was punished with death. He could not in general be examined as a witness, except by torture. A master, when accused, could oiler his slaves for the “question,” or demand for the same purpose the slaves of another; and, if in the latter case they were injured or killed in the process, their owner was indemnified. A slave could not accuse his master, except of adultery or incest (under the latter name being included the violation of sacred things or places); the case of high treason was afterwards added to these. An accused slave could not invoke the aid of the tribunes. The penalties of the law for crime were more severe on guilty slaves than on freemen; “majores nostri,” say the legists, “in omni supplicio severius servos quam liberos punierunt.” The capital punishment of the freeman was by the sword or the precipice,—of the slave by the axe or the cross. The lex Cornelia punished the murder of a slave or a freeman alike; but the master who killed his own slave was not affected by this law.
Columella, like Xenophon, favours a certain friendliness and familiarity in one’s intercourse with his farm slaves. Cato ate and drank the same coarse victuals as his slaves, and even had the children suckled by his wife, that they might imbibe a fondness for the family. But that rigid old economist had a strict eye to profit in all his dealings with them. He allowed the contubernium of male and female slaves at the price of a money payment from their peculium. Columella regarded the gains from the births as a sufficient motive for encouraging these unions, and thought that mothers should be rewarded for their fecundity; Varro, too, seems to have taken this view. The immense extension of the rural estates (latifundia) made it impossible for masters to know their slaves, even if they were disposed to take trouble for the purpose. Effective superintendence even by overseers became less easy; the use of chains was introduced, and these were worn not only in the field during working hours but at night in the ergastulum where the labourers slept—a practice which Pliny lamented as a disgrace to agriculture. Urban slaves had probably often a life as little enviable, especially those who worked at trades for speculators. Even in private houses at Rome, so late as the time of Ovid, the porter was chained. In the familia urbana the favourites of the master had good treatment, and might exercise some influence over him which would lead to their receiving flattery and gifts from those who sought his vote or solicited his support. Doubtless there was often genuine mutual affection; slaves sometimes, as in noted instances during the civil wars, showed the noblest spirit of devotion to their masters. Those who were not inmates of the household, but were employed outside of it as keepers of a shop or boat, chiefs of workshops, or clerks in a mercantile business, had the advantage of greater freedom of action. The slaves of the leno and the lanista were probably in most cases not only degraded but unhappy. The lighter punishments inflicted by masters were commonly personal chastisement or banishment from the town house to rural labour; the severer were employment in the mill (pistrinum) or relegation to the mines or quarries. To the mines speculators also sent slaves; they worked half-naked, men and women, in chains, under the lash and guarded by soldiers. Vedius Pollio, in the time of Augustus, was said to have thrown his slaves, condemned sometimes for trivial mistakes or even accidents, to the lampreys in his fishpond. Cato advised the agriculturist to sell his old oxen and his old slaves, as well as his sick ones; and sick slaves were exposed in the island of Aesculapius in the Tiber; by a decree of Claudius slaves so exposed, if they recovered, could not be reclaimed by their masters.
Though the Roman slaves were not, like the Spartan Helots, kept obedient by systematic terrorism, their large numbers were a constant source of solicitude in the later period of the republic and under the early empire. The law under which the slaves of Pedanius were put to death, probably first made under Augustus and more fully enacted under Nero, is sufficient proof of this anxiety, which indeed is strongly stated by Tacitus in his narrative of the facts. There had been many conspiracies amongst the slaves in the course of Roman history, and some formidable insurrections. We hear of a conspiracy about 500 b. c. and another in 419 b.c. ; again just before the sea-fight of Duilius and between the battles of Trasimenus and Cannae. In 198 b.c. a servile war had almost broken out; in 196 b.c. there was a rising in Etruria and in 185 b.c. in Apulia. The growth of the latifundia made the slaves more and more numerous and formidable. Free labour was discountenanced. Cato, Varro, and Columella all agree that slave labour was to be preferred to free except in unhealthy regions and for large occasional operations, which probably transcended the capacity of the permanent familia rustica. Cicero and Livy bear testimony to the disappearance of a free plebs from the country districts and its replacement by gangs of slaves working on great estates. The policy of the Gracchi and their successors of the popular party was opposed to this reduction of the free working population, which they sought to counteract by agrarian laws and by colonization on a large scale—projects which could not be effectively carried out until civil supremacy was united with military power in the hands of a popular chief, and which, even when this condition was satisfied by the establishment of the empire, were inadequate to meet the evil. The worst form of praedial slavery existed in Sicily, whither Mommsen supposes that its peculiarly harsh features had been brought by the Carthaginians. In Sicily, accordingly, the first really serious servile insurrections took place, at once provoked by the misery of the slaves and facilitated by the habits of brigandage which, it is said, the proprietors had tolerated and even encouraged as lightening the cost of subsistence of their slaves. The rising under Eunus in 133 b.c. was with some difficulty suppressed by Rupilius. Partial revolts in Italy succeeded; and then came the second Sicilian insurrection under Trypho and Athenio, which, after a severe struggle, was put down by Aquilius. These were followed by the Servile War in Italy under Spartacus, which, occurring at an otherwise critical period, severely tested the military resources of Rome. In the subsequent civil conflicts the aid of slaves was sought by both parties, even by Marius himself, and afterwards by Catiline, though he finally rejected their services. Clodius and Milo employed bands of gladiators in their city riots, and this action on the part of the latter was approved by Cicero. In the First Civil War they were to be found in both camps, and the murderers of Caesar were escorted to the Capitol by gladiators. Antony, Octavius, and Sextus Pompeius employed them in the Second Civil War; and it is recorded by Augustus on the Monumentum Ancyranum that he gave back to their masters for punishment about 30,000 slaves who had absconded and borne arms against the state. Under Tiberius, at the death of Caligula, and in the reign of Nero there were threatening movements of the slaves. In the wars from Otho to Vespasian they were employed, as Tacitus tells us, even by the most scrupulous generals.
Of the moral influences of slavery we have already spoken. In the particular case of Rome it cannot be doubted that it largely contributed to the impurities which disgraced private life, as seen in the pages of Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius. It is shocking to observe the tone in which Horace, so characterized by geniality and bonhomie, speaks of the subjection of slaves to the brutal passions of their masters (Sat., i. 2, 116). The hardening effect of the system appears perhaps most strikingly in the barbarous spectacles of the amphitheatre, in which even women took pleasure and joined in condemning the gladiator who did not by his desperate courage satisfy the demands of a sanguinary mob. It led, further, to a contempt for industry, even agriculture being no longer held in esteem (“quum sit publice accepta et confirmata jam vulgaris existimatio, rem rusticam sordidum opus,” Col., i., praef. 20). The existence of slavery, degrading free labour while competing with freemen for urban employment, multiplied the idle and worthless population of Rome, who sought only “panem et circenses.” These had to be supported by public distributions, which the emperors found they could not discontinue, and by the bounty of patrons, and, like the “mean whites” of modern America, formed a danger ous class, purchasable by selfish ambitions and ready to aid in civil disturbances.
Blair, in comparing the Greek and Roman systems of slavery, points with justice to the greater facility and frequency of emancipation as the great superiority of the latter. No Roman slave, he says, “needed to despair of becoming both a freeman and a citizen.” Manumission was of two kinds— justa or regular, and minus justa. Of manumissio justa there were four modes :— (1) by adoption, rarely resorted to; (2) by testament, already recognized in the Twelve Tables; (3) by census , which was of exceptional use, and did not exist later than the time of Vespasian; and (4) by vindicta , which was the usual form. In the last method the master turned the slave round, with the words “liber esto,” in the presence of the praetor, that officer or his lictor at the same time striking the slave with his rod. The manumissio minus justa was effected by a sufficient manifestation of the will of the master, as by letter, by words, by putting the pileus (or cap of liberty) on the slave, or by any other formality which had by usage become significant of the intention to liberate, or by such an act as making the slave the guardian of his children. This extra-legal sort of manumission was incomplete and precarious; even after the lex Julia Norbana (19 a.d.), which assimilated the position of those so liberated to that of the Latin colonists, under the name of Latini juniores, the person remained in the eye of the law a slave till his death and could not dispose of his peculium.
A freedman, unless he became such by operation of law, remained client of his master, and both were bound by the mutual obligations arising out of that relation. These obligations existed also in the case of freedmen of the state, of cities, temples, and corporations. The freedman took his former master’s name; he owed him deference (obsequium) and aid (officium)·, and neglect of these obligations was punished, in extreme cases even with loss of liberty. Conditions might be annexed by the master to the gift of freedom, as of continued residence with him, or of general service or some particular duty to be performed, or of a money payment to be made. But the praetor Rutilius, about the beginning of the 1st century b.c., limited the excessive imposition of such conditions, and his restrictions were carried further by the later jurists and the imperial constitutions. Failing natural heirs of an intestate freedman, the master, now patron, succeeded to his property at his death; and he could dispose by will of only half his possessions, the patron receiving the other half. Freedmen and their sons were subject to civil disabilities; the third generation became ingenua (full citizens). Thus, by a process of constant infiltration, the slave element tended to merge itself in the general popular body; and Scipio Aemilianus could reply to the murmurs of a plebeian crowd, “Taceant quibus Italia noverca est; non efficietis ut solutos verear quos alligatos adduxi” (Val. Max., vi. 2, 3).
It was often a pecuniary advantage to the master to liberate his slave; he obtained a payment which enabled him to buy a substitute, and at the same time gained a client. This of course presupposes the recognition of the right of the slave to his peculium; and the same is implied in Cicero’s statement that a diligent slave could in six years purchase his freedom. Augustus set himself against the undue multiplication of manumissions, probably considering the rapid succession of new citizens a source of social instability, and recommended a similar policy to his successor. The lex Aelia Sentia (about 3 a.d.) forbade manumission, except in strictly limited cases, by masters under 20 years of age or of slaves under 30; and the lex Furia Caninia (about 7 a.d.) fixed the proportion of a man’s slaves which he could liberate by testament, and forbade more than a hundred being so enfranchised whatever might be the number of the familia. Under the empire the freedmen rose steadily in influence; they became admissible to the rank of equites and to the senate; they obtained provincial governments, and were appointed to offices in the imperial household which virtually placed them at the head of administrative departments. Pallas and Narcissus are familiar types of the unworthy members of this class, and there were doubtless many outside of official life who exhibited the ostentation and insolence of the parvenu; but there were others who were highly deserving of esteem. Freedmen of humbler rank filled the minor offices in the administrative service, in the city cohorts, and in the army; and we shall find that they entered largely into the trades and professions when free labour began to revive. They appeared also in literature; we hear of several historical and biographical memoirs by freedmen under the republic and the early empire; many of them were professors of grammar and the kindred arts, as Tiro, the amanuensis of Cicero, and Hyginus, the librarian of Augustus; and names of a higher order are those of Livius Andronicus, Caecilius, Statius, Terence, Publius Syrus, Phaedrus, and Epictetus.
