Slavery – The Perverse Thread In Human History

January 20, 1985
Lakeland

In choosing this subject, the purpose is neither to re-ignite the inherited shadows of white collective guilt, nor to castigate the memories of the slave owners of this nation. The purpose is to examine, briefly, the history of human slavery and to look at what Gunnar Myrdal called “The American Dilemma.” My purpose is to try to deepen awareness and to sharpen perception that the ghosts of the past are still rattling chains that are a discordant sound in our best dreams.

Myrdal wrote (Intro, Vol. I – lxxi) “The American Negro is a problem in the heart of the American ... At bottom our problem is the moral dilemma of the American.... The ever-raging conflict between, on the one hand, the valuations preserved on the general plane we shall call ‘The American Creed,’ where the American thinks, talks, and acts under the influence of high national and Christian precepts, and on the other hand, the valuations on specific plans of individual and group living, where personal and local interests; economic, social and sexual jealousies; considerations of community prestige and conformity; group prejudice against particular persons or types of people; and all sorts of miscellaneous wants, impulses, and habits dominate his outlook.”

Because the history of slavery is so complex, the literature so vast, this talk is limited to a few divisions:

The definition and origins of human slavery.
Slavery in antiquity.
Slavery in the age of the dominating religions of the West, Christianity and Islam.
Slavery in the Americas.
The ghosts that haunt us today.

What is a slave? “His/her person is the property of (another); the slave’s will is subject to the owner’s authority and the slave’s labor is obtained and maintained through coercion.” (SLAVERY, Davis, p. 31) Furthermore, the slave was a chattel, a piece of property, a thing. This economic definition – that a slave is property – pervades the entire sorry history. Human rights and humane considerations need not stir the conscience if a slave is not a person but a thing, a chattel, an outsider.

When people were wandering hunters and food gatherers in pre-historic times, almost surely slavery did not exist. The subsistence level of the economy did not allow for such a practice. American Indians and Australian Aborigines did not seem to have practiced slavery. Enemies captured in battle were killed, not enslaved. The primitive economy had no place for them.

When animals were domesticated and required tending, and when people developed agriculture and settled in at one location, the exploitation of outsiders became characteristic. Perhaps captured women were the first victims. In ancient Sumeria, the word for slave women meant “women from a foreign land.” Prostitution is commonly called the world’s oldest profession, but the ancient tradition for that was slavery because the brothels and harems were supplied with women captured in wars and raids. The laws of Hammurabi prescribed the death penalty for anyone who harbored a slave fugitive.

In ancient Egypt all slaves belonged to Pharaoh, a story well told in the accounts of Moses in Egypt and the Exodus.

In the Old Testament, slavery was not only part of the culture, but in these scriptures there is no explicit protest against slavery on any grounds. In Nehemiah, after the return of the Jews from captivity, they sold their own children into slavery in order to pay the high taxes levied by the King. (5/5)

In ancient Greece, which we think of as a high classical civilization, human slavery was never seriously questioned. While some philosophers raised questions that human slavery was contrary to nature, most took the opposite view. Aristotle argued that slaves lacked the higher qualities of soul necessary for freedom.

In the civilizations of Greece and Rome, the source of slaves was not only those captured in war, but also [those] enslaved for debt, or punishment for crime. Impoverished parents sometimes sold their children in to slavery. It is told that many unwanted children were “exposed” and left to die. Scholars write that “exposed” meant, many times, that the children sold into slavery.

Rome required large numbers of slaves to work in the huge agricultural estates (lat. fundia) acquired by the upper classes, a high point being in the second and first centuries B.C.E. The size of the revolt led by Spartacus (73-71 BCE) illustrates both the large number of slaves and the enormous discontent of the slave with his lot. The gladiators in the death sports of the Roman arenas were slaves, but were the strongest, fiercest warriors in the slave revolts.

In spite of the humane, ethical, person-centered teachings of the prophet Jesus, the growth and eventual domination of the Christian religion made little difference in the institution of slavery. Paul's letter to Philemon epitomizes the difficulty the early Christians had with human slavery. Paul sends Onesimus back to his master, Philemon, who also is a Christian. Paul urges that Onesimus be treated well, but Paul does not condemn slavery as an institution. Debates have raged for centuries about what Paul meant, but at bottom it shows that Christians were allowed to hold fellow Christians as slaves.

Some of the early Christian theologians explained slavery away on the grounds that it was punishment for the original sin of Adam’s fall from grace. Others tried to rationalize a rather flimsy proposition that there was a distinction between physical and spiritual slavery. Bishop Ignatius of Antioch wrote to Polycarp, “Despise not men or women slaves. Yet let them not be puffed up, but rather bear their slavery for the glory of God that they may win from Him thereby a better liberty.” (SLAVERY, Davis p. 87)

Some differences began to emerge in later centuries. Christians were forbidden to enslave Christians. But it was O.K. to enslave Moslems captured in war or the Crusades. In 1488, Pope Innocent VIII accepted 100 Moorish slaves as a gift from King Ferdinand of Spain and distributed these slaves among the cardinals and nobility.

