Part 9

The whole soil of the Roman community constituted an _ager Romanus_ or _publicus_. Every citizen, as a part of the _populus_ or state, received therefrom a share of the public land for his private use. When the Romans extended their dominions by subduing the neighboring villages and districts, the lands of such districts, their pasturages, etc., were incorporated into the _ager Romanus_, and the inhabitants were sometimes obliged to settle in Rome or in lands in its vicinity. From these originated the plebeians, who, under certain conditions, received shares or lots in the _ager publicus_ or _Romanus_. The aim of these primitive wars was neither to kidnap nor enslave the subdued tribes, nor even to transform them into serfs or Helots, at the utmost to make them tributaries.

To the legendary Romulus were attributed the regulations or laws which forbade the massacre or enslavement of the male youth of conquered villages or districts, and prohibited also the transformation of the conquered lands into pasturages, and provided that they should be parcelled into small homesteads for Roman citizens. At first two acres, and afterward seven, constituted such a civic patrimony or homestead. It was the abandonment of this law in after ages which generated slavery and the ruin of the populace.

Only the prisoners made on the battle-field and counted among the spoils, were sold by the state at public auction: _sub hasta_, "under the spear," and _sub corona_, "the citizen wearing a crown"--to the citizens or members of the community. Such prisoner, like all other vended booty, became a _mancipium_, _res mancipia_, (from _manu capere_, "taken, caught by the hand.") Such slaves, in all probability, were not numerous. A more prolific source of slavery was the right to enslave a debtor for life. The debtor became a _mancipium_; and even when the right to enslave him was abolished, the legal formality of catching him or touching by the hand, was maintained.

The power of the father or chief of the household--_patria potestas_--was limitless, in the precincts of the house, over both the family and the servants. The father, be he patrician or plebeian, could sell his son into slavery, but the right was very seldom used. So also, the father had the right of life and death over all his family and household. Manumission of slaves was common; it existed from the most ancient times. The slave could also buy his liberty. Subsequently, in the last centuries of the republic and under the emperors, a slave could be emancipated by various positive enactments, and the status of the manumitted slave often passed through various gradations before reaching absolute independence. The fortieth book of the Pandects contains several chapters relating to manumission.

Sometimes, though rarely, under the kings, the _public slaves_--or those of the state, exclusively war prisoners--were employed on public works, or to take care of public buildings, or to attend on magistrates or priests. The condition of public slaves was preferable to that of the private slaves; indeed, the former subsequently had the right to dispose by will of half of their property.

The land was tilled by the hands of the senators themselves, patricians though they were. If a patrician (_pater_) possessed more land than he could cultivate himself, he divided it among small free cultivators, or let it out; and no servile hand desecrated the plough. The slaves employed in the house were not numerous.

King Servius Tullius inaugurated a political reform, intended to alleviate the condition of the plebeians oppressed by the patricians; and in preparation for it he took a census. At that time Rome had eighty-four thousand able-bodied citizens between the ages of eighteen and sixty years, or a total population of about four hundred thousand free persons of all ages and sexes. To this number must be added the plebeians, who were not yet citizens. The artisans, operatives, clients and strangers perhaps doubled this estimate of the population of Rome, the limits of which then stretched from the Tiber to the Anio, including, probably, the lands of Alba, and making in all, an area of about one hundred and twenty or one hundred and forty square miles. There would thus be more than five thousand five hundred inhabitants to a square mile; so that there could have remained but very little room for slaves.

In the first stages of the republic, the patricians continually increased their landed estates, and by renting these to tenants, they acquired power over the poor free laborers, and by lending them money, got a claim on their bodies and also on the free yeomen and rustics. The patricians were hard creditors, and rigorously availed themselves of their legal rights, and their _ergastula_--caves or vaulted prisons--were almost continually filled with poor debtors. This impoverishment of the free yeomanry increased after the terrible devastations perpetrated by the Gauls under Brennus. Finally, these financial oppressions generated those revolts of the plebeians which terminated in their obtaining political rights and full citizenship, together with the jurisprudential reform known as the Twelve Tables.

During the first three or four centuries of the republic, the number of slaves who were non-debtors was very limited. At the census made in the year of Rome 280, the free population amounted to over four hundred and ten thousand persons, and there were then only seventeen thousand slaves.

Few, if any, women were originally enslaved. If the nursling of a Roman family often drew its milk from the paps of a slave woman, the Roman matron, in turn, often gave her breast to the babe of a slave.

In those early times the slaves were kindly treated; they were regarded rather as members of the family than as chattels; they took their meals with their masters, and participated in the sacrifices and worship of the gods. They were not considered dangerous elements in the household or the state. From that early epoch also date certain privileges conceded to the slaves--such as their earnings or _peculium_, which, at first established only by common usage, became afterward defined and specified by the civil law, in which originally the slave was almost entirely ignored.