In the 2d century of the Christian era we find a marked change with respect to the institution of slavery, both in the region of thought and in that of law. Already the principles of reason and humanity had been applied to the subject by Seneca who, what- ever we may think of him as a man, deserves our gratitude for the just and liberal sentiments he expressed respecting the slaves, who, he says, should be treated as “humble friends,” and especially for his energetic reprobation of gladiatorial combats and of the brutality of the public who enjoyed those sanguinary shows. But it was in the 2d century, as we have said, that “the victory of moral ideas” in this, as in other departments of life became “decisive. . . . Dio Chrysostom, the adviser of Trajan, is the first Greek writer who has pronounced the principle of slavery to be contrary to the law of nature” (Mark Pattison). And a parallel change is found in the practical policy of the state. The military vocation of Rome was now felt to have reached its normal limits; and the emperors, understanding that, in the future, industrial activity must prevail, prepared the abolition of slavery as far as was then possible, by honouring the freedmen, by protecting the slave against his master, and by facilitating manumissions. The jurists who, in the absence of a recognized spiritual power, provisionally discharged in their own way the office of systematizing practical morals, modified, by means of the useful fiction of the jus naturale, the presumptions of law and the interpretation of doubtful instruments. (“Quod ad jus naturale attinet, omnes homines aequales sunt ”—Ulpian. "Servitus est constitutio juris gentium, qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subjicitur”—Florentinus.) The general tendency both of the imperial constitutions and of the maxims of the legists is in favour of liberty. ( “Nec ignotum est quod multa contra juris rigorem pro libertate sint constituta ”—Ulpian. ) The practices of exposure and sale of children, and of giving them in pledge for debt, are forbidden. An edict of Diocletian forbade a free man to sell himself. Manstealers or kidnappers (plagiarii) were punished with death. The insolvent debtor was withdrawn from the yoke of his creditor. While the slave trade was permitted, the atrocious mutilation of boys and young men, too often practised, was punished with exile and even with death. In redhibitory actions (for the annulment of sales), if a slave were returned to the seller, so must also be his parents, brothers, and personae contubernio conjunctae. In the interpretation of testaments it was to be assumed that members of the same family were not to be separated by the division of the succession. The law also favoured in special cases the security of the peculium, though in general principle it still remained the property of the master. The state granted to public slaves the right of bequeathing half their possessions; and private persons sometimes permitted similar dispositions even to a greater extent, though only within the familia. Hadrian took from masters the power of life and death and abolished the subterranean prisons. Antoninus Pius punished him who killed his own slave as if he had killed another’s. Already in the time of Nero the magistrates had been ordered to receive the slave’s complaint of ill-treatment; and the lex Petronia, belonging to the same or an earlier period, forbade masters to hand over their slaves to combats with wild beasts. Antoninus directed that slaves treated with excessive cruelty, who had taken refuge at an altar or imperial image, should be sold; and this provision was extended to cases in which the master had employed a slave in a way degrading to him or beneath his character. M. Aurelius gave to masters an action against their slaves for any cause of complaint, thus bringing their relation more directly under the surveillance of law and public opinion. A slave’s oath could still not be taken in a court of law; he was interrogated by the “question”; but the emperors and jurists limited in various ways the application of torture, adding, however, as we have mentioned, to the cases in which it could previously be appealed to that of the crime of majestas. For certain alleged offences of the master the slave could bring an action, being represented for the purpose by an adsertor. Emancipation was facilitated; some of the old formalities were dispensed with; obstacles to it were removed, and legal difficulties solved in such a way as to further it. The power of imposing conditions on testamentary manumissions was restricted, and these conditions interpreted in the sense most favourable to freedom. The emperor could confer liberty by presenting a gold ring to a slave with the consent of the master, and the legal process called restitutio natalium made him a full citizen. It was decided that liberty could not be forfeited even by a prescription of sixty years’ duration.
The rise of Christianity in the Roman world still further improved the condition of the slave. The sentiments it created were not only favourable to the humane treatment of the class in the present, but were the germs out of which its entire liberation was destined, at a later period, in part to arise. It is sometimes unreasonably objected to the Christian church that it did not denounce slavery as a social crime and insist on its immediate abolition, that on the contrary it recognized the institution, ecclesiastical persons and societies themselves being owners of slaves. We have seen that slavery was a fundamental element of the old Roman constitution, not only incorporated with the laws, but necessarily arising out of, and essential to, the military mission of the state. When the work of conquest had been sufficiently achieved, it could not be expected that a radical alteration should be suddenly wrought either in the social system which was in harmony with it, or even in the general ideas which had grown up under its influence. The latter would, indeed, be gradually affected; and accordingly we have observed a change in the policy of the law, indicating a change in sentiment with respect to the slave class, which does not appear to have been at all due to Christian teaching, but to have arisen from the spontaneous influence of circumstances co-operating with the softened manners which were inspired by a pacific regime. But the institution itself could not be at once seriously disturbed; it was too deeply rooted and too closely bound up with the whole existing order of things. If it could have been immediately abolished, the results must have been disastrous, most of all to the slave population itself. Before that end could be accomplished, an essentially new social situation must come into existence; society must be organized for defence as it had previously been for conquest; and this transformation could not be wrought in a day. But in the meantime much might be done towards further mitigating the evils of slavery, especially by impressing on master and slave their relative duties and controlling their behaviour towards one another by the exercise of an independent moral authority. This was the work open to the Christian priesthood, and it cannot be denied that it was well discharged. Whilst the fathers agree with the Stoics of the 2d century in representing slavery as an indifferent circumstance in the eye of religion and morality, the contempt for the class which the Stoics too often exhibited is in them replaced by a genuine sympathy. They protested against the multiplication of slaves from motives of vanity in the houses of the great, against the gladiatorial combats (ultimately abolished by the noble self-devotion of a monk), and against the consignment of slaves to the theatrical profession, which was often a school of corruption. The church also encouraged the emancipation of individual slaves and the redemption of captives. And its influence is to be seen in the legislation of the Christian emperors, which softened some of the harshest features that still marked the institution. There is not, indeed, a uniform advance in this legislation; there is even retrogression in some particulars under Constantine, as in his renewed permission to fathers to sell their children and to the finder of an exposed child to make it his slave—enactments which it is sometimes sought to excuse by the prevailing poverty of his period. But a stronger influence of Christianity appears in Theodosius, and this influence is at the highest in the legislation of Justinian. Its systematic effort is, in his own words, “pro libertate, quam et fovere et tueri Romanis legibus et praecipue nostro numini peculiare est.” Law still refused in general to recognize the marriages of slaves; but Justinian gave them a legal value after emancipation in establishing rights of succession. Unions between slaves and free women, or between a freeman and the female slave of another, continued to be forbidden, and were long punished in certain circumstances with atrocious severity. As witness, the slave was still subject to the question; as criminal, he was punished with greater rigour than the freeman. If he accused his master of a crime, unless the charge was of treason, he was burnt. But he could maintain a legal claim to his own liberty, not now merely through an adsertor, but in person. A female slave was still held incapable of the offence of adultery; but Justinian visited with death alike the rape of a slave or freedwoman and that of a free maiden. Already the master who killed his slave had been punished as for homicide, except in the case of his unintended death under correction; Constantine treated as homicide a number of specially-enumerated acts of cruelty. Even under Theodosius the combats of the amphitheatre were permitted, if not encouraged, by the state authorities; these sports were still expected from the candidates for public honours. Combats of men with beasts were longest continued; they had not ceased even in the early years of the reign of Justinian. A new process of manumission was now established, to be performed in the churches through the intervention of the ministers of religion; and it was provided that clerics could at any time by mere expression of will liberate their slaves. Slaves who were admitted to holy orders, or who entered a monastery, became freemen, under certain restrictions framed to prevent fraud or injustice. Justinian abolished the personal conditions which the legislation of Augustus had required to be satisfied by the master who emancipated and the slave who was manumitted, and removed the limitation of number. The liberated slave, whatever the process by which he had obtained his freedom, became at once a full citizen, his former master, however, retaining the right of patronage, the abolition of which would probably have discouraged emancipation.
The slavery of the working classes, justly described by Hume as the most important difference between the social life of antiquity and that of modern times, was not directly changed into the system of personal freedom. There was an intermediate stage which has not always been sufficiently discriminated from slavery, though the confusion of the two leads to endless misconceptions. We mean the régime of serfdom. In studying the origin of this transitional state of things, four principal considerations have to be kept in view. (1) As Gibbon observes, the substantial completion of the Roman system of conquest and incorporation reduced the supply of slaves by restricting the dealings in them to such trade as took place within the now fixed limits of the empire. It is true that, when the barbarian invasions began in the 3d century, many captives were made, who, when not enrolled in the army, were employed in agriculture or domestic service; but the regular importation was greatly and increasingly diminished, and the Romans were obliged to have recourse to “the milder but more tedious method of propagation.” The effect of this was to improve the condition of the slave by rendering his existence an object of greater value to his master. It tended, indeed, directly to the transformation of slavery into serfdom by making it the interest of each family to preserve indefinitely its own hereditary slaves, who could not be replaced except with difficulty and at great expense. The abolition of the external slave trade tended, in fact, to put an end to internal sales, and the slaves became attached to the households or lands of their masters. (2) The diminished supply of slaves further acted in the direction of the rehabilitation of free labour. A general movement of this kind is noticeable from the 2d century onwards. Freemen had always been to some extent employed in the public service— (a) as subordinate assistants to the magistrates and priests; the places of scribes, viatores, criers could be filled only by citizens; the apparitors attached to the new imperial administration were also free plebeians, with slaves in the lower ranks; but these apparitorships were usually held by freedmen. So also (b) public works were in the 2d century divided amongst corporations of free plebeians, with public slaves under them. In private service the superior posts were often filled by freedmen; the higher arts—as medicine, grammar, painting—were partly in the hands of freedmen and even of ingenui; the more successful actors and gladiators were often freedmen. In the factories or workshops kept by wealthy persons slave labour was mainly employed; but free artisans sometimes offered their services to these establishments or formed associations to compete with them. We have seen that free persons had all along been to some extent employed in the cultivation of land as hired labourers, and, as we shall presently find, also as tenants on the great estates. How all this operated we shall understand when we examine the remarkable organization of the state introduced by Diocletian and his successors. (3) This organization established in the Roman world a personal and hereditary fixity of professions and situations which was not very far removed from the caste system of the East. The purpose of this was doubtless to resist by a strong internal consolidation the shock of the invasions, to secure public order, to enforce industrious habits, and to guarantee the financial resources of the state. Personal independence was largely sacrificed, but those still more important ends were in a great measure attained. The all-pervading nature of this discipline will be understood from the following particulars. Members of the administrative service were absolutely bound to their employments; they could not choose their wives or marry their daughters out of the collegia to which they respectively belonged, and they transmitted their obligations to their children. If they abandoned their posts, they were sought for everywhere and forced to return. In municipalities, even the curiales, or members of the local senates, were bound to their places and their functions; there were other members of the municipal service who might supply a substitute on condition of resigning to him their lands, but this power was rarely used; they commonly remained in their posts; their families, too, were bound to remain; they were attached to the collegia or other bodies to which they belonged. The soldier, procured for the army by conscription, served as long as his age fitted him for his duties, and his sons were bound to similar service. The same sort of compulsion appears to have been exercised upon those belonging to, at least, such free industrial corporations as were recognized and regulated by the state. Every one was treated, in fact, as a servant of the state, and was bound to furnish labour or money, or both; and the nature of his labour was permanently fixed for him; he was, in the language of the law, “conditionis laqueis irretitus.” This general system, by diminishing the freeman’s mastery over himself and his power to determine his occupation, reduced the interval between him and the slave; and the latter on the one hand, the free domestic servant and workshop labourer on the other, both passed insensibly into the common condition of serfdom. (4) The corresponding change, in the case of the rural slaves, took place through their being merged in the order of coloni. The Roman colonus was originally a free person who took land on lease, contracting to pay to the proprietor either a fixed sum annually or (when a colonus partiarius) a certain proportion of the produce of the farm. Under the emperors of the 4th century the name designated a cultivator, who, though personally free, was attached to the soil, and transmitted his condition to his descendants; and this became the regular status of the great mass of Roman cultivators. In sanctioning this personal and hereditary fixity, the law probably only recognized a state of things which had previously existed, having been spontaneously brought about by the circumstances of society, and especially by the needs of agriculture. The class of coloni appears to have been composed partly of tenants by contract who had incurred large arrears of rent and were detained on the estates as debtors (obaerati), partly of foreign captives or immigrants who were settled in this condition on the land, and partly of small proprietors and other poor men who voluntarily adopted the status as an improvement in their position. They paid a fixed proportion of the produce (pars agraria) to the owner of the estate, and gave a determinate amount of labour {operse) on the portion of the domain which he kept in his own hands (mansus dominicus). The law for a long time took no notice of these customary tenures, and did not systematically constitute them until the 4th century. It was indeed the requirements of the fiscus and the conscription which impelled the imperial Government to regulate the system. The coloni were inscribed {adscripti) on the registers of the census as paying taxes to the state, for which the proprietor was responsible, reimbursing himself for the amount. In a constitution of Constantine (332 a.d.) we find the colonus recognized as permanently attached to the land. If he abandoned his holding he was brought back and punished; and any one who received him had not only to restore him but to pay a penalty. He could not marry out of the domain; if he took for wife a colona of another proprietor, she was restored to her original locality, and the offspring of the union were divided between the estates. The children of a colonus were fixed in the same status, and could not quit the property to which they belonged. They and their descendants were retained, in the words of a law of Theodosius, “quodam aeternitatis jure,” and by no process could be relieved from their obligations. By a law of Anastasius, at the end of the 5th century, a colonus who had voluntarily come into an estate was by a tenure of thirty years for ever attached to it. The master (dominus) could inflict on his coloni “moderate chastisement,” and could chain them if they attempted to escape, but they had a legal remedy against him for unjust demands or injury to them or theirs. In no case could the rent or the labour dues be increased. The colonus could possess property of his own, but could not alienate it without the consent of the master. Thus, whilst the members of the class were personally free, their condition had some incidents of a semi-servile character. They are actually designated by Theodosius, though the lax language of the codes must not be taken too literally, “servi terrae cui nati sunt.” And Salvian treats the proposition “coloni divitum fiunt” as equivalent to “vertuntur in servos.” This is indeed an exaggeration; a deduction must always be made from the phrases of the mediaeval Jeremiah; the colonatus was not an oppressive system; it afforded, on the contrary, real security against unreasonable demands and wanton disturbance, and it was a great advance on the system of cultivation by the familia rustica. But the point which it is important for our present purpose to observe is, that there was a certain approximation between the condition of the colonus and the slave which tended towards the fusion of both in a single class. To make this plain, we must go a little further into detail.
