Part 10

In the beginning of his career, Cæsar tried to create a free yeomanry by distributing the public domain among the poor free citizens and the disabled soldiers. After the victory over the oligarchs and Pompey, he colonized eighty thousand of the proletarians of Rome. But it was forever too late; and besides, the oligarchs and slaveholders opposed his attempts. Scarcely any free laborers existed; the domain of the slave-driver was universal; indeed it was such an epoch as is now again so ardently desired by small senators, would-be statesmen, and the whole vanguard of the knight-errant army of chattelhood. Freeholds disappeared from Italy, and almost from the world, with the exception perhaps of the valleys in the Apennines and the Abruzzi. The region from the modern Civita Vecchia across Tusculum to Boiæ and Naples, where once a dense population of Latin and Italian free yeomanry ploughed the soil and reaped the harvest, was now covered with splendid villas for the masters and with _ergastula_ for their chattels. But the proud inhabitants of the villas, the rich patricians and slaveholders, were themselves soon to become political slaves. Central Italy and the lands around Rome which nursed the armies, and from which were recruited the conquerors of the Carthaginians, Numidians and the phalanxes of Macedonia, was now a waste, depopulated solitude, owned by a few wealthy planters.

Domestic slavery now brought Rome into the condition to which it had reduced Greece and the oriental world centuries before. The Italy of Varro and of Cicero resembled the Greece of Polybius, Carthage on the eve of its fall, or Asia as found by Alexander. _What will be the full and ripe crop of this dragon-teeth-seed in America?_ Whenever domestic slavery is planted and takes enduring root in a country, even the beauty of nature is ravaged and destroyed. Do the chattel-cabins enliven the landscape of Virginia or beautify the coast of Carolina? The living rill or river gloriously reflects a thousandfold the rays and colors of light, but stagnant sewers are everywhere alike fetid and abominable.

During the epoch when slavery flourished and the Roman republic fell into decay, those terrible cruelties toward slaves which history records, and which even now strike the mind with horror, came into vogue. Slaves, chained in gangs, worked in the fields; at night they were crowded together in prisons; a Greek letter was branded with a hot iron into their cheeks, and other unmentionable cruelties were practised. Still, even then, they were comparatively well fed, as indeed are all useful and submissive beasts. The Roman fabulist Phoedrus, in his tale of "_The Dog and the Wolf_," tells how this good feeding was regarded by the nobler minds of that demoralized epoch.

After the time of Cato the breeding of slaves became more general, and one woman would frequently nurse several babies, while their mothers were otherwise employed. This became even more common, however, in a subsequent epoch.

Slaves were used for all purposes in the household of the rich Roman oligarch. They performed the highest as well as the basest labors; they were even doctors, architects, literati, readers and amanuenses; they exercised in some degree the function of printing in our day, as by their labor manuscripts were copied and libraries formed.

How domestic slavery degraded the Roman slaveholder is evidenced by the direct statements of history, as well as by the descriptions of manners in the comedies, etc., which have reached us from that epoch. In proportion as the old Roman spirit and courage declined, did violence and rowdyism increase. Among the various deleterious influences of slavery on slaveholders, also, two which are very noticeable at that remote time, may again, after the lapse of ages, be observed under our own eyes: slavery either emasculates the slaveholder physically and mentally, and thus renders him cruel from effeminacy; or else makes him rude and reckless, and full of a coarse and savage ferocity.

The Roman oligarchs had all the polish reflected from general culture covering the most depraved minds; and this told upon their politics as well as upon their domestic economy. As early as the time of Jugurtha, nearly all the senators were venal; and subsequently, those who preserved individually some of the better Roman characteristics, became even more rare. Such an one, toward the end of the republic, was Sextus Roscius, whom history mentions for his good treatment of his bondmen. Whenever a special class of society becomes anywhere predominant, a special type of character is formed as the standard of honor, which, however, is generally quite different from the true standard of an honest man or an upright citizen. But, false criterions aside, the Slave States may, and undoubtedly do, possess many honorable planters and citizens, as Carroll of Carrollton or Aiken and Preston of South Carolina: but none of these men give tone or character to the manners or the laws; their influence is not permitted in Congress or the state legislatures, nor are their opinions reflected in the press or in the sham literature and science of their section. But the customs and manners which now prevail, the laws enacted, the utterances of statesmen, the condition of science and literature, and the statements of the current press, constitute the evidence from which the social condition of the nation is to be judged now, and the historic evidence from which it will be judged by future generations.

