Part 4

The regulations prescribing the status of slaves, and their general condition, are within, the reach of every one. Their spirit is mild and beneficent for the bond-man; the duration of his slavery is limited--his treatment is humane, and the condition not ordinarily hereditary. In the times of the early patriarchs, a servant could become the chief of the family--thus proving that some commentators have made a strange confusion in the interpretation of the above-mentioned Hebrew word (_e'bed_), when they construe it as applying to such a system as modern American slavery. A servant who was eligible to become the chief of a family could not be a chattel, but must necessarily have been a member of the clan, with independent powers and rights, and at least the proprietorship of himself.

Among the Hebrews, also, a man could voluntarily sell himself into slavery; thus the debtor paid his debts with his own body, or with that of his wife or child. This custom was almost universal in early antiquity, as well as among the Romans and the barbarous Germans. But the Mosaic law appointed a regular epoch for the emancipation of all slaves, and therefore of debtors among the rest; and the operation of this law it was which made hereditary slavery of such comparatively rare occurrence.

Slaves, therefore, even when bought from the Gentiles, and therefore considered _unclean_ by the Hebrews, or when prisoners taken in war, were not cut off from the general law of protection. They enjoyed human rights, and some of the civil privileges of the Jewish born. No absolute distinctions of men can be traced in the Mosaic law without perverting its whole moral tendency. When a slave received any severe wound from his master, he was from thence declared free, and the Jewish law punishes with death the sale of a freeman into slavery--(a fact, by the way, in striking contrast with the great social movement of the militant pro-slavery party, whose policy it is to enslave both emancipated and free-born). A slave concubine could not be sold to strangers--still less her children by her master. But if he wished to be rid of her, the master was obliged to find her a husband or another master among his relatives or friends. In the old colonial times in America, the law inflicted a penalty on _white servants and bondsmen_ for mixing with black chattels--but what penalty threatened the _white masters_ for the same offence? The fact is, the slave-breeders of the slave regions continually invoke the Bible to justify their doings, and continually violate Scriptural regulations.

The Mosaic law commands: "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in the place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him." Some modern commentators attempt to contract this humane and universal command, by arguing that it only applied to _Jewish born_ servants or slaves; but sound criticism utterly annihilates the assumption. On the contrary, the phrase "_in one of thy gates_," is a positive proof that the command had in view fugitives of every tribe and kingdom. All Gentiles, slaves as well as freemen, were considered by the Jews "unclean," and there might have been some difficulty in admitting such runaways into their _houses_. But whatever was the creed or nationality of the _escaped_, he found safety "_in the gates_," and from thence could not be "delivered unto his master." Difference of religion and not of race constituted the paramount distinction between the Jew and the Gentile; if the command, therefore, were exclusively applicable to the Jewish slave, even then its spirit is violated by the American fugitive slave act, to uphold which, the Mosaic law is blasphemed--for the enslaved race of Christian America are of the same faith and baptism as their owners.

With the increase of luxury and corruption under the Hebrew kings, kidnapping and the traffic in men and women seem to have largely increased. The slaves stolen in piratical expeditions among neighboring tribes were exported to a distance, while others were imported from thence into Judea. But against this practice the prophets--those inspired successors of the lawgiver of Sinai--thundered terribly. The Edomites and other Phoenicians--who seem to have been pre-eminently the slave-traders of their time--importing slaves from Gaza, which was then a great thoroughfare and commercial metropolis, and exporting them to other points, were declared to be the most accursed of nations. So now, the modern Edomites of this continent, who have again revived the slave-traffic between Africa and this country, together with all who aid, abet, patronize or excuse them, come under the curse so often denounced against their ancient prototypes.

Under the kings, also, domestic slavery became more extensive, and its influence more fatal. It did not yet, however, succeed in devouring the vitals of the nation, or wholly destroying the small homesteads and the free yeomanry, as it afterward did in Greece, and over almost the entire ancient world under republican and imperial Rome. The epoch of the kings is one of moral degradation and effeminacy on the one hand, and of disasters and captivities to the Jews themselves, on the other. Sensuality and general depravity flourished rank and wild under the malignant influence of domestic slavery. Slavery relaxed the ties of family and society among the Jews, as history shows it to have done in every place and in all ages of its existence--for slavery, sensuality and general depravity mutually engender and sustain each other. But in their deepest and most helpless degradation, the Jews never sold the offspring of their own personal lechery into slavery: this advance on the turpitude of Hebraic slavery--this outrage on the humanity of the faith we inherit from the Jews--was first justified and systematized by the slave states of the great Republic of the West! In ancient as in Christian times, there were doubtless parents who abandoned their legitimate or illegitimate offspring to public mercy, to accident, or to servitude; but all legislators have condemned such inhumanity, and tried, if possible, to regulate and soften it. So, deliberate selling of one's children may anciently have occurred in solitary instances; but it was always and everywhere condemned as the sum of all infamies.