Besides the coloni there were on a great estate—and those of the 4th century were on a specially large scale— a number of praedial slaves, who worked collectively under overseers on the part of the property which the owner himself cultivated. But it was a common practice to settle certain of the slaves (and possibly also of the freedmen) on other portions of the estate, giving them small farms on conditions similar to those to which the coloni were subject. These slaves are, in fact, described by Ulpian as quasi coloni. They had their own households and were hence distinguished as casati. In law these slaves were at first absolutely at the disposal of their masters; they had no property in the strict sense of the word, and could be sold to another proprietor and separated from their families. But the landlord’s interest and the general tone of feeling alike modified practice even before the intervention of legislation; they were habitually continued in their holdings, and came to possess in fact a perpetual and hereditary enjoyment of them. By a law of Valentinian I. (377) the sale of these slaves was interdicted unless the land they occupied were at the same time sold. The legal distinction between the coloni and the slave tenants continued to exist after the invasions; but the practical difference was greatly attenuated. The colonus often occupied a servile mansus, and the slave a mansus originally appropriated to a colonus. Intermarriages of the two classes became frequent. Already at the end of the 7th century it does not appear that the distinction between them had any substantial existence. The servile tenures were, no less than the others, stable and hereditary; and the charges to be borne by the former were not necessarily the heavier.
Whilst giving their due weight to the social and economic circumstances which tended thus to merge the free labourer and colonus on the one hand and the slave on the other in a common class of serfs, we must never leave out of account the directly moral agencies which worked towards the same result by modifying slavery. Nor ought we to have in view only the influence of Christian doctrine and precept considered in themselves; we must regard them as constantly applied in daily life by an independent spiritual order, which was revered alike by the two classes whose relations it assisted in regulating, and whose general attitude towards slavery is sufficiently shown by the celebrated declaration of Gregory the Great.
A review of what has been said will make it plain that the Northern invasions had little to do with the transition from slavery to serfdom. Only two modes have been suggested in which they may possibly have accelerated the change. It is not likely that the newly established proprietors would understand, or respect in practice, nice distinctions between classes of cultivators; they would probably regard the coloni and slaves, now that their conditions were so much assimilated, as standing on the same basis. And, secondly, the Germans, if we may believe Tacitus, had in their original seats no menial slaves, whilst, on the other hand, they were familiar with the system of slaves settled on separate portions of a domain and paying a fixed share of the produce to its owner. There may be a certain value in these considerations. But, on the whole, it appears that, as in the case of the rise of the feudal system generally, so in the particular respect of the qualified personal freedom which accompanied it, the influence of the Northern nations was really of little account, and that both changes would have equally, though perhaps not so speedily, taken place if the invasions had never occurred.
Whilst ancient slavery was, as we have seen, a system fitted to endure under given social conditions, and had a definite political function to fulfil, serfdom, which succeeded when that function was exhausted, was a merely transitory condition, with no other destination than that of leading the working population up to a state of entire personal freedom. How the serf in cities and towns became a free labourer for hire can be easily conceived; he doubtless in many cases purchased his liberty out of his earnings, and in others it was not the master’s interest to retain his services at the cost of his maintenance. The emancipation of this entire class was favoured by the movement (not, however, to be confounded with it) which established free industrial communities and gave them municipal jurisdiction. But it is very difficult to trace the steps by which the rural serf was transmuted into a free tenant. “The time and manner,” says Adam Smith, “in which so important a revolution was brought about is one of the most obscure points in modern history.” Smith himself attributes the change to two causes—(1) the greater advantage to the proprietor derived from the exertions of the cultivator when he worked entirely for himself, and (2) the encouragement which sovereigns, jealous of the great lords, gave to the villeins (under which term Smith seems to comprehend the whole mixed class of non-free tenants) to encroach on their authority. To these economic and political reasons, though doubtless real and important, Smith appears to attribute too exclusive an efficacy, neglecting the moral and religious causes which conspired to the same result, especially the personal influence of the clergy, who were natural mediators between the serfs and the proprietors. The serfs were best treated on the ecclesiastical estates, and many on private properties were liberated “pro amore Dei” and “pro remedio animae.”
Let us examine more particularly the circumstances of the transition in France and in England.
M. Guérard has shown that from the conquest by Caesar to the abolition of feudalism there was a steady improvement in the condition of the class originally enslaved. He distinguishes three periods—one of slavery proper, lasting till the conquest of Gaul by the barbarians; the second, ending about the close of the reign of Charles the Bald (d. 877), in which slavery is replaced by an intermediate state which he calls by the indeterminate name of “servitude,” the rights of the servus being recognized, respected, and protected, if not yet in a sufficient degree by the civil laws, at least by those of the church and by social manners; and a third in which, under the developed regime of feudalism, serfdom proper is fully established and the serf-tenant has become simply a tributary under various appellations (homme de corps or de pôté, main mortable, taillable, serf, vilain). The three personal conditions here described coexisted to some extent in all these periods, one of them, however, greatly preponderating in each. Towards the end of the 9th century the serf-tenants were already proprietors of their holdings; under the third dynasty they were rather subjects than tenants, and the dues they paid were rather taxes than rents; they were, in short, vassals occupying the lowest round of the feudal ladder. Guérard enumerates as immediate causes which led to the liberation of serfs (besides the master’s voluntary gift or bequest) their flight,—with the prescription which arose after a certain interval off absence,—ordination, redemption by themselves or others, marriages with women of higher status, and the action of law in the case of certain wrongs inflicted by the master. The church co-operated to the same result, as might be shown by many instances. Thus St Benedict of Aniane (d. 821), the reformer of the monasteries in the Carolingian territories, received a number of donations of lands from the faithful; but, whilst accepting them for his religious establishments, he enfranchised the serfs who inhabited them. All the serfs, not merely in a village, bourg, or city, but in whole districts, were liberated by charters of sovereigns or lords. Such documents are most common in the 13th century. The general edicts of Louis X. (1315) and Philip V. (1318) are little more than recognitions of a fait accompli, and were dictated, at least in part, by financial motives. Some relics of serfdom continued to exist in local customs down to the Revolution, and were not abolished till the night of the 4th August 1789. But these survivals do not affect the truth of the proposition that the work of emancipation was essentially accomplished early in the 14th century.
Guérard has observed on the difficulty created by the ambiguity of the word servus in the mediaeval authorities. In the study of English serfdom, even eminent writers like Robertson, Hallam, and Kemble have obscured the subject by the use of the term slave, sometimes in its proper sense, sometimes in relation to the serf. Dr Stubbs has avoided this equivocal nomenclature, and by attending more to social fact than to the letter of the law has placed the history of the class in a clear light. The slaves of Anglo-Saxon times were “regarded as the stock of their owner; . . . their offences against a third person he must answer for, as for the mischief done by his cattle; . . . they had no credibility, no legal rights; wrongs done to them were regarded as wrongs done to their master.” Practice, indeed, was kinder to them than legal theory; as in the case of the Roman peculium, they were “in some unexplained way” allowed to keep their savings, and so to purchase their freedom; and “the spiritual law could enforce a penance on the master for ill-treating them.” There were laws of Ethelbert and Canute forbidding the sale of men to heathen masters, and the slave trade, the principal seat of which was Bristol, was put down by the preaching of St Wulfstan. The villein of Domesday Book is not a slave; he represents the Anglo-Saxon ceorl ; he is an irremovable cultivator, now regarded as customary tenant of a lord. The Norman knights probably confounded with the villanus the bordarii and other tenants who stood on a less favourable footing. Whilst the free ceorl became a villein, the servus (theow) disappeared altogether. The position which the class constituted by this fusion came to occupy was one “compatible with much personal comfort and some social ambition.” The villeins "were safe in the possession of their homes; they had a remedy against the violence of their masters; they could, if they chose to renounce their holdings and take refuge in a town, become members of the guild, and there, when unclaimed for a year and a day, obtain the full rights of freemen; they could obtain manumission by the intervention of the church, which always proclaimed the liberation of the villein to be a work of merit on the part of the master. . . . Under a fairly good lord, under a monastery or a college, the villein enjoyed immunities and security that might be envied by his superiors; he had a ready tribunal for his wrongs, a voice in the management of his village; he might with a little contrivance redeem his children and start them in a higher state of life.” Walter Map declares that in his time (12th century) the villeins were educating their ignoble offspring in the liberal arts. In the early part of the 14th century “it was by a mere legal form that the villeins were described as less than free.” In the reign of Richard II. it seems that “the legal theory of their status has become hardened and sharpened so as to warrant almost wanton oppression;” but social causes, on the other hand, have ameliorated their actual lot. It was not their normal condition that led to the insurrection of 1381, but the enforcement of (the Statute of Labourers and the attempt of the lords to reassert legal claims which were practically obsolete. Serfdom died out in England without any special legislation against it. It survived in exceptional instances, as in France; Hallam mentions as the latest deed of enfranchisement one of Elizabeth in 1574 in favour of the bondmen on some of her manors; and it appears that in Scotland the workers in coal and salt mines were in a state of serfdom until they were liberated by Acts of the 15th and 39th years of the reign of George III.