The slaveholding oligarchy triumphed over Marius and Sertorius as it triumphed over the Gracchi. _And the Roman republic expired_ composed of slaveholders, capitalists, and beggars. The fury of the indignant and impoverished people carried Cæsar to power over the carcasses and the ruins of the oligarchy, which long before had reduced the liberty and the name of the Roman people to a sham and a mockery. Domestic slavery for several centuries undermined the Roman republic, and its corrosive action increased with the most brilliant periods of conquest, just as the human body, though gnawed internally by a chronic disease, may exhibit, for a longer or shorter period, all the appearances of health and vigor. Oligarchs, slaveholders, and capitalists destroyed a republic founded by intelligent and industrious agriculturists, yeomen, and freeholders.

More than one point of analogy exists between the Roman and American republics. Independent and intelligent small farmers, with artisans, mechanics, etc., were the founders of American independence. And the free states have not only preserved but elevated to a higher social and political significance the original characteristics of her existence; and the reproaches hurled by the militant pro-slavery oligarchs against the free farmers and operatives in the fields and workshops of the north are sacrilegious to liberty and light. Even so the prince of darkness curses the god of day!

XIII.

ROMANS--POLITICAL SLAVES.

It was an easy matter to engraft despotism upon a society morally, politically, and economically ruined by the slaveholding oligarchy. The Cæsars and the emperors inaugurated and developed it, and at that time nothing else would have suited Rome. Domestic slavery had destroyed the republican spirit, and the vitality of ancient republican institutions. The political condition of the empire--that world-ruling despotism--under the Cæsars and the emperors[14] was the legitimate result of chattelhood and of oligarchism. Political and domestic slavery now went hand in hand, both of them supreme over man and society.

During the reign of the six Cæsars, rural as well as urban slavery rapidly began to be reduced to method and to legal forms. Augustus tried to modify somewhat the cruel treatment of the slaves: he abolished, for instance, the custom of branding their cheeks with a hot iron, and ordered instead that they should wear metallic collars. It came into vogue, also, that a woman who had given birth to three children was free from hard labor the rest of her life; if she had four she became wholly free.

The slave traffic was very active over all the imperial Roman world during the whole period of its existence, and was the most lucrative branch of commerce. It was also strictly adjusted by police regulations.

Augustus likewise made efforts to morally re-invigorate, so to speak, the decaying oligarchy; but this attempt was even more unsuccessful than the former. Every person who is even slightly acquainted with history must be familiar with the absolute degradation of the oligarchs, capitalists, and rich slaveholders of imperial Rome. Tiberius despised them and tyrannized over them with a cold-blooded and contemptuous cruelty only equalled by the manner in which they crushed their chattels, or the populace of Rome, whom they had impoverished and degraded. For then, as for centuries before, the oligarchy looked with as much contempt on the working-classes as the modern slave-drivers do on "greasy mechanics." But, in the eye of history and humanity, it is the "greasy mechanics" and "small-fisted farmers" of the free states who are the glorious lights which redeem the dark side of American polity as embodied in the slave-driving chivalry.

In fact, the Roman oligarchs were far more degraded than their chattels. "_Turpis adulatio Senatus_," said Tacitus; and the names of Druses, Germanicus, Britannicus, Chærea, Trasea, and a few others, can never redeem the infamy of a whole community.

The numbers of slaves owned by the wealthy, was, as it were, proportionate to their degradation. Athenæus says that some rich men had from ten to twenty thousand slaves, and the statement is confirmed by Seneca. Cæcilius Isidorus, a rich _particulier_ living under Augustus, lost a great part of his fortune in the civil wars, and yet left by will 4116 chattels; Elius Proculus, on his estates in Liguria, had two thousand slaves able to bear arms; Scaurus, a wealthy senator, owned 4116 chattels, exclusive of shepherds and tillers; Eumolpus, a simple citizen--not one of the oligarchs or F.F.V.'s of that time, but rather a _parvenu_--had so large a number of slaves on his estates in Numidia, that with an army of them he could have stormed and taken the city of Carthage, which, although reduced from its former grandeur, was still among the first cities of Africa. Under Nero, half of Africa was owned by six slaveholders: Nero slaughtered them and inherited their estates.

Such was the rapidly developed internal condition of the Roman state when Pliny dolefully exclaimed: "_Latifundi perdidere Italiam moxque provincias_:" "Large extended estates (cultivated by slaves), ruined Italy, and soon after the provinces," as even Spain and Gaul were quickly devoured by the large slaveholders.