Many of the tutelary regulations for the slaves laid down in the law, fell, it is true, into disuse, even as other parts of the law were violated by the wayward and stiff-necked Israelites. On the advent to power of the good Josiah, however, the violated commandments and regulations of Moses, including those concerning the slaves, were rigidly enforced, and a general reformation inaugurated.

The increase of wealth, the various modifications and changes generated in the organism of society by its growth, as also by wars, captivities, changes of government, etc., brought forth a new subordinate condition in the domestic and civil life of the Hebrews--it was that of the _client_, and belongs to the latter epoch of the kings. Theologians of doubtful learning, and still more dubious honesty, argue that such clients were slaves; but, in truth, the clients among the Hebrews were no more the slaves of their patrons than the same class were among the Romans or Gauls. The Hebrew client was a _subordinate_, but _independent_; he was under the protection of his patron, but both were bound by mutual obligations and prescribed conditions; and the property and estate of the patron were often under the guardianship of the client. Many expressions in the Scriptures, also, bearing on the mission of the future Messianic servant of Jahveh, mean properly a client, and not a slave or a chattel.

The old kingdom of Judea was overthrown in wars with Assyria and Babylon; and the Jews were carried away as captives. These repeated captivities chiefly befell the most wealthy and influential part of the population. Such captives generally became political slaves, that is, were deprived of political, though not of religious or civil rights, and were not made domestic slaves or chattels. They became the property of the king or of the state; but were not individually subject to be scattered or sold; in fact, they became colonists, and lands were assigned them in some part of the empire. Thus Tiglath-Palassar colonized certain regions north of Nineveh with Hebrews; and Sargon (or Sargina) transplanted others to Media. In the Babylonian captivities their condition was precisely similar: thus, when Cyrus liberated forty-two thousand three hundred and sixty Jews from captivity in Babylon, there were among them only seven thousand three hundred and eighty-seven slaves, or about one-sixth of the whole number.

Domestic slavery, as we have seen, made considerable havoc among the Beni-Israel, and its life was continually recruited by wars and the consequent ruin and impoverishment of the people, as well as by other causes already pointed out. But down to the last breath of the political and national existence of the Jews--to the day of the destruction of Jerusalem and the hour of final dispersion--slavery never succeeded in wholly destroying the humble homesteads of the free rural population--as it did in other nations and empires of antiquity: for example, it never extirpated the free agricultural yeomanry in Palestine as it afterward did in the Roman world, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. The free population was mostly devoted to agriculture, and possessed homesteads; and these small free homesteads were regarded almost as sacred--even kings could only by violence seize upon the poor man's farm.

Little Palestine, to the East, swarmed like a beehive with people, notwithstanding captivities, calamities, and exterminating wars. At the time of David, the kingdom of Palestine was about the size of the present kingdom of Portugal, and had a population of about three million eight hundred thousand. Under Solomon, his son, fifty-three thousand six hundred foreign-born slaves worked at the construction of the temple, most of whom, probably, were the property of the king or of the state--not private chattels. If we allow that the number of Jewish-born slaves of both sexes and of all ages was even four times as large (which is not at all likely, considering the source and means of supply of slaves), it will give only two hundred and sixty-eight thousand slaves of every type, in Judea, or one-fourteenth part of the population.[8]

How corrupt soever the law and its regulations became, both, nevertheless, remained a check upon domestic slavery. Long previous to the terrible Flavian epoch, the Hebrews were thickly scattered over the eastern and western world, not as exported slaves, but as wanderers and adventurers: there may, indeed, have been slaves among them, but such slaves formed the minority. Strangers, indeed, they were, but free according to then existing municipal limitations. It was the surplus of a free population that thus wandered abroad in search of better fortunes--a phenomenon which is reproduced in the present day by the immigration to America of the surplus population of various European states. So large was this emigration that, in the time of Cicero, the Jews, Italians and Greeks formed the principal nationalities that took part in the tumults of the Roman forum, and on one occasion they hooted Cicero while on the rostrum. The great and striking fact of the preservation of the people of Beni-Israel, and its increase at an epoch when the populations of other countries were slowly dying out, is to be attributed solely to the curb which the law imposed on domestic slavery, and which it partially maintained even in the times of the greatest national decay.