Essentially similar movements took place in the other countries of the West. In Italy “the 11th and 12th centuries,” says Hallam,
“saw the number of slaves” (by which word he means serfs) "begin to decrease; early in the 15th a writer quoted by Muratori speaks of them as no longer existing. . . . The greater part,” he adds, “of the peasants in some countries of Germany had acquired their liberty before the end of the 13th century; in other parts . . . they remained in a sort of villenage till the present age.” The most rigorous forms of serfdom (Leibeigenschaft) existed in those German districts which were once Wendish,—as Lusatia, Pomerania, and Mecklenburg,—and in Holstein. The last remains of the system in Germany were abolished in 1832 and 1848. In Castile the serfs were slowly converted into solariegos, who cultivated the land of the lord under obligations similar to those of the colonus. Alphonso X. (El Sabio) declared that the solariego could quit his holding when he wished, though he could not alienate it or demand anything for his improvements. Alphonso XI. (El Justiciero) decreed that no lord should take the solar (holding) from the tenant, nor from his sons or grandsons, so long as they paid the fixed dues. They thus became irremovable, and their tenures were hereditary.
By these gradual processes every form of servitude disappeared from the social order of western Europe, whilst at the same time was bequeathed to the modern world the inexorable problem, still but partially solved, of the definitive position of the classes whose origin is traceable to that condition.
But not very long after the disappearance of serfdom in the most advanced communities comes into sight the new system of colonial slavery, which, instead of being the spontaneous outgrowth of social necessities and subserving a temporary need of human development, was politically as well as morally a monstrous aberration, and never produced anything but evil.
In 1442, when the Portuguese under Prince Henry the Navigator were exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa, one of his officers, Antam Gonsalves, who had captured some Moors, was directed by the prince to carry them back to Africa. He received from the Moors in exchange for them ten blacks and a quantity of gold dust. This excited the cupidity of his fellow-countrymen; and they fitted out a large number of ships for the trade, and built several forts on the African coast. Many negroes were brought into Spain from these Portuguese settlements, and the colonial slave trade first appears in the form of the introduction into the newly-discovered western world of children or descendants of these negroes. When Ovando was sent out in 1502 as governor of Hispaniola, whilst regulations, destined to prove illusory, were made for the protection of the natives of the island, permission was given to carry to the colony negro slaves, born in Seville and other parts of Spain, who had been instructed in the Christian faith. It appears from a letter of Ovando in 1503 that there were at that time numbers of negroes in Hispaniola; he requested that no more might be permitted to be brought out. In 1510 and the following years King Ferdinand ordered a number of Africans to be sent to that colony for the working of the mines.
Before this time Columbus had proposed an exchange of his Carib prisoners as slaves against live stock to be furnished to Hispaniola by Spanish merchants. Infidels, he represented, would thus be converted, the royal treasury enriched by a duty on the slaves, and the colonists supplied with live stock free of expense. He actually sent home in the ships of Antonio Torres, in 1494, above 500 Indian prisoners taken in wars with the caciques, who, he suggested, might be sold as slaves at Seville. But, after a royal order had been issued for their sale, Queen Isabella, interested by what she had heard of the gentle and hospitable character of the natives and of their docility, procured a letter to be written to Bishop Fonseca, the superintendent of Indian affairs, suspending the order until inquiry should be made into the causes for which they had been made prisoners, and into the lawfulness of their sale. Theologians differed on the latter question, and Isabella directed that these Indians should be sent back to their native country, and that a policy of conciliation should be followed there instead of one of severity.
Bartolomé de las Casas, the celebrated bishop of Chiapa, accompanied Ovando to Hispaniola, and was a witness of the cruelties from which the Indians suffered under his administration. He came to Spain in 1517 to obtain measures in their favour, and he then made the suggestion to Charles that each Spanish resident in Hispaniola should have licence to import a dozen negro slaves. Las Casas, in his Historia de las Indias (lib. iii. cap. 101), frankly confesses the grave error into which he thus fell. “This advice that licence should be given to bring negro slaves to these lands the clerigo Casas first gave, not considering the injustice with which the Portuguese take them and make them slaves; which advice, after he had apprehended the nature of the thing, he would not have given for all he had in the world.” Other good men appear to have given similar advice about the same time, and, as has been shown, the practice was not absolutely new; indeed the young king had in 1516, whilst still in Flanders, granted licences to his courtiers for the importation of negroes into the colonies, though Ximenes, as regent of Castile, by a decree of the same year forbade the practice. The suggestion of Las Casas was no doubt made on the ground that the negroes could, better than the Indians, bear the labour in the mines, which was rapidly exhausting the numbers of the latter. He has sometimes on this plea been exonerated from all censure; but, as we have seen, he did not exculpate himself; and, though entitled to honour for the zeal and perseverance which he showed on behalf of the natives of the New World, he must in justice bear the blame due from posterity for his violation or neglect of moral principle. His advice was unfortunately adopted. “Charles,” says Robertson, “granted a patent to one of his Flemish favourites, containing an exclusive right” of supplying 4000 negroes annually to Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Porto Rico. “The favourite sold his patent to some Genoese merchants for 25,000 ducats”; these merchants obtained the slaves from the Portuguese; and thus was first brought into a systematic form that odious “commerce between Africa and America which has since been carried on to such an amazing extent,” the action of the Spaniards being “imitated by all the nations of Europe who have acquired territories in the warmer climates of the New World.”
The first Englishman who engaged in the hateful traffic was Captain John Hawkins ( q.v.). The English slave traders were at first altogether occupied in supplying the Spanish settlements. Indeed the reign of Elizabeth passed without any English colony having been permanently established in America. But in 1620 a Dutch ship from the coast of Guinea visited Jamestown in Virginia, and sold a part of her cargo of negroes to the tobacco-planters. This was the first beginning of slavery in British America; the number of negroes was afterwards continually increased— though apparently at first slowly—by importation, and the field-labour was more and more performed by servile hands, so that in 1790 the State of Virginia, which is only a small part of the original colony so named, contained 200,000 negroes.
The African trade of England was long in the hands of exclusive companies; but by an Act of the first year of William and Mary it became free and open to all subjects of the crown. The African Company, however, continued to exist, and obtained from time to time large parliamentary grants. By the treaty of Utrecht the asiento, or contract for supplying the Spanish colonies with 4800
negroes annually, which had previously passed from the Dutch to the French, was transferred to Great Britain; an English company was to enjoy the monopoly for a period of thirty years from 1st May 1713. But the contract came to an end in 1739, when the complaints of the English merchants on one side and of the Spanish officials on the other rose to such a height that Philip V. declared his determination to revoke the asiento, and Sir Robert Walpole was forced by popular feeling into war with Spain. Between 1680 and 1700 about 140,000 negroes were exported by the African Company, and 160,000 more by private adventurers, making a total of 300,000. Between 1700 and the end of 1786 as many as 610,000 were transported to Jamaica alone, which had been an English possession since 1655. Bryan Edwards estimated the total import into all the British colonies of America and the West Indies from 1680 to 1786 at 2,130,000, being an annual average of 20,095. But this, he admits, is much less than was in his time commonly supposed. The British slave trade reached its utmost extension shortly before the War of American Independence. It was then carried on principally from Liverpool, but also from London, Bristol, and Lancaster; the entire number of slave ships sailing from those ports was 192, and in them space was provided for the transport of 47,146 negroes. During the war the number decreased, but on its termination the trade immediately revived. When Edwards wrote (1791), the number of European factories on the coasts of Africa was 40; of these 14 were English, 3 French, 15 Dutch, 4 Portuguese, and 4 Danish. As correct a notion as can be obtained of the numbers annually exported from the continent about the year 1790 by traders of the several European countries engaged in the traffic is supplied by the following statement :— “By the British, 38,000; by the French, 20,000; by the Dutch, 4000; by the Danes, 2000; by the Portuguese, 10,000; total 74,000.” Thus more than half the trade was in British hands. “At present,” said Robertson, writing in 1791, “the number of negro slaves in the settlements of Great Britain and France in the West Indies exceeds a million; and, as the establishment of servitude has been found, both in ancient and modern times, extremely unfavourable to population, it requires an annual importation of at least 58,000 to keep up the stock.” The slaves in the Spanish dominions and in North America, he thought, probably amounted to an additional million.
The hunting and stealing of human beings to make them slaves, which were already practised in Africa for the supply of the central states of that continent,· as well as of the markets of northern Africa, Turkey, and other Mohammedan countries, were greatly aggravated by the demand of the European colonies. The native chiefs engaged in forays, sometimes even on their own subjects, for the purpose of procuring slaves to be exchanged for Western commodities. They often set fire to a village by night and captured the inhabitants when trying to escape. Thus all that was shocking in the barbarism of Africa was multiplied and intensified by this foreign stimulation. To the miseries thus produced, and to those suffered by the captives in their removal to the coast were added the horrors of the middle passage. Exclusive of the slaves who died before they sailed from Africa, 12 ½ per cent. were lost during their passage to the West Indies; at Jamaica 4 ½ per cent. died whilst in the harbours or before the sale, and one-third more in the “seasoning.” Thus, out of every lot of 100 shipped from Africa 17 died in about 9 weeks, and not more than 50 lived to be effective labourers in the islands. The circumstances of their subsequent life on the plantations were not favourable to the increase of their numbers. In Jamaica there were in 1690 40,000; from that year till 1820 there were imported 800,000; yet at the latter date there were only 340,000 in the island. One cause which prevented the natural increase of population was the inequality in the numbers of the sexes; in Jamaica alone there was in 1789 an excess of 30,000 males.