Plebeians, proletarians, clients, free artisans--almost all of whom were Romans--formed, in the first centuries, the bulk of the slaves kept in the _ergastula_ of the patricians. Frequently, when a consul wanted soldiers, he would order the creditors to open their vaults and disgorge the victims for his service in a campaign. And sometimes, though rarely, a consular edict quashed the debts and set them free.

In these earliest times of the Republic the name of a _proletarius_, or procreator of children, was held in honor. It was to an increase of the number of its freemen, not of its slaves, that the Republic hoped for duration and power. To be called _colonus_, or a cultivator, was also an honor to a Roman citizen, whether patrician or plebeian, in the times of Cincinnatus, Dentatus, and Regulus. Labor was then a high distinction, nay it was sacred; and a slave may almost be considered an accident in domestic pursuits. Scaurus, then one of the wealthiest and most powerful senators, had six slaves, Curius Dentatus one, Regulus one, when he commanded the Roman legions against Carthage, while Cincinnatus may have had one, but most probably none.

The three hundred patrician Fabii, who left Rome, crossed the Tiber and settled at the utmost limits of the state, to guard and defend it from the inroads of invaders--were yeomen, ploughmen, and farmers. And without intending to offend or disparage the _ennobled_ pro-slavery militants of this age and country, one may surely suppose that they have at least a little respect for the names and the character of a Dentatus, a Cincinnatus, and a Regulus.

However, the patricians and many of the rich plebeians continued uninterruptedly to increase their lands in the _ager publicus_ at the cost of the smaller yeomen, and that at a time when rural slavery may be said to have been in its infancy. And it was the object of the celebrated agrarian laws to restore the balance between the rich and the poor in the possession of the public lands.

The wars carried on by Rome with the Greek cities in Italy, which were crowded with slaves, and the wars carried on beyond the borders of Italy, were the great nurseries of slavery. In such wars free citizens were of course killed in vast numbers, and slave war-prisoners were brought back to Rome in their stead. The Punic wars are the turning point in the political history and in the social and moral development of the Romans. These wars gave the first great stimulus both to urbane, and rustic slavery. Urbane slaves were those employed in houses and villas for personal service; rustic slaves were those engaged in working the estates.

Rome became more and more a maritime and commercial emporium, and slaves were now imported as merchandise, besides the continually increasing number of prisoners of war. Thus Regulus brought over twenty thousand Carthaginians of all conditions of life, who were sold into slavery. But even at the time of the second Punic war, the number of slaves of all kinds must have been comparatively very small; for after the terrible defeat at Cannæ, the Roman senate ordered the slaves to be armed, and only eight thousand were inscribed on the military roll. The census taken about that time gave, in all the state, two hundred and thirty-seven thousand Roman adult citizens, or 1,185,000 free persons of all sexes and ages; making in all, 770,000 Romans, with their Italian allies, fit for military duty.

The victorious Hannibal sold into slavery thousands of Roman citizens; while the final conquest of the Carthaginian empire and of Sicily poured many thousands of slaves into Rome from Africa, from Sicily, and from Spain. Thus thirty thousand inhabitants of Palermo and twenty-five thousand of Agrigentum, were sold into slavery. Among those brought by Scipio from Africa, were two thousand artisans whom he promised he would not sell, but would keep as slaves of the state.

Henceforth conquests in and out of Italy became a social and political necessity for Rome. The spoils and lands rapidly increased the wealth of the citizens, but principally of the patricians. The habits of luxury, the contempt of manual and especially agricultural labor, became general; and with it the demand increased for slaves to work the estates and to cater to the other wants of the rich and effeminate Romans. So now again, war and rapine, the annexation of Mexico, Central America, Cuba and Hayti, are the aims of the militant American slaveocracy.

In course of time Rome became a mart for slaves, as great as were Carthage, Corinth, Athens and Syracuse. The slave market, like all the other markets in the city, was superintended by the ædiles. The municipal regulations compelled the vender to hang a scroll around the neck of the slave, containing a description of his character, in which his defects were declared and his health warranted, especially his freedom from epilepsy and violent diseases. The nativity of the slave was considered important and was also to be declared. When the Romans conquered Asia, the Syrians (who belonged to the Caucasian race) were considered to be especially adapted for slavery, just as the negroes are at the present day. An incalculable majority of the Roman slaves were of the Caucasian or Japhetic race. Where, oh, where, during these almost countless centuries, slept the Scriptural curse of Ham?