The condition and treatment of the slaves inspired pity even in a Claudius. He prohibited the custom of starving to death the old and disabled slaves, who had generally been exposed on an island in the Tiber, upon which was a temple of Esculapius. By the Claudian edict, such exposition was equivalent to emancipation. Even Nero had some pity for the slaves, though he had none for their masters. The emperors were terrified at the increased ravages of slavery, which spread in continually wider and wider circles over Gaul and Spain as well as in Africa and in the east. Edicts were issued by several emperors--as Adrian and the Antonines--designed to stay the spread of slavery and alleviate the condition of the chattels. These edicts encouraged manumissions either absolute and immediate, or gradual, and conferred the same municipal rights as were enjoyed by the enfranchised. The _latifundia_, or large estates, nevertheless, still increased their size; and the condition and relations of landed property required new laws and new legal definitions, which were gradually introduced into the _jus civile_. First in order were the common usages of the people, and then the legalization of their customs. Thus it is not till toward the end of the second Christian century that there are found in the Roman law definitions of slaves as persons attached perpetually to the soil. But their classification was so complicated, that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to define distinctly the various grades, or to exhibit clearly the features in which one differs from another. The necessities of the imperial treasury were probably the cause of such divisions as those of _adscriptitii_, _censiti_, _perpetui_, _conditionales_, _coloni_, _inquilini_--both of old republican origin--_simplices_, _originarii_, _homologi_, _tributari_, _addicti glebæ_, _agricolæ_, _aratores_, _rustici actores_, _etc._ In course of time, also, all these names were merged under the general denomination of serfs, which again assumed various degrees of oppression and servitude.

Augustus is proverbially said to have pacified the world; and indeed, with few exceptions, the Roman empire enjoyed internal peace during the first two Christian centuries. But under Claudius, during the war with Tiridates of Pontus, the entire population of some of the captured cities was sold into slavery, as were also one hundred thousand Jews, when Jerusalem fell under Vespasian. There were now, however, no more rich cities or cultivated countries to be conquered, no peoples to be enslaved by millions, as there had been under the republic; wars now were waged only on the outskirts of the empire, and generally with barbarous nations. Prisoners of war, captives and subdued barbarians, were no longer sold into slavery, but the emperors colonized the waste lands with them. They thus attempted to repeople Italy and the provinces, and to revive the ancient mode of rural economy, as also to increase the revenue of the imperial treasury. Such colonizations were frequent after the time of Marcus Aurelius. But all this could not stop the growth of the social cancer. Chattelhood, encouraged, as will be shown by political slavery and taxations, was wildly rampant, and overleaped every barrier to its progress which the emperors attempted to raise.

During the whole epoch of the growth and maturity of domestic slavery in Rome, no one of her moralists, philosophers, poets, priests or satirists ever preached or sang of the idyllic beauties of slavery; none of her statesmen considered it as the foundation, corner-stone or cement of society or of the empire, or even as "ennobling"[15] to the slaveholder, and orations and discourses in exaltation of human bondage were unknown. Pliny, Seneca and Plutarch only spoke of it in extenuating language.

The Roman jurisconsult of the better times of the empire crystallized into legal form the sense of justice and equity inherent in the Roman, nay, in human society. He expounded the law for the _de facto_ existing society, and therefore generally in favor of the owner, slaveholder, etc., and against the thing, the _res_, which was the chattel. The object of the Roman law was only to regulate existing relations, and such was domestic slavery. But with all its unbending severity, the Roman law, through the conscientious voice of the Roman jurisconsult, declared slavery a condition, "_qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subiicitur_," and rarely missed an occasion to favor the slave, to alleviate his status, and to facilitate his emancipation. No clause or decision of the law re-enslaved, in any case, the chattel once emancipated. Even if a will provided for the emancipation of a slave in terms like these: "I will and command that my slave A becomes free; but upon condition that he live with my son, and if he refuses or neglects to do this he returns to slavery," the law decided, that "A, being emancipated by the first paragraph of the will, cannot be re-enslaved by the subsequent conditional paragraph; therefore A is free, and he may or may not fulfil the condition."

The child also followed the condition of the mother when born from illicit intercourse, _nisi lex specialis alius inducit_. If the father was a slave and the mother a free woman, the child was free, _quia non debet calamitas matris ei noceri qui in utero est_--"the misfortune of the mother shall not bear on the product of the womb." A change of the status of the mother from liberty to slavery during pregnancy was always construed favorably to the child, who thus might be born free if the mother was free for even the shortest time during the period of pregnancy.

Under the emperors, freemen began to sell themselves into slavery--a thing unknown during the existence of the republic. But a freeman who sold himself into slavery, if afterward manumitted, could not become again a full citizen. And whoever was once emancipated could on no pretence be re-enslaved, under penalty of death.

Modern pro-slavery legislators and jurisconsults boldly overthrow all these Roman ideas of justice and equity.

The law established various _just_ causes for emancipation. Among these were, natural relationships, as children, brothers, sisters, mothers, cousins, grandparents, etc., when slaves; and whoever _ad impudicitiam turpemque violationem servos compellat_, lost his _potestas_, or power, over the slave.