It may be truly said that from the latter part of the 17th century, when the nature of the slave trade began to be understood by the public, all that was best in England was adverse to it. Among those who denounced it— besides some whose names are now little known, but are recorded with the honour they deserve in the pages of Clarkson—-were Baxter, Sir Richard Steele (in Inkle and Yarico), the poets Southern (in Oroonoko), Pope, Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Savage, and above all Cowper (see his Charity, and Task, bk. 2), Thomas Day (author of Sandford and Merton), Sterne, Warburton, Hutcheson, Beattie, John Wesley, Whitfield, Adam Smith, Millar, Robertson, Dr Johnson, Paley, Gregory, Gilbert Wakefield, Bishop Porteus, Dean Tucker. The question of the legal existence of slavery in Great Britain and Ireland was raised in consequence of an opinion given in 1729 by York and Talbot, attorney-general and solicitor-general at the time, to the effect that a slave by coming into those countries from the West Indies did not become free, and might be compelled by his master to return to the plantations. ChiefJustice Holt had expressed a contrary opinion; and the matter was brought to a final issue by Mr Granville Sharp in the case of the negro Somerset. It was decided by Lord Mansfield, in the name of the whole bench, on June 22d 1772, that as soon as a slave set his foot on the soil of the British islands he became free. In 1776 it was moved in the House of Commons by David Hartley, son of the author of Observations on Man, that “the slave trade was contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men”; but this motion—the first which was made on the subject—failed; public opinion on the question was far from being yet fully ripe.
The first persons in England who took united practical action against the slave trade were the Quakers, following the expression of sentiment which had emanated so early as 1671 from their founder George Fox. In 1727 they declared it to be “not a commendable or allowed” practice; in 1761 they excluded from their Society all who should be found concerned in it, and issued appeals to their members and the public against the system. In 1783 there was formed amongst them an association “for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West Indies, and for the discouragement of the slave trade on the coast of Africa.” This was the first society established in England for the purpose. The Quakers in America had taken action on the subject still earlier than those in England. The Pennsylvanian Quakers advised their members against the trade in 1696; in 1754 they issued to their brethren a strong dissuasive against encouraging it in any manner; in 1774 all persons concerned in the traffic, and in 1776 all slave holders who would not emancipate their slaves, were excluded from membership. The Quakers in the other American provinces followed the lead of their brethren in Pennsylvania. The individuals amongst the American Quakers who laboured most earnestly and indefatigably on behalf of the Africans were John Woolman (1720-1773) and Anthony Benezet (1713-1784), the latter a son of a French Huguenot driven from France by the revocation of the edict of Nantes. The former confined his efforts chiefly to America and indeed to his coreligionists there; the latter sought, and not without a large measure of success, to found a universal propaganda in favour of abolition. A Pennsylvanian society was formed in 1774 by James Pemberton and Dr Benjamin Rush, and in 1787 (after the war) was reconstructed on an enlarged basis under the presidency of Franklin. Other similar associations were founded about the same time in different parts of the United States. The next important movement took place in England. Dr Peckard, vice-chancellor of the university of Cambridge, who entertained strong convictions against the slave trade, proposed in 1785 as subject for a Latin prize dissertation the question, “An liceat invitos in servitutem dare.” Thomas Clarkson resolved to compete for the prize. Reading Anthony Benezet’s Historical Account of Guinea and other works in the course of his study of the subject, he became so powerfully impressed with a sense of the vile and atrocious nature of the traffic that he ere long determined to devote his life to the work of its abolition, a resolution which he nobly kept. His essay, which obtained the first prize, was translated into English in an expanded form by its author, and published in 1786 with the title Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. In the process of its publication he was brought into contact with several persons already deeply interested in the question; amongst others with Granville Sharp, William Dillwyn (an American by birth, who had known Benezet), and the Rev. James Ramsay, who had lived nineteen years in St Christopher, and had published an Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of the African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. The distribution of Clarkson’s book led to his forming connexions with many persons of influence, and especially with William Wilberforce, who, having already occupied himself with the subject, went fully into the evidence bearing on it which Clarkson laid before him, and, as the result of his inquiries, undertook the parliamentary conduct of the movement which was now decisively inaugurated. A committee was formed on 22d May 1787 for the abolition of the slave trade, under the presidency of Granville Sharp, which after twenty years of labour succeeded, with the help of eminent public men, in effecting the object of its foundation, and thus removing a grave blot on the character of the British nation, and mitigating one of the greatest evils that ever afflicted humanity. It is unquestionable that the principal motive power which originated and sustained their efforts was Christian principle and feeling. The most earnest and unremitting exertions were made by the persons so associated in investigating facts and collecting evidence, in forming branch committees and procuring petitions, in the instruction of the public and in the information and support of those who pleaded the cause in parliament. To the original members were afterwards added several remarkable persons, amongst whom were Josiah Wedgwood, Bennet Langton (Dr Johnson’s friend), and, later, Zachary Macaulay, Henry Brougham, and James Stephen.
In consequence of the numerous petitions presented to parliament, a committee of privy council was appointed by the crown in 1788 to inquire concerning the slave trade; and Mr Pitt moved that the House of Commons should early in the next session take the subject into consideration. Wilberforce’s first motion for a committee of the whole House upon the question was made on 19th March 1789, and this committee proceeded to business on 12th May of the same year. After an admirable speech, Wilberforce laid on the table twelve resolutions which were intended as the basis of a future motion for the abolition of the trade. The discussion of these was postponed to the next session, and in 1790-91 evidence was taken upon them. At length, on 18th April of the latter year, a motion was made for the introduction of a bill to prevent the further importation of slaves into the British colonies in the West Indies. Opinion had been prejudiced by the insurrections in St Domingo and Martinique, and in the British island of Dominica; and the motion was defeated by 163 votes against 88. Legislative sanction was, however, given to the establishment of the Sierra Leone Company, for the colonization of a district on the west coast of Africa and the discouragement of the slave trade there. It was hoped at the time that that place would become the centre from which the civilization of Africa would proceed; but this expectation was not fulfilled. On 2d April 1792 Wilberforce again moved that the trade ought to be abolished; an amendment in favour of gradual abolition was carried, and it was finally resolved that the trade should cease on 1st January 1796. When a similar motion was brought forward in the Lords the consideration of it was postponed to the following year, in order to give time for the examination of witnesses by a committee of the House. A bill in the Commons in the following year to abolish that part of the trade by which British merchants supplied foreign settlements with slaves was lost on the third reading; it was renewed in the Commons in 1794 and carried there, but defeated in the Lords. Then followed several years during which efforts were made by the abolitionists in parliament with little success. But in 1806, Lord Grenville and Fox having come into power, a bill was passed in both Houses to put an end to the British slave trade for foreign supply, and to forbid the importation of slaves into the colonies won by the British arms in the course of the war. On 10th June of the same year Fox brought forward a resolution “that effectual measures should be taken for the abolition of the African slave trade in such a manner and at such a period as should be deemed advisable,” which was carried by a large majority. A similar resolution was successful in the House of Lords. A bill was then passed through both Houses forbidding the employment of any new vessel in the trade. Finally, in 1807, a bill was presented by Lord Grenville in the House of Lords providing for the abolition of the trade, was passed by a large majority, was then sent to the Commons (where it was moved by Lord Howick), was there amended and passed, and received the royal assent on 25th March. The bill enacted that no vessel should clear out for slaves from any port within the British dominions after 1st May 1807, and that no slave should be landed in the colonies after 1st March 1808.
In 1807 the African Institution was formed, with the primary objects of keeping a vigilant watch on the slave traders and procuring, if possible, the abolition of the slave trade by the other European nations. It was also to be made an instrument for promoting the instruction of the negro races and diffusing information respecting the agricultural and commercial capabilities of the African continent.
The Act of 1807 was habitually violated, as the traders knew that, if one voyage in three was successful, they were abundantly remunerated for their losses. This state of things, it was plain, must continue as long as the trade was only a contraband commerce, involving merely pecuniary penalties. Accordingly, in 1811, Brougham carried through parliament a bill declaring the traffic to be a felony punishable with transportation. Some years later another Act was passed, making it a capital offence; but this was afterwards repealed. The law of 1811 proved effectual, and brought the slave trade to an end so far as the British dominions were concerned. Mauritius, indeed, continued it for a time. That island, which had been ceded by France in 1810, three years after the abolition, had special facilities for escaping observation in consequence of the proximity of the African coast; but it was soon obliged to conform.
The abolition of the French slave trade was preceded by stormy struggles and by many deplorable excesses. The western part of St Domingo, nominally belonging to Spain, had been occupied by buccaneers, who were recognized and supported by the French Government, and had been ceded to France at the peace of Ryswick in 1697. So vast was the annual importation of enslaved negroes into this colony before 1791 that the ratio of the blacks to the whites was as 16 to 1. In that year there were in French St Domingo 480,000 blacks, 24,000 mulattoes, and only 30,000 whites. The French law for the regulation of slavery in the plantations, known as the Code Noir (framed under Louis XIV. in 1685), was humane in its spirit; but we are informed that its provisions were habitually disregarded by the planters, whilst the free mulattoes laboured under serious grievances and were exposed to irritating indignities. A “Société des Amis des Noirs” was formed in Paris in 1788 for the abolition, not only of the slave trade, but of slavery itself. The president was Condorcet, and amongst the members were the Duc de la Rochefoucault, the Abbé Gregoire, Brissot, Clavière, Pétion, and La Fayette; Mirabeau was an active sympathizer. The great motor of the parallel effort in England was the Christian spirit; in France it was the enthusiasm of humanity which was associated with the revolutionary movement. There were in 1789 a number of mulattoes in Paris, who had come from St Domingo to assert the rights of the people of colour in that colony before the national assembly. The Declaration of the Rights of Man in August 1789 seemed to meet their claims, but in March 1790 the assembly, alarmed by rumours of the discontent and disaffection of the planters in St Domingo, passed a resolution that it had not been intended to comprehend the internal government of the colonies in the constitution framed for the mother country, and added that the assembly would not cause any innovation to be made, directly or indirectly, in any system of commerce in which the colonies were already concerned,' —a declaration which could only be interpreted as sanctioning the continuance of the slave trade. Vincent Ogé, one of the mulatto delegates in Paris, disgusted at the overthrow of the hopes of his race, returned to St Domingo, and on landing in October
1790 addressed a letter to the governor announcing his intention of taking up arms on behalf of the mulattoes if their wrongs were not redressed. He rose accordingly with a few followers, but was soon defeated and forced to take refuge in the Spanish part of the island. He was afterwards surrendered, tried, and sentenced to be broken on the wheel. When the news of this reached Paris, it created a strong feeling against the planters; and on the motion of the Abbé Gregoire it was resolved by the assembly on 15th May
1791 “that the people of colour resident in the French colonies, born of free parents, were entitled to, as of right, and should be allowed, the enjoyment of all the privileges of French citizens, and among others those of being eligible to seats both in the parochial and colonial assemblies.” On the 23d August a rebellion of the negroes broke out in the northern province of St Domingo, and soon extended to the western province, where the mulattoes and blacks combined. Many enormities were committed by the insurgents, and were avenged with scarcely inferior barbarity. The French assembly, alarmed by these scenes, and fearing the loss of the colony, repealed on 24th September the decree of the preceding May. This lamentable vacillation put an end to all hope of a reconciliation of parties in the island. Civil commissioners sent out from France quarrelled with the governor and called the revolted negroes to their assistance. The white inhabitants of Cape François were massacred and the city in great part destroyed by fire. The planters now offered their allegiance to Great Britain; and an English force landed in the colony. But it was insufficient to encounter the hostility of the republican troops and the revolted negroes and mulattoes; it suffered dreadfully from disease, and was obliged to evacuate the island in 1798. On the departure of the British the government remained in the hands of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the noblest type ever produced by the African race. Slavery had disappeared; the blacks were employed as hired servants, receiving for their remuneration the third part of the crops they raised; and the population was rapidly rising in civilization and comfort. The whole island was now French, the Spanish portion having been ceded by the treaty of Basel. The wish of Toussaint was that St Domingo should enjoy a practical independence whilst recognizing the sovereignty and exclusive commercial rights of France. Of the violent and treacherous conduct of Bonaparte towards the island and its eminent chief we cannot here give an account; the final issue was that the blacks drove from their soil the forces sent to subdue them, and founded a constitution of their own, which was more than once modified. There can be no doubt that the Government of the Restoration, in seeking to obtain possession of the island, had the intention of re-establishing slavery, and even of reopening the slave trade for the purpose of recruiting the diminished population. But Bonaparte abolished that trade during the Hundred Days, though he also failed to win back the people of St Domingo, or, as it was now called by its original name, Hayti, to obedience. The Bourbons, when again restored, could not reintroduce the slave trade; the notion of conquering the island had to be given up; and its independence was formally recognized in 1825. Thus France lost her most important colonial possession, which had yielded produce to an amount almost as great as that of all the rest of the West Indies; and the negro race obtained its first and hitherto its only independent settlement outside the African continent.