The Hannibalian war was eminently destructive to the yeomanry and to their small homesteads. Internal domestic economy was shaken from the foundation and almost entirely destroyed; the arable lands were rapidly turned into wild sheep pastures, with wild slaves on them as shepherds; the patricians no longer considered agriculture their first occupation, when they found that the slaves of Sicily, Africa, and afterward Egypt, were able to nourish both them and the people; and any land still in culture, was worked by poor farmers, by colonists and slaves. The term _colonist_, also, now acquired a somewhat degraded signification, for they were now but poor proletarians and plebeians. Now also came into more common use the legal denomination _familia rustica_, or rural chattels; and perhaps at this time, or soon after, originated in Rome the proverb: "_As many slaves, so many enemies._"

In the course of the sixth century, U.C., there burst out in great force the antagonism between the free rural laborer and the slave. The struggle for life and death between the large land and slave holders and the yeomanry or freeholders, became more and more active. That which had taken root but slowly in the previous centuries, became strengthened by contact with nations of older and more corrupt civilizations. The influence of Carthage appeared in the rural economy of the Romans, and they began to model their agriculture on the Carthaginian slave husbandry. The book on "Agriculture," written by Magon, a Carthaginian, was translated into Latin by order of the senate. The country was rapidly filled with slaves, and now originated that reckless cruelty in dealing with them which was reflected soon after in the laws. The large slaveholders continually enlarged their estates by buying or seizing under various pretexts the small homesteads. In the times of Publicola and of the Twelve Tables, the small freeholders had been driven to despair by debts and executions; but now they were ruined and utterly destroyed by slave labor. The patricians, who had formerly been mortgagees of homesteads, and for whom the freeholder had worked to quash his indebtedness, now became large planters. Thus in Rome and throughout Italy, as well as in the conquered provinces, the slave tide rose higher and higher. These provinces constituted the estates of the sovereign Roman people; but in their administration the patricians applied the same discipline, the same iron rod that they held over their slaves. They kept the ironed chattels in walled courts and prisons, and it became proverbial that "A good mastiff should show no mercy to slaves"--a proverb still applicable to the bloodhounds of slavery.

The poor freemen, expelled from the country and deprived of employment, crowded more and more into Rome, increasing, to a fearful extent, the Roman proletariate. For more than three centuries the best men of Rome, Crassus, Licinius, Emilianus, Drusus, and the Gracchi, made various efforts, to arrest by agrarian laws, the destruction of freeholds, first by the large estates, and then by slaveholders. These efforts were the principal causes of the internal struggles and civil wars of the Roman republic, and their failure proved the destruction of the Roman world. Scipio Æmilianus Africanus prophecied the downfall of liberty and of the Roman state, if this substitution of plantation economy for the old yeomanry and freeholds did not cease. About the year 620 U.C., scarcely any freeholds for yeomen existed in Etruria; and Plutarch says, "When Tiberius Gracchus went through Tuscany to Numantia he found the country almost depopulated, there being scarcely any free husbandmen or free shepherds, but for the most part imported slaves. He then first conceived the course of policy," etc. An account almost precisely similar of the present condition of Virginia may be found in a speech made a few years ago by one of her own sons--one, too, of the most ardent upholders of slavery, whether as governor of the state, as active politician, or as a private citizen. The Roman planter desolated Etruria by devoting it to the breeding of cattle; the Virginian desolates her prolific soil and his own manhood by devoting them to the breeding of "niggers." But here the analogy ceases. The Virginian savior will stand in history the antipodes of the Gracchi.

The Roman oligarchs, slaveholders and slave-traders, baffled the sublime efforts of the Gracchi, who attempted not only to preserve but to increase the number of freeholders. The Gracchi were murdered by the oligarchs and the degraded rabble. Publius Scipio Nasica and other senators, fomented and incited Publius Satureius and Lucius Rufus, who, armed with bludgeons or legs of broken chairs, struck down and murdered Tiberius Gracchus. With similar barbarity Senator Sumner was assaulted in his chair of office; and Senators Toombs and Mason, as well as Hons. Keitt and Brooks, had thus their bloody prototypes in Rome. The murder of the Gracchi was applauded by the degraded Roman rabble; so also did the "poor whites" in the South applaud the assault on Sumner, as well as every other act of savage violence perpetrated in Washington or elsewhere in the interests of slavery. The Roman men and matrons, however, did not present _cudgels of honor_ to Publius Satureius and Lucius Rufus.