Similarly, Islam – slavery was well-established in the time of the prophet Muhammad, but he proclaimed that no follower of Islam could be enslaved. However, Christians and followers of other religions could be enslaved, and they were.

But it was in our Western Hemisphere that human slavery has affected every one of us. Because the West Indies (and later the American colonies) were appropriate for development of large plantation crops – rice, tobacco, sugar, cotton, there arose the greatest demand for slaves and the most large-scale abuse. The need for slaves was huge, and Africa became the source. Native tribes fought each other and the captives were marched to the hell of the slave ships. Moslem slave traders had no compunction because the slaves were not followers of Islam; Christian slave-ship traders and captains had no restraints because the black Africans were not Christians.

Statistics may be unreliable, but it is estimated that in the two plus centuries of the slave trade, 15 million Africans were transported to the Western Hemisphere, not counting the 20% of each human cargo who perished or were killed on the long sea-journeys.

A distinctive feature of the African slave trade was that being black became the definition of availability for slavery. In antiquity, Rome, Greece, and early Europe, there was no such racial distinction. The slaves were of all colors, races, nations.

The story of American slavery is too well-known to fully rehearse its sad, sorry, and bloody history leading to our Civil War, the most traumatic event in our American history. If you viewed the series ROOTS, or have read any of the many novels, histories, or analyses, not much can be added.

There are a few key observations. If Northerners felt morally superior to the southern slave-holders, there was little justification. New Englanders transported the slaves the Southerners bought. Ship captains and owners sailed from Boston, Salem, or Newport with cargoes of rum to the African coast to be traded for slaves, then the slaves were carried to the West Indies to be traded for sugar and molasses which was brought back to New England to be distilled into rum – the infamous three-cornered trade. [CJW note: 60 rum distilleries]

At the time of the Declaration of Independence, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies. In the northern colonies, most slaves were household servants, not field hands, not because of greater kindness, but because in the North, climate and land were not suitable for the large plantation crops which required numerous field hands.

The American dilemma – the Declaration called for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but its author was a slave holder and the 1st President [was] as well. Beautiful Mt. Vernon and stunning Monticello were built by slaves.

Washington’s will provided that his slaves be manumitted (freed) upon the death of Martha Washington. In his lifetime at Mt. Vernon, he refused to buy or sell slaves.

In his NOTES ON VIRGINIA, Jefferson wrote, “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise in the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other.... And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

Nevertheless, all his life Jefferson bought and sold slaves, even when he was President. His will freed a few slaves, but most remained in slavery.

The dawn of conscience about the evils of slavery arrived late. Not until the 18th century did any protests begin. Slave trade was not abolished by Great Britain until 1807.

Gradually the values sifted out by Enlightenment thought had influence; some religious groups like the Quakers generated moral disapproval. But in our country, general feeling about abolition did not prevail up to the very dawn of the Civil War.

David Brion Davis, whose studies of human slavery are authoritative, comments, “It is more difficult, however, to get around the simple fact that no country thought of abolishing the slave trade until its economic value had considerably declined.”

Legal slavery came to an abrupt halt with the defeat of the South in the Civil War. But the cost lingers on to this very day.

[insert: Ibsen]

Mrs. Alving is suffering the blow in courage and faith; and she is rewarded with her deepest insight:

“I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of sand, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.”

Ibsen’s insight about the personal tragedy of the Alving family is an analogy writ large for the ghosts that haunted America after Emancipation and the Civil War.

The attempts to achieve more equality for the freed slaves, voting rights, property rights foundered after the strange events called the Reconstruction. There was the greed of the Scalawags and Carpetbaggers – the determined efforts of the defeated to regain their lands and recoup their fortunes – and permeating it all the prejudice against black people – not only in the South but all through the land. And that prejudice persisted. The civil rights struggles, equal opportunity laws, the claims for educational equality all are efforts to dispel the ghosts of slavery and racism. That is the meaning of the life and death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Holidays seem to become diluted. The Fourth of July and Labor Day are more occasions for picnics and sports than they are solemn occasions of memories of human struggle for greater freedom and a more fair way of life.

As a writer in the Christian Century wrote (and this is my conclusion also),

“Let’s concede that institutions can take the salt out of anything. But we can preserve King’s motivation for justice.... Many white as well as black Christians did follow King’s leadership; we have that memory to celebrate. Many opposed; we have that memory to lead us to repentance. The church can use this birthday as a time to remember other parts of our past that are ignored in patriotic speeches: the work of William Penn for religious liberty, Roger Williams’ courage, the abolitionist movement, and the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday just might become that time of self-reflection that our nation needs.” (Jerry Gentry, Christian Century, 1/16/85)