England had not been the first European power to abolish the slave trade; that honour belongs to Denmark; a royal order was issued 16th May 1792 that the traffic should cease in the Danish possessions from the end of 1802. The United States had in 1794 forbidden any participation by American subjects in the slave trade to foreign countries; they now prohibited the importation of slaves from Africa into their own dominion. This Act was passed 2d March 1807; it did not, however, come into force till 1st January 1808. At the congress of Vienna (opened November 1, 1814) the principle was acknowledged that the slave trade should be abolished as soon as possible; but the determination of the limit of time was reserved for separate negotiation between the powers. It had been provided in a treaty between France and Great Britain, May 30, 1814, that no foreigner should in future introduce slaves into the French colonies, and that the trade should be absolutely interdicted to the French themselves after June 1, 1819. This postponement of abolition was dictated by the wish to introduce a fresh stock of slaves into Hayti, if that island should be recovered. Bonaparte, as we have seen, abolished the French slave trade during his brief restoration, and this abolition was confirmed at the second peace of Paris, November 20, 1815, but it was not effectually carried out by French legislation until March 1818. In January 1815 Portuguese subjects were prohibited from prosecuting the trade north of the equator, and the term after which the traffic should be everywhere unlawful was fixed to end on 21st January 1823, but was afterwards extended to February 1830; England paid £300,000 as a compensation to the Portuguese. A royal decree was issued on 10th December 1836 forbidding the export of slaves from any Portuguese possession. But this decree was often violated. It was agreed that the Spanish slave trade should come to an end in 1820, England paying to Spain an indemnification of £400,000. The Dutch trade was closed in 1814; the Swedish had been abolished in 1813. By the peace of Ghent, December 1814, the United States and England mutually bound themselves to do all in their power to extinguish the traffic. It was at once prohibited in several of the South American states when they acquired independence, as in La Plata, Venezuela, and Chili. In 1831 and 1833 Great Britain entered into an arrangement with France for a mutual right of search within certain seas, to which most of the other powers acceded; and by the Ashburton treaty (1842) with the United States provision was made for the joint maintenance of squadrons on the west coast of Africa. By all these measures the slave trade, so far as it was carried on under the flags of European nations or for the supply of their colonies, ceased to exist.
Meantime another and more radical reform had been in preparation and was already in progress, namely, the abolition of slavery itself in the foreign possessions of the several states of Europe. When the English slave trade had been closed, it was found that the evils of the traffic, as still continued by several other nations, were greatly aggravated. In consequence of the activity of the British cruisers the traders made great efforts to carry as many slaves as possible in every voyage, and practised atrocities to get rid of the slaves when capture was imminent. It was, besides, the interest of the cruisers, who shared the price of the captured slave-ship, rather to allow the slaves to be taken on board than to prevent their being shipped at all. Thrice as great a number of negroes as before, it was said, was exported from Africa, and two-thirds of these were murdered on the high seas. It was found also that the abolition of the British slave trade did not lead to an improved treatment of the negroes in the West Indies. The slaves were overworked now that fresh supplies were stopped, and their numbers rapidly decreased. In 1807 there were in the West Indies 800,000; in 1830 they were reduced to 700,000. It became more and more evident that the root of the evil could be reached only by abolishing slavery altogether. At the same time, by the discussions which had for years gone on throughout English society on the subject of the slave trade, men’s consciences had been awakened to question the lawfulness of the whole system of things out of which that trade had taken its rise.
An appeal was made by Wilberforce in 1821 to Thomas Fowell Buxton to undertake the conduct of this new question in parliament. An anti-slavery society was established in 1823, the principal members of which, besides Wilberforce and Buxton, were Zachary Macaulay, Dr Lushington, and Lord Suffield. Buxton moved on 5th May of the same year that the House should take into consideration the state of slavery in the British colonies. The object he and his associates had then in view was gradual abolition by establishing something like a system of serfdom for existing slaves, and passing at the same time a measure emancipating all their children born after a certain day. Canning carried against Buxton and his friends a motion to the effect that the desired ameliorations in the condition and treatment of the slaves should be recommended by the home Government to the colonial legislatures, and enforced only in case of their resistance, direct action being taken in the single instance of Trinidad, which, being a crown colony, had no legislature of its own. A well-conceived series of measures of reform was accordingly proposed to the colonial authorities. Thereupon a general outcry was raised by the planters at the acquiescence of the Government in the principles of the anti-slavery party. A vain attempt being made in Demerara to conceal from the knowledge of the slaves the arrival of the order in council, they became impressed with the idea that they had been set free, and accordingly refused to work, and, compulsion being resorted to, offered resistance. Martial law was proclaimed; the disturbances were repressed with great severity; and the treatment of the missionary Smith, which was taken up and handled with great ability by Brougham, awakened strong feeling in England against the planters. The question, however, made little progress in parliament for some years, though Buxton, William Smith, Lushington, Brougham, Mackintosh, Butterworth, and Denman, with the aid of Z. Macaulay, James Stephen, and others, continued the struggle, only suspending it during a period allowed to the local legislatures for carrying into effect the measures expected from them. In 1828 the free people of colour in the colonies were placed on a footing of legal equality with their fellow-citizens. In 1830 the public began to be aroused to a serious prosecution of the main issue. It was becoming plain that the planters would take no steps tending to the future liberation of the slaves, and the leaders of the movement determined to urge the entire abolition of slavery at the earliest practicable period. The Government continued to hesitate and to press for mitigations of the existing system. At length in 1833 the ministry of Earl Grey took the question in hand and carried the abolition with little difficulty, the measure passing the House of Commons on 7th August 1833 and receiving the Royal assent 28th of the same month. A sum of 20 millions sterling was voted as compensation to the planters. A system of apprenticeship for seven years was established as a transitional preparation for liberty. The slaves were bound to work for their masters during this period for three-fourths of the day, and were to be liable to corporal punishment if they did not give the due amount of labour. The master was, in return, to supply them with food and clothing. All children under six years of age were to be at once free, and provision was to be made for their religious and moral instruction. Many thought the postponement of emancipation unwise. Immediate liberation was carried out in Antigua, and public tranquillity was so far from being disturbed there that the Christmas of 1833 was the first for twenty years during which martial law was not proclaimed in order to preserve the peace. Notwithstanding protracted and strenuous opposition on the part of the Government, the House of Commons passed a resolution against the continuance of the transitional system. When this was done the local legislatures saw that the slaves would no longer work for the masters; they accordingly cut off two years of the indentured apprenticeship, and gave freedom to the slaves in August 1838 instead of 1840.
The example of Great Britain was gradually followed by the other European states, and some American ones had already taken action of the same kind. The immediate emancipation of the slaves in the French colonies was decreed by the Provisional Government of 1848. In 1858 it was enacted that every slave belonging to a Portuguese subject should be free in twenty years from that date, a system of tutelage being established in the meantime. This law came into operation on 29th April 1878, and the status of slavery was thenceforth illegal throughout the Portuguese possessions. The Dutch emancipated their slaves in 1863. Several of the Spanish American states, on declaring their independence, had adopted measures for the discontinuance of slavery within their limits. It was abolished by a decree of the Mexican republic on 15th September 1829. The Government of Buenos Ayres enacted that all children born to slaves after 31st January 1813 should be free; and in Colombia it was provided that those born after 16th July 1821 should be liberated on attaining their eighteenth year.
Three of the most important slave systems still remained in which no steps towards emancipation had been taken—those of the Southern United States, of Cuba, and of Brazil.
Slavery was far from being approved in principle by the most eminent of the fathers of the American Union. Washington in his will provided for the emancipation of his own slaves; he said to Jefferson that it was “among his first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in his country might be abolished by law,’ and again he wrote that to this subject his own suffrage should never be wanting. John Adams declared his abhorrence of the practice of slaveholding, and said that “every measure of prudence ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States.” Franklin’s opinions we have already indicated; and Madison, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry all reprobated the principle of the system. Jefferson declared that in the presence of the institution “he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just.” The last-named statesman, at the first continental congress after the evacuation by the British forces, proposed a draft ordinance (1st March 1784) for the government of the territory—including the present Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi— ceded already or to be ceded by individual States to the United States; and it was an article of this ordinance that “after the year 1800 there should be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in punishment of crime.” This proviso, however, was lost. At the convention of Philadelphia in 1787, where the constitution was settled, the sentiments of the framers were against slavery; but South Carolina and Georgia insisted on its recognition as a condition of their joining the Union, and even an engagement for the mutual rendition of fugitive slaves was embodied in the federal pact. The words “slave” and “slavery” were, however, excluded from the constitution, “because,” as Madison says, “they did not choose to admit the right of property in man” in direct terms; and it was at the same time provided that Congress might interdict the foreign slave trade after the expiration of twenty years. It must not be forgotten that either before or soon after the formation of the Union the Northern States—beginning with Vermont in 1777, and ending with New Jersey in 1804—either abolished slavery or adopted measures to effect its gradual abolition within their boundaries. But the principal operation of (at least) the latter change was simply to transfer Northern slaves to Southern markets.
We cannot follow in detail the several steps by which the slave power for a long time persistently increased its influence in the Union. The acquisition of Louisiana— including the State so named, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas—(1803), though not made in its interest, the Missouri compromise (1820), the annexation of Texas (1845), the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), the Kansas-Nebraska bill (1854), the Dred Scott decision (1856), the attempts to acquire Cuba (1854) and to reopen the foreign slave trade (1859-60), were the principal steps—only some of them successful—in its career of aggression. They roused a determined spirit of opposition, founded on deep-seated convictions. The pioneer of the more recent abolitionist movement was Benjamin Lundy (1789-1839). He was followed by William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), Elijah P. Lovejoy (1802-1837)—a martyr, if ever there was one—Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, John Brown (b. 1800, hanged 1859), all of whom were in their several ways leading apostles or promoters of the cause. The best intellect of America outside the region of practical politics has been on the anti-slavery side. William E. Channing, R. W. Emerson, the poets Bryant, Longfellow, pre-eminently Whittier, and more recently Whitman, have spoken on this theme with no uncertain sound. The South, and its partisans in the North, made desperate efforts to prevent the free expression of opinion respecting the institution, and even the Christian churches in the slave States used their influence in favour of the maintenance of slavery. But in spite of every such effort opinion steadily grew. Public sentiment in the North was deeply stirred by the Uncle Tom's Cabin of Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852), which, as Senior said, under the disguise of a novel was really a pamphlet against the Fugitive Slave Law. It gradually became apparent that the question could not be settled without an armed conflict. The designation of Abraham Lincoln as president in November 1860 was the signal for the rising of the South. The North at first took arms simply to maintain the Union; but the far-sighted politicians from the first, and soon the whole nation, saw that the real issue was the continued existence or the total abolition of slavery. See United States.