The current of slavery now flowed in unchecked course, ever enlarging as it advanced. The free citizens, deprived of their homes and property, though now inspired no more by the antique Roman virtue, nevertheless preserved somewhat of their former bravery, and the legions extended the Roman sway over Greece and Asia. The captives taken from the cities and districts were no longer colonized, as formerly, but were sold into slavery like prisoners made on the battle-field, and the most vigorous and patriotic portion of the population of other countries was sold as chattels. The depopulation of Macedon, Epirus, and Greece by the Roman conquerors, has been already mentioned. Cato brought large numbers of slaves from Cyprus; Lucullus must have made innumerable thousands in Bithynia and Cappadocia, judging from the low price of about two-thirds of a dollar per head, for which his human booty was sold. Marius made slaves of more than one hundred and fifty thousand Gauls, Kymri and Teutons, and among them undoubtedly many Angles and Saxons.

The exactions, taxes and tributes which the Roman oligarchy compelled the conquered kingdoms to pay, increased the general poverty, ruin and slavery. The men and children of the Sicilians and other nations were sold into slavery by the Roman tax-gatherers: and when Marius demanded from Nicomede of Bithynia, as an ally, his contingent of troops, the king made answer that all his able-bodied men were sold into slavery by the Roman tax and tribute gatherers. And even to the present day, in the slave states, they sell into slavery free men and women for the costs of prison and judgment.

All these slaves, either in person or cash, centred toward Rome, and thus increased the power and resources of the oligarch slaveholders, while at the same time they incontinently devoured the domestic economy of the state; and the impoverished and homeless freemen took their revenge on the oligarchs under Marius, father and son, and under Cinna; while Sylla, in turn, was the avenging sword of the oligarchs and slaveholders. In his time slaveholders were composed principally of wealthy ancient patricians and new rich men or cavaliers, who together constituted the oligarchy of capital: just as now, the "old families," as they are called, of the slave states combine with the new plantation-buyers, overseers, traders, etc., and jointly form the slave-driving oligarchy.

Sylla shed in torrents the blood of those who dared to hope for a reform from Marius and the reduction of the power of the slaveholders. He was their soul and their representative, and was guilty of every cruelty to uphold the interest, not of Rome, but of the egotistical oligarchy; just, again, as in the slave states, the diminutive would-be Syllas are ready to sacrifice every thing to maintain slavery, even to the destruction of society and the republic; while the public spirit of a free state makes every freeman seek his own welfare in the general good.

In the time of Sylla, Italy contained about thirteen millions of slaves; and slave insurrections, both there and in Sicily, succeeded each other almost uninterruptedly. History has recorded some of them, and immortalized the name of the heroic Spartacus. The insurrection in Sicily also, under Ennus, lasted more than four years, and cost the lives of nearly a million of victims.

Slave-breeding was not yet conducted on a large scale. The advice of Cato the Grumbler, was against its permission; and he obliged his slaves to pay him a tax from their _peculium_ whenever they cohabited with the other sex.

The large amount of grain imported from conquered countries cultivated by slaves, brought about a competition which soon destroyed the homesteads of the yeomanry, and transformed the fertile Campagna and almost the whole of Italy into a vast cattle pasturage.

It has been already mentioned (see "Greeks") that during the post-Alexandrian dissolution of Greece and of the east, Cilician piracy was rampant in the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Until Pompey destroyed this piracy, it had its centres and markets in Crete, in Rhodes, and even in Alexandria; but the principal mart was in Delos, where sometimes ten thousand slaves changed masters in a single day. The Roman merchants were the best patrons of the Cilician pirates; and recent developments show that our slave-planters are again beginning to be willing customers to the Americo-African pirates and slave-traders. In general, wherever the capitalist-slaveholder is permitted to develop his supremacy in a state, both man and society are materially and morally ruined. Thus it was with Rome and Italy at that epoch: and so also, the American slave states move on rapidly in the orbit from which Rome whirled into the abyss.

In the Mithridatic and Asiatic wars, Pompey enslaved more than two millions of Asiatics; and according to the census made under him, Italy contained at that time only 450,000 able-bodied citizens capable of military duty, or a total free population of about 2,200,000. It is also asserted that Cæsar enslaved at least one million of Gauls. In the age of Cicero only about two thousand citizens of Rome possessed landed property, but with it they owned legions of chattels; and Cicero--a parvenu without manhood, first the accessory and then the betrayer of Cataline--maintained that only slaveholders could be considered respectable.

After the patricians were restored to power by Sylla, they found that war and hereditary slavery did not supply the necessary quantity of slaves; and they consequently began to kidnap and enslave poor freemen--even their Roman fellow-citizens. To rob and take violent possession of the remaining freeholds became now a matter of course. In the time of Cicero nearly all handicrafts in the city, which had once been in the hands of freemen and clients, were carried on by slaves, either directly for their masters, or indirectly by being hired out to others. It became more and more common to hire out skilful slaves and to train them up with the view of receiving the revenues of their proficiency. It was then just as it is now; for then Italy, as now the slave states, was owned by slave-drivers, worked by slaves, and guarded by heartless overseers and bloodhounds.