On our knowledge of the internal organism and economy of the Hebrews, may be based certain deductions as to the domestic economy of other contemporaneous nations, especially those of Syria and certain parts of west Asia. Lydia, and above all, Babylon and Assyria are historically known only in the last stages of their existence, when political and domestic slavery had almost completely fused themselves together. For earlier times, the sources of investigation are limited, if not altogether wanting, and analogy alone can guide research. It is, however, probable that only the Mosaic law remained to combat and regulate serfdom and slavery with moral and legal weapons. The Hebrews did not possess, and did not transmit to history, any of the products of a brilliant civilization or of a refined culture such as reaches us in echoes from the antique oriental empires. But the Hebrews were, at the same time, endowed with certain spiritual impulses, aspirations and ideas, far grander than those of any of the surrounding nations. Material civilization and culture cannot be considered as the highest manifestation of man's spirit. History presents examples of the development of the noblest human impulses to a degree out of all proportion with the so-called "civilization" of the nation.

The authority of the Scriptures is invoked as absolute sanction for the enslavement of one branch of the human family; and the theological right to enslave the African is based on the well-known words of Noah: "Cursed be Canaan: a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." The general import of these words, however, even in the strictest construction, has rather a reference to their degradation as a caste--exemplified in the case of the swineherds among the Egyptians, or the Çudras (Soudras) among the Hindus--either of which, however, were chattels deprived of human and family rights.

Modern criticism, guided chiefly by the light of comparative philology and ethnology, has established beyond any doubt the genuine meaning of the patriarchal names of Scripture. Down to Abraham, or at the utmost to Terah his father, all those names bear an ethnical or geographical signification. Abraham, however, is an historical person, and with him positive Jewish history opens.

Moses and the other writers of the book of Genesis were educated among the highly learned and scientific Egyptians; and in Palestine they came in contact with a highly advanced civilization among the Canaanites or Phoenicians, Arabians, and Nabatheans, who were then in the full tide of life and action. From these kindred Shemitic peoples the Hebrews learned the use of written characters; and many of the scientific discoveries of these epochs are dimly preserved in the Mosaic record, as also the general outlines of the ethnic knowledge of the age. Moses and the other writers did but record the various geographic and ethnic names which came to their ears, and for this no inspiration was necessary. Modern scientific criticism, guided by the inductions of reason--that grandest product of the hand of God--now infuses living spirit into what was for ages a dead and incomprehensible letter. This can be easily elucidated by a few examples. The word Ham, or _Erez-Cham_, has no root or meaning in Hebrew or any other Shemitic dialect; it was doubtless borrowed from the Egyptians, and to Egypt must we go for the solution of its signification. Other Biblical names, as, for example, _Eber_, _Pheleg_ or _Peleg_, _Reu_ or _Rehu_, _Serug_ and _Nahor_, represent distinct Shemitic tribes, or, as the record tropically styles them, kingdoms and states, of Mesopotamia (Naharaina). _Eber_, or more properly, _Heber_ (whence our "Hebrews"), signifies "the stranger" or "a person from the other side," that is, one who came from a foreign region. _Aram_ also implies an immigrant from the other side of the Euphrates. So, likewise _Misraim_ (the _Misr_ or M-R of the Egyptians), _Cush_, _Phut_ and _Lud_, constituted distinct tribes and nations in widely distant regions, and perhaps even belonged to different races, according to accepted schemes of ethnology. _Lud_ answers to the Libyan _Lewatah_, the _Leguatan_ of the Byzantine writers, and the classical _Garaman_. _Phut_ and _Lud_ belong to Africa; they are brothers of Mizraim, or its nearest ethnic relations in the remotest antiquity, or perhaps closely allied but independent tribes--as the Scriptures generally record tribes and states politically and geographically independent. _Phut_ and _Lud_ are also mentioned as the allied troops of the Egyptians, or of the Syrians. Finally _Lud_ (_Ludim_) descends from Mizraim; so it may be that they were a branch of the Egyptian stem, just as the Irish are an offshoot of the Gallo-Celtic stock, or the Anglo-Saxons of the Teutonic trunk.

The curse of Noah was hurled against _Canaan_. The philological and ethnic signification of this name has already been explained. The Canaanites, although themselves but an elder branch of the Shemitic family, were the enemies of Beni-Israel, who conquered them and drove them from their land and homes. There is thus a manifest logic in the writer of this part of Genesis condemning them to eternal servitude--for it was written after the subjugation of the Canaanites. Indeed, the same policy of enslavement was pursued by almost all the ancient conquering nations in the flush of their victorious battles; and so, in later times, did the Longobards of Italy, the Goths and Franks in Gaul and Spain, the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, and the Normans in England and Ireland.