The war was closed by the surrender at Appomattox (9th April 1865), but already in 1862 slavery in the Territories had been abolished by Congress; on 22d of September of the same year Lincoln had issued his proclamation of freedom to the slaves; and in 1864 a constitutional amendment had been passed abolishing and for ever prohibiting slavery throughout the United States.
The Spanish slave code, promulgated in 1789, is admitted on all hands to have been very humane in its character; and, in consequence of this, after Trinidad had become an English possession, the anti-slavery party resisted—and successfully—the attempt of the planters (1811) to have the Spanish law in that island replaced by the British. But, notwithstanding this mildness of the code, so habitually and glaringly were its provisions violated in the colonies of Spain, that Dr R. R. Madden, who had personal knowledge of the affairs of Cuba, declared in 1840 that “slavery in Cuba was more destructive to human life, more pernicious to society, degrading to the slave and debasing to the master, more fatal to health and happiness, than in any other slaveholding country on the face of the habitable globe.” “It is in Cuba at this day,” wrote Cairnes in 1862, “. . . that we see in the servile class the coarsest fare, the most exhausting and unremitting toil, and even the absolute destruction of a portion of its numbers every year by the slow torture of overwork and insufficient sleep and rest.” The slave population of the island was estimated in 1792 at 84,000; in 1817 at 179,000; in 1827 at 286,000; and in 1843 at 436,000. An Act was passed by the Spanish legislature in 1870, providing that every slave who had then passed, or should thereafter pass, the age of sixty should be at once free, and that all yet unborn children of slaves should also be free. The latter, however, were to be maintained at the expense of the proprietors up to their eighteenth year, and during that time to be kept, as apprentices, to such work as was suitable for their age. This is known as the Moret Law, having been carried through the house of representatives by Señor Moret y Prendergast, then minister for the colonies. By the census of 1867 there was in Cuba a total population of 1,370,211 persons, of whom 764,750 were whites and 605,461 black or coloured; and of the latter number 225,938 were free and 379,523 were slaves. In 1873 the Cubans roughly estimated the population at 1,500,000,—of whom 500,000, or one-third, were slaves. Mr Crowe, consul-general in the island, has lately (1885) stated that “the institution is rapidly dying,—that in a year, or at most two, slavery, even in its present mild form, will be extinct.”
There was a convention between Great Britain and Brazil in 1826 for the abolition of the slave trade, but it was habitually violated in spite of the English cruisers. In 1830 the traffic was declared piracy by the emperor of Brazil. England asserted by the Aberdeen Act (1845) the right of seizing suspected craft in Brazilian waters. Yet by the connivance of the local administrative authorities 54,000 Africans continued to be annually imported. In 1850 the trade is said to have been decisively put down. The planters and mine proprietors cried out against this as a national calamity. The closing of the traffic made the labour of the slaves more severe, and led to the employment on the plantations of many who before had been engaged in domestic work; but the slavery of Brazil has always been lighter than that of the United States. On 28th September 1871 the Brazilian chambers decreed that slavery should be abolished throughout the empire. Though existing slaves were to remain slaves still, with the exception of those possessed by the Government, who were liberated by the Act, facilities for emancipation were given; and it was provided that all children born of female slaves after the day on which the law passed should be free. They were, however, bound to serve the owners of their mothers for a term of 21 years. A clause was inserted to the effect that a certain sum should be annually set aside from fines to aid each province in emancipating slaves by purchase. Seven years before the passing of this Act the emperor, whose influence has always been exerted in favour of freedom, had liberated his private slaves, and many Brazilians after 1871 followed his example. According to the census of 1835 there were then in Brazil 2,100,000 slaves. It was estimated that at the beginning of 1875 there were not more than 1,476,567. But in 1884 they are spoken of as 3,000,000 in number. A gradual separation has been for some time taking place between the parts of the country in which slave labour is used and the free-labour regions. Slavery is being concentrated in the districts between Maranhão and São Paulo. In 1880 the deputy Joachim Nabuco, leader of the antislavery movement, obtained leave to introduce a bill for a more rapid liberation of slaves than was attainable under the law of 1871, and for the final extinction of slavery in Brazil by 1st January 1890. The Government, however, refused to sanction the further progress of the bill; but the question has since become again of present political interest, being the principal subject of discussion in the parliament which opened 1st March 1885. A bill has been passed, known as the Saraiva Law, on which we cannot yet form a definitive judgment, but which is understood to have disappointed the expectations of the abolitionists. It is said to provide exorbitant compensation for the slave-owners; and, although slaves over 60 years of age are to obtain their freedom, it appears that all slaves, on being set free, as well as the indentured children of slaves, are to remain three years longer with their masters at very low wages, the planters thus practically receiving an additional indemnity.
In the colonies of more than one European country, after the prohibition of the slave trade, attempts were made to replace it by a system of importing labourers of the inferior races under contracts for a somewhat lengthened term; and this was in several instances found to degenerate into a sort of legalized slave traffic. About 1867 we began to hear of a system of this kind which was in operation between the South Sea Islands and New Caledonia and the white settlements in Fiji. It seems to have begun in really voluntary agreements; but for these the unscrupulous greed of the traders soon substituted methods of fraud and violence. The natives were decoyed into the labour ships under false pretences, and then detained by force; or they were seized on shore or in their canoes and carried on board. The nature of the engagements to go and work on the plantations was not fully explained to them, and they were hired for periods exceeding the legal term. The area of this trade was ere long further extended. In 1884 attention was drawn in a special degree to the Queensland traffic in Pacific Islanders by the “Hopeful” trials, and a Government commission was appointed to inquire into the methods followed by labour ships in recruiting the natives of New Guinea, the Louisiade Archipelago, and the D’Entrecasteaux group of islands. The result of the investigations, during which nearly five hundred witnesses were examined, was the disclosure of a system which in treachery and atrocity was little inferior to the old African slave trade. These shameful deeds have made the islanders regard it as a duty to avenge their wrongs on any white men they can entice upon their shores. The noble-hearted bishop of Melanesia, John Coleridge Patteson, fell a victim to this retaliation on the island of Nukapu 20th September 1871. The tendency of the whole system is to create a war of races. It may be questioned whether this trade in labour can be safely continued at all; if so, it must be under a constant and vigorous system of surveillance and regulation.
We have seen that the last vestiges of the monstrous anomaly of modern colonial slavery are disappearing from all civilized states and their foreign possessions. It now remains to consider the slavery of primitive origin which has existed within recent times, or continues to exist, outside of the Western world.
In Russia, a country which had not the same historical antecedents with the Western nations, properly so called, and which is in fact more correctly classed as Eastern, whilst slavery had disappeared, serfdom was in force down to our own days. The rural population of that country, at the earliest period accessible to our inquiries, consisted of (1) slaves, (2) free agricultural labourers, and (3) peasants proper, who were small farmers or cottiers and members of a commune. The sources of slavery were there, as elsewhere, capture in war, voluntary sale by poor freemen of themselves, sale of insolvent debtors, and the action of the law in certain criminal cases. In the 18th century we find the distinction between the three classes named above effaced, and all of them merged in the class of serfs, who were the property either of the landed proprietors or of the state. They were not even adscripti glebae, though forbidden to migrate; an imperial ukase of 1721 says, “the proprietors sell their peasants and domestic servants, not even in families, but one by one, like cattle.” This practice, at first tacitly sanctioned by the Government, which received dues on the sales, was at length formally recognized by several imperial ukases. Peter the Great imposed a poll-tax on all the members of the rural population, making the proprietors responsible for the tax charged on their serfs; and the “free wandering people” who were not willing to enter the army were required to settle on the land either as members of a commune or as serfs of some proprietor. The system of serfdom attained its fullest development in the reign of Catherine II. The serfs were bought, sold, and given in presents, sometimes with the land, sometimes without it, sometimes in families and sometimes individually, sale by public auction being alone forbidden, as “unbecoming in a European state.” The proprietors could transport without trial their unruly serfs to Siberia or send them to the mines for life, and those who presented complaints against their masters were punished with the knout and condemned to the mines. The first symptoms of a reaction appear in the reign of Paul (1796-1801). He issued an ukase that the serfs should not be forced to work for their masters more than three days in each week. There were several feeble attempts at further reform, and even abortive projects of emancipation, from the commencement of the present century. But no decisive measures were taken before the accession of Alexander II. (1855). That emperor, after the Crimean War, created a secret committee composed of the great officers of state, called the chief committee for peasant affairs, to study the subject of serf-emancipation. Of this body the grand-duke Constantine was an energetic member. To accelerate the proceedings of the committee advantage was taken of the following incident. In the Lithuanian provinces the relations of the masters and serfs were regulated in the time of Nicholas by what were called inventories. The nobles, dissatisfied with these, now sought to have them revised. The Government interpreted the application as implying a wish for the abolition of serfdom, and issued a rescript authorizing the formation of committees to prepare definite proposals for a gradual emancipation. A circular was soon after sent to the governors and marshals of the nobility all over Russia proper, informing them of this desire of the Lithuanian nobles, and setting out the fundamental principles which should be observed “if the nobles of the provinces should express a similar desire.” Public opinion strongly favoured the projected reform; and even the masters who were opposed to it saw that, if the operation became necessary, it would be more safely for their interests intrusted to the nobles than to the bureaucracy. Accordingly during the year 1858 a committee was created in nearly every province in which serfdom existed. From the schemes prepared by these committees, a general plan had to be elaborated, and the Government appointed a special imperial commission for this purpose. The plan was formed, and, in spite of some opposition from the nobles, which was suppressed, it became law, and serfdom was abolished (19th February = 3d March 1861). Its nature and results have been indicated in Russia, vol. xxi. p. 82. The total number of serfs belonging to proprietors at the time of the emancipation was 21,625,609, of whom 20,158,231 were peasant serfs and 1,467,378 domestic serfs. This number does not include the state serfs, who formed about one-half of the rural population. Their position had been better, as a rule, than that of the serfs on private estates; it might indeed, Mr Wallace says, be regarded as “an intermediate position between serfage and freedom.” Amongst them were the serfs on the lands formerly belonging to the church, which had been secularized and transformed into state demesnes by Catherine II. There were also serfs on the apanages affected to the use of the imperial family; these amounted to nearly three and a half millions. Thus by the law of 1861 more than forty millions of serfs were emancipated.
The slavery of the Mohammedan East is usually not the slavery of the field but of the household. The slave is a member of the family, and is treated with tenderness and affection. The Koran breathes a considerate and kindly spirit towards the class, and encourages manumission. The child of a slave girl by her master is born free, and the mother is usually raised to be a free wife But behind this slavery, however mild in itself, stands the slave trade, with its systematic man-hunting, which has been, and still is, the curse of Africa. The traffic in slaves has been repeatedly declared by the Ottoman Porte to be illegal throughout its dominions, and there have been several conventions between Great Britain and the khedive for its suppression in Egypt; but it is still largely carried on both in the latter country and in Turkey, owing to the laxity and too often the complicity of the Government officials.