These facilities for emancipation operated principally in favor of the urban chattels, or those of the household proper, and also rural overseers, but were rarely applied to the rural slaves; consequently, during the most brilliant period of the existence of the empire, the cities were filled with enfranchised slaves of various kinds and various nations. The country, too, was altogether abandoned by the slaveholders, who lived and rioted in the imperial city. Most of these emancipated slaves, as also, indeed, many of the free-born citizens, finally lost their liberty by the operation of those causes which, notwithstanding emancipations and state colonizations, continually increased the _latifundia_ or large estates, and transformed into bondmen the freeholders as well as those who rented land from the state or from private individuals.

The civil administration of the Roman empire, heathen and Christian, down to its last agonies in Constantinople, may be very briefly summed up: it was _fiscality_. Every administrative measure aimed at replenishing the imperial exchequer. The imperial treasury was bottomless, and its owners cold, rapacious, cruel and insatiable. All the colonizations of free laborers had for their single aim but to increase the income of the state; and tributes and taxations of every conceivable kind were imposed, first upon the provinces, and in course of time, on Italy itself. These, of course, were principally supplied by the laboring classes in the cities and on the lands. The rapacity of the state was heightened also by the individual greed of the magistrates, from the prefects down to the meanest military or political official or tax-gatherer; indeed, locusts more destructive than the Roman officials never devoured the fruits of toil or the accumulations of industry. These fiscal measures and lawless extortions, fostered chattelhood almost as much as wars and conquests had formerly done.

The _inquilini_ and _coloni_ of the last century of the republic were free, rent-paying farmers (who paid the rent in money), or free laborers. When, after the time of Sylla, the republican oligarchs partially enslaved these farmers, the rent had to be paid in kind, in sign of dependence, if not of absolute bondage. The colonists settled by the emperors also had to pay tribute and submit to various other servitudes; and thus the once free colonists were, by a slow but uninterrupted process, transformed into bondmen, serfs and slaves. As in the last days of the republic, so under Augustus and his successors, the free yeoman or colonist, in order to avoid being violently expelled from his homestead and shut up in the _ergastulum_ with the chattels, frequently sold himself and his little property, on certain conditions, to the rich and powerful slaveholder, and thus secured patronage and protection. In proportion as exaction, oppression and lawlessness increased under the emperors, so also did the forced or voluntary submission of colonists to influential slaveholders. As the imperial tax-gatherer was wont to sell the children of the poor for tax or tribute, the peasant often preferred to become a slave in order to obtain protection from his master, who became responsible to the treasury for the taxes of the bondman and his lands. Frequently whole villages of colonists thus gave up their rights for the sake of patronage and protection.

The exchequer had a roll inscribed with the names of all the colonists on the domains belonging to the state, the cities, or to private individuals. From this census for taxation was derived the legal designation, and afterward the condition of _adscriptus_. And the imperial government, whose sole object was to gather taxes and have responsible tax-payers, had little if any objection to this transformation of colonists and their homesteads into the bondmen of the rich. The change was not made at once by any special law,[16] but was brought about by the slow progress of social decomposition. When the serfdom of the colonists first became an object of jurisprudence--a little before and under Theodosius--it had already existed as a fact; and _ex facto nascitur jus_ was an old axiom of the civil law. By and by slaves proper--that is, movable chattels, not persons attached to the soil--both in the city and on the lands, were taxed on the plantation roll; and Constantine prohibited the sale of chattels from one province to another, most probably with the view of facilitating their control by the tax-gatherer.

Rapacious taxation, the first outgrowth of imperial despotism which was originated by the slaveholders, forced into the grip of the oligarch all that remained of free soil and independent labor, or what was intended to be such by the colonizing emperors. The same cause also disorganized the ancient municipal regime in the cities of Italy and throughout the Roman world.

The _curia_ of Italian cities, and afterward of all other cities privileged with Italian law, constituted the body politic of each municipality. The most influential and wealthy citizens, therefore, were _curiales_; next to them were _municipes_, common burghers, small traders, etc.; then clients, free plebeian proletarians, the enfranchised, etc. The _decurions_ or city senate, and other dignitaries called patrons, protectors, etc., administered the affairs of the city; these and all other offices were light and honorable while the cities were flourishing, as in the first two centuries of the empire; but even then, various legal immunities released _curiales_ from performing public municipal service. During the peace enjoyed by the Roman world in the early times of the empire, the taxes, tolls, excises, _venalicium_, etc., imposed on Italianized cities, were moderate. These cities were then rich; they accumulated and loaned capital; they owned slaves and extensive domains. By means of their slaves they erected those public edifices and monuments whose splendor rivalled those of Rome and whose ruins are still in many places preserved; and the administration of the revenues and the honors of the city were in the control of rich oligarchs and slaveholders. The same accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, existed in the cities as in the country, as the same oligarchs generally lived in the city, and indeed necessarily belonged to some _municipium_; for in the Roman world the whole political and civic status was exclusively embodied in and bestowed on the city; and the country, as such, had no political or civil significance.