There seems to be no scientific doubt that the cursed Canaanites were of the same family and stock as the Hebrews. After the most searching and conscientious investigations in ethnology and philology, it is impossible to regard the Canaanites or Phoenicians as other than Shemites; and with this also coincide the Scriptures--their land of Canaan is not in Africa. Who the _Cushites_ of antiquity were, has likewise been already pointed out. And if, as some have attempted to prove, the ancient Egyptians were not of the African race (according to our modern designation), then they were the Chamites, Cushites, etc., of Scripture. How, through them, the curse can be shown to reach the genuine African, requires an effort of casuistry repulsive both to logic and fact--nay, to the baldest common sense. Not the dimmest shadow of authority can be tortured from the Scriptures for the enslavement of the black or negro race. With somewhat sounder logic has this curse of Canaan been applied, even in Christian times, and among European nations, to classes kept in bondage by masters belonging to the same race. Slavery, indeed, has been the common fate, in successive epochs, of all human races and families; and the oppressor has never been wanting in a pious plea. The so-called nobility of the mediæval Christian ages considered the burghers and subdued laborers as being of impure and degraded blood, and all over Europe they were held to be the descendants of Ham. (Some old aristocratic European families even now consider all who are not nobles to be of the degraded caste). According to this construction of the Noachic curse, the foul taint even now circulates not in the vein of the African slave, but in the veins of the tyrants who oppress him. Neither the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, nor, indeed, any nation of antiquity, considered any special race or tribe as absolutely predestined to eternal bondage. This abominable conception is a putrid growth from mental, social and moral decay. Even Moses had a black woman for his wife (not his concubine), and, nevertheless, was admitted to converse with Jehovah.

The present historical investigation aims not at the vindication of the African: science and history do this triumphantly for all honest and intelligent minds. These pages have but in view to exhibit the terrific havoc and devastation which domestic slavery brings on all races, nations and civilizations, and to point out the complete analogy of slavery as it existed in the past with that which still blasts our country and our age. The leprosy of early Egypt, Syria and Judea, was the same as that which existed long centuries afterward in western Europe; and so also is it with the social leprosy of the ages. And as, in special conditions, a disease may assume a more deadly intensity, so also do social maladies at times show themselves with increased virulence. In antiquity, domestic slavery seized hold of all races and all social and civil conditions: it was not exclusively fastened on any special race. It may be for this reason that it ate but slowly into the marrow of the antique civilizations. Now modern sophistry attempts to give a divine and moral sanction to chattel slavery, and bases its justice on the absolute and predestined inferiority of the _black race_. But the natural work of slavery in destroying manhood, morals and intellect, progresses with terrible rapidity in this country, and is here receiving its most mournful illustration.

But what is the testimony of the highest scientific generalization on this question, of the natural inferiority of the African? All the authoritative names in comparative anatomy and physiology--Owen, Flourens, Bachman, Muller, Haenle, Pritchard, Wagner, Vogt and Draper, among them--together with men of the mental calibre and scientific attainments of William and Alexander von Humboldt--men of every variety of scientific theory, and discussing the question from every possible stand-point--universally deny the existence of any absolute inferiority of the negro race, or even any essential difference or line of demarcation between the races at all! The physiological and craniological differences which are so easily observed, do not amount to a difference of _species_; and cerebral physiology makes no essential distinction between the brain of a white man--even an Anglo-Saxon--and that of a negro.

Still more groundless are the current assertions concerning the mental inferiority of the African race. If such an inferiority really exists at the present day, it is, at the utmost, but transient and conditional in its nature. It can only be such an inferiority as for countless centuries characterized the northern races in contrast to the southern. While the former roved and fought as savages in the wilds and forests, the latter were elaborating grand and harmonious civilizations. It is difficult to imagine what would have been the condition of the Germans--aye, even of the Anglo-Saxons--what kind of civilization they would have inaugurated--without their Christian, Roman and Gallo-Celtic inoculation. If it be urged that certain African tribes _are_ less susceptible of culture, or less endowed with intellectual qualities and capacities than certain white tribes or their offshoots--is it not also the case that the offspring from the same parents may have widely varying powers, tendencies and capacities; and that diverse tribes and nations springing from the same ethnic source, have played very different parts in the drama of universal history?

In the remotest antiquity, the great Gallo-Celtic stem actively influenced the destinies of Europe, and a part of Asia; yet it is only eighty years since the historian Pinckerton, speaking of _Ireland_ and the _Irish_--those purest Celtic remains, said: "It is indeed a matter of supreme indifference at what time the savages of a continent peopled a neighboring island" (Ireland). This remark it would be difficult to justify--although there are even now many Englishmen who consider the genuine Irish an inferior race, and one, too, incapable of any high development.