In the days of the colonial slave trade its African centre was the region about the mouths of the rivers Calabar and Bonny, whither the captive negroes were brought from great distances in the interior. As many slaves, Clarkson tells us, came annually from this part of the coast as from all the rest of Africa besides. At present, it is commonly said,—though Cameron in 1875 was otherwise informed,—no slaves are exported from the western side of the continent. The principal centres from which the supply is now furnished to Egypt, Turkey, Arabia, and Persia are three in number. (1) The Soudan, south of the Great Sahara, appears to be one vast hunting-ground. Captives are brought thence to the slave market of Kuka in Bornu, where, after being bought by dealers, they are, to the number of about 10,000 annually, marched over arid desert tracks under a burning sun to Murzuk in Fezzan, from which place they are distributed to the northern and eastern Mediterranean coasts. Their sufferings on the route are dreadful; many succumb and are abandoned. Rohlfs informs us that “any one who did not know the way” by which the caravans pass “would only have to follow the bones which lie right and left of the track.” Negroes are also brought to Morocco from the Western Soudan and from Timbuktu. The centre of the traffic in Morocco is Sidi Hamed ibn Musa, seven days’ journey south of Mogador, where a great yearly fair is held. The slaves are forwarded thence in gangs to different towns, especially to Morocco city, Fez, and Mequinez. About 4000 are thus annually imported, and an ad valorem duty is levied by the sultan, which produces about £4800 of annual revenue. The total number of negro slaves in Morocco appears to be about 50,000. (2) The basin of the Nile, extending to the great lakes, is another region infested by the slave trade; the slaves are either smuggled into Egypt or sent by the Red Sea to Turkey. The khedive Ismail in 1869 appointed Sir Samuel Baker to the command of a large force with which he was “to strike a direct blow at the slave trade in its distant nest.” The instructions in the firman issued to him were as follows:—“To subdue to our authority the countries situated to the south of Gondokoro, to suppress the slave trade, to introduce a system of regular commerce, to open to navigation the great lakes of the equator, and to establish a chain of military stations and commercial depots throughout Central Africa.” The work energetically commenced by him was continued by Colonel C. G. Gordon (1874 to 1879), but since the revolt of the Soudan, it is to be feared, no trace of his or of Baker’s work remains in the scene of their labours. The most effectual direct methods of dealing with the slave trade in the present territories of Egypt seem to be those suggested by the Anti-Slavery Society to Mr Gladstone’s Government in 1881—extended consular supervision, and a compulsory registration of all existing slaves. (3) There has long been a slave trade from the Portuguese possessions on the East African coast. The stream of supply came mainly from the southern Nyassa districts by three or four routes to Ibo, Mozambique, Angoche, and Kilimane. Madagascar and the Comoro Islands obtained most of their slaves from the Mozambique coast. It was believed in 1862 that about 19,000 passed every year from the Nyassa regions to Zanzibar, whence large supplies were drawn for the markets of Arabia and Persia up to 1873. The mission of Sir Bartle Frere to the sultan of Zanzibar in 1873 brought about a treaty for the suppression of the slave trade, but it is to be feared that the cessation of the traffic from that port has not extinguished the traffic but has in part only given it a different direction, through Somali markets. In Madagascar, which had been supplied from the Mozambique coast, the import and sale of slaves were prohibited within the Hova dominions by Queen Ranavalona II. in June 1877. The rulers of the Comoro Islands, Mohilea and Anjuan (or Johanna), have signed treaties for the abolition of the status of slavery in their dominions after 1890, the fulfilment of which, however, it will probably be difficult to enforce. The stations established by the English universities in the valley of the Rovuma and by the Established and Free Churches of Scotland on Lake Nyassa doubtless contributed much to the diminution of the traffic in those parts. It is said that, whereas no less than 10,000 slaves formerly passed the southern end of the Nyassa every year, in 1876 not more than 38 were known to have been conveyed by that route. Lieutenant O’Neill, British consul at Mozambique, writing in 1880, fixed at about 3000 the number then annually exported from the coast between the rivers Rovuma and Zambesi. But since that date the traffic seems to have received a fresh impetus from an increased demand for ivory, the slave and ivory trades being “hand and glove.” The Portuguese appear to be the most determined upholders of the evil system, and in consequence are everywhere detested by the natives.
There are other minor branches of the trade elsewhere in Africa. Thus from Harar in Somâli-land caravans are sent to Berbera on the coast, where there is a great annual fair. The slaves are collected from the inland Galla countries, from Gurâgwe, and from Abyssinia.
Clarkson first, and Buxton afterwards, whilst they urged all other means for the suppression or discouragement of the slave trade and slavery, saw clearly that the only thoroughly effectual method would be the development of legitimate commerce in Africa itself. When Buxton published in 1840 his book entitled The Slave Trade and its Remedy, this was the remedy he contemplated. The unfortunate Niger expedition of 1841 was directed to similar ends; and it has been more and more felt by all who were interested in the subject that here lies the radical solution of the great problem. It was for some time thought that from Sierra Leone as a centre industry and civilization might be diffused amongst the nations of the continent; and in 1822 the colony (which in 1847 became the independent republic) of Liberia had been founded by Americans with a similar object; but in neither case have these expectations been fulfilled. A new, and it would seem really hopeful, effort for the same great end has recently been undertaken.
Leopold II., king of the Belgians, invited in September 1876 representative geographers to a conference in his palace, to discuss the question of the exploration and civilization of Africa through the development of commerce and the abolition of the slave trade.
Six European nations were represented, and an International African Association was formed. The central committee organized seven successive expeditions from the east coast to Lake Tanganyika. The exploration of the Congo by Stanley turned attention to the west coast, and he went out to the Congo in 1879 as commanderin-chief of the association, to open up that river. The association obtained, by treaties with the native chiefs, the cession of certain territories. The recognition of its flag and its territorial rights by the European Powers has transformed the association into the Congo Free State. A conference was held at Berlin on 15th November 1884, attended by plenipotentiaries from all the European states, to regulate the position of the new state, and one of its declarations was that “these regions shall not be used as markets or routes of transit for the trade in slaves, no matter of what race; each of these powers binds itself to use all the means at its disposal to put an end to this trade and to punish those engaged in it.” The territory of the new state was fixed so as to comprise 1,065,200 square miles, with an estimated population of 42,608,000 souls. Stations have been built at points extending for nearly 1500 miles into the centre of Africa.
There are, it cannot be denied, real dangers connected with this great enterprise for the civilization of Africa. Disputes may arise between the powers having interests in the territories of the new state, and, still worse, the natives may be led to take sides in such disputes. That the African population should be sometimes oppressed, or have justice denied them, by European traders or officials is by no means unlikely in the present state of opinion with respect to our duties towards the retarded races. Difficulties, too, may be created by the rivalries and mutual jealousies of the missionaries of the several Western communions. But, whilst foreseeing these possibilities and urging the necessity of guarding, as far as possible, against the evils referred to, we ought not to view in a grudging or suspicious spirit an enterprise which is begun with pure intentions, and will probably do much to right the wrongs and improve the position of a deeply-injured portion of our race. The establishment of the state will be no reason for the cessation of any effort which Western Governments can make, by the exercise of influence and by remonstrance, to induce Turkey and Egypt to fulfil their engagements respecting the slave trade. The rulers of those states are well disposed to appropriate the results of more advanced civilization; and we need not despair of the disappearance in Mohammedan communities of slave-holding and its ally polygamy, since those practices are not enjoined, but only tolerated, by a religious code which social progress will inevitably lead its adherents to modify by interpretation.
Bibliography.— On the several branches of the subject of slavery and serfdom fuller information may be obtained from the following works, which have been amongst those used in the preparation of the preceding sketch.
On Ancient Slavery: H. Wallon, Histoire de l'Esclavage dans l'Antiquité, 3 vols., 1847, 2d ed. 1879; A. Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, Eng. transl, by G. Comewall Lewis, 1828, 2d ed. 1842; William Blair, Inquiry into the State of Slavery among the Romans, from the Earliest Period to the Establishment of the Lombards in Italy, 1833; Dureau de la Malle, Économie Politique des Romains, 2 vols., 1840; M. Troplong, De l'Influence du Christianisme sur le Droit Civil des Romains, 2d ed. 1855. On Mediaeval Slavery and Serfdom: G. Humbert, article “Colonat” in the Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines of Daremberg and Saglio (now in course of publication); J. Yanoski, De l'Abolition de l'Esclavage Ancien au Moyen Âge et de sa Transformation en Servitude de la Glèbe (Wallon and Yanoski had jointly composed a memoir to compete for a prize offered by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1837; Wallon’s portion of the memoir became the foundation of his Histoire de l'Esclavage dans l'Antiquité above mentioned; Yanoski’s part, the expansion of which was prevented by his early death, was posthumously published in 1860; it is no more than a slight sketch); Benjamin Guérard, Prolegomènes au Polyptyque d'Irminon, 1844; Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des Institutions Politiques de l’ancienne France (only the first part has been published, 2d ed. 1877), and Recherches sur quelques Problèmes d'Histoire, 1885 (the latter work contains the best extant discussion of the whole subject of the colonatus, founded throughout on the original texts); Stubbs. Constitutional History of England, 3 vols., 1874-78. On the Colonial Slave Trade and Slavery: Washington Irving, Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1828, several times reprinted; Arthur Helps, Life of Las Casas, 1868; Bryan Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, 1793, 5th ed. in 5 vols. 1819; Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols., 1808; T. Fowell Buxton, African Slave Trade, 2d ed. 1838, and The Remedy, a Sequel, 1840; Memoirs of Sir T. F. Buxton, edited by his son Charles Buxton, 3d ed. 1849. On North American Slavery: G. M. Stroud, Laws relating to Slavery in America, 2d ed. 1856; H. Greeley, The American Conflict, 1865; and John E. Cairnes. The Slave Power, its Character, Career, and Probable Designs, 1862, 2d ed. 1863. On Brazilian: Fletcher and Kidder, Brasil and the Brazilians, 9th ed. 1879. On Russian Serfdom: D. Mackenzie Wallace, Russia, 1877. For the existing state of the African slave trade, and of Egyptian and Turkish slavery, the Ismailia of Sir S. Baker, the writings of Livingstone, and the biographies of Gordon may be consulted, besides the many documents on these subjects published by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. There are two volumes by A. Tourmagne, entitled respectively Histoire de l'Esclavage Ancien et Moderne, 1880, and Histoire du Servage Ancien et Moderne, 1879, which bring together many facts relating to slavery and serfdom; but they are somewhat loose and uncritical; the author, too, repeats himself much, and dwells on many topics scarcely if at all connected with his main themes. The largest and most philosophical views on slavery generally will be found in Hume’s Essay “On the Populousness of Antient Nations,” and in Comte’s Philosophie Positive, vol. v., and Politique Positive, vol. iii. For its economic effects, when it is regarded as an organization of labour, reference may be had to Smith’s Wealth of Nations, book iii. chap. 2, J. S. Mill’s Political Economy, book ii. chap. 5, and J. E. Caimes’s Stave Power, chap. 2.
