Chapter 104
Slavery and servitude; masters and slaves; bondage and emancipation.
574 passages · 169 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Slavery is the oldest form of the question how one human being may stand to another. These books treat it in its literal senses: the captive led from a burning city, the girl cried for sale in a market, the bondman bound to his lord’s land, the indentured apprentice, the African in chains below deck. They also treat it figuratively, as the bondage of the soul to passion, sin or a tyrant. It is a great idea for these books because it runs from Homer’s swineherd to Lincoln’s proclamation. Along the way it draws in nearly every other inquiry: property and justice, nature and convention, economy and the state, religion, and the meaning of freedom itself. The collection holds no sustained ancient defense of slavery, yet the ancients took it as given. The moderns, by degrees, came to find it intolerable.
The most elementary form is chattel slavery, the person as property. In the Odyssey the nurse Eurycleia was bought for twenty oxen, though she was honored in the house1. Eumaeus himself buys a thrall from the Taphians2. The Preacher counts his menservants and maidservants among his possessions3. In the Thousand and One Nights a slave-girl goes to brokers for ten thousand gold pieces, and one broker advises resting her ten days to raise her price4,5. Raleigh records Spaniards buying women and children from cannibals for hatchets and reselling them at a large profit6. Darwin finds a governor selling Indian children for a few pounds apiece7. Beside such outright ownership stand the bound forms of labor. Debtors at Rome were dragged off like slaves8. Germans gambled away their own liberty9. More’s Utopians make criminals into bondmen rather than prisoners of war10, and Harrison would make thieves into galley slaves11. Franklin’s America is full of indentured servants12,13. Woolman grieves at having sold a negro lad to serve till thirty, nine years longer than their own children were bound14,15. Feudal bondage fills the gap between these forms. Froissart’s commons protest that no man ought to be bond and demand to be made free forever16,17. Voltaire recalls villains bought and sold with the land like cattle18. Smith notes that the feudal occupier’s person and effects belonged to his lord19. Even the animals furnish an image. Aesop’s chained dog and bridled horse figure servitude20,21. Darwin describes slave-making ants whose masters are helpless without their captives22,23.
How does anyone come to be a slave? The ancient answer is chiefly war. The captives of Troy bow beneath the chain24. Agamemnon, bringing home Cassandra, remarks that none wear the slave’s yoke willingly25. Andromache tells of being made more handmaid than bride to her conqueror26. Eumaeus was stolen as a child and sold27, and Sindbad is seized by pirates and sold28. Fortune of this kind reaches the great as well: Clytemnestra reminds Cassandra that even Heracles was sold29, and Sidney recalls that Plato was made a slave by Dionysius30.
The moderns ask a deeper question: whether some men are slaves by nature. Hobbes answers directly that master and servant arise by consent, not by any natural difference of wit, and he rejects Aristotle’s natural slavery31. Rousseau goes further. In the state of nature no one could enslave another, because among men who possess nothing there are no chains of dependence32,33. Servitude begins only with property and new wants. The rich enslave their neighbors like wolves that have tasted human flesh34, and the end of the process is master and slave as the last degree of inequality35. Mill makes a kindred point about morals. The morality that ruled between Spartans and Helots, or planters and negroes, expressed the interests of the dominant class36. Against these accounts of origin stands an older, moralizing view, which Milton voices most strongly. Ham’s race is cursed as servant of servants37. Romans degenerate through lust are “by themselves enslaved,” since one cannot make inward slaves outwardly free38. Nations bring servitude on themselves by their vices39.
On the justice of slavery, the decisive modern argument concerns whether liberty can be alienated at all. The Body of Liberties of Massachusetts still permits bond slavery for lawful captives of just wars and for those who sell themselves40. Rousseau denies that any man may renounce his liberty or bind his posterity. He answers Pufendorf that if a slave’s child is born a slave, then a man is not born a man41,42. Mill reaches the same conclusion by another road: a contract of self-sale is void, because it abdicates the very liberty that justifies respecting a man’s choices43. Woolman applies the principle within the household. He refuses to draw wills making some children masters over others44. He also takes apart the stock defenses of African slavery. The plea of compassion is false while slaves are bought for gain and their purchase fuels wars45, and the claim that Africans descend from Cain or Ham is groundless46. Darwin rejects those who call slavery a tolerable evil, or who excuse it by comparison with England’s poor47,48.
The religious condemnation has an ancient root. Epictetus says that one must not impose on others the slavery one shuns oneself49. It reaches its fullest expression in Woolman, who declares slave-keeping inconsistent with the Christian religion and refuses to write bills of sale50,51. Yet the tradition’s record is mixed. Mill observes that St. Paul’s accommodation to existing morality gave slavery apparent sanction52. Lessing asks whether Christians treat their slaves better than the Egyptians did53. Emerson counts slave-holding religions as evidence of religion’s corruption54.
The condition of slaves ranges widely. Woolman describes families separated, meager food, whipping and nakedness55. Whittier writes of children sold and mothers crying56. Darwin is revolted by the planned sale of slave families and by a slave cowering from a blow57. Raleigh finds native lords chained and tortured by Berreo58. Cervantes’s captive rows at the oar without hope and describes the Algiers baths, where life hung on a master’s whim59,60. Drake’s Pezoro works a hundred slaves in his mines61. Kindliness appears too. Plutarch recalls Romans who lived and worked beside their slaves62, and Darwin judges that Brazilian slaves on some fazendas live contented lives63. But Darwin adds that such patriarchal charm lasts only as long as the idea of slavery can be banished64. In law the slave is marked by incapacities. His testimony is taken under torture65. He can make no will66, and Rome excluded him from the army67. Among the Germans a hair knot distinguished free from slave68.
The duties binding master and servant form a separate and largely ancient strand. Job did not despise his servants, for the same God made both in the womb69. Epictetus calls slaves kinsmen and offspring of God, though bought with a price70. Pliny governs his household on the ideal of a father of a family71. Penn asks masters to treat servants as fellow-creatures and to correct them without passion72, and he praises fidelity in the servant as the virtue that has freed slaves and raised servants to sons73. Homer had already seen the cost of servitude to the servant. When slavery comes, Zeus takes away half a man’s virtue74. Locke observes that slavish discipline breeds a slavish temper that obeys only while the rod is present75.
Dominion also corrupts and endangers the master. Pliny reports slaves murdering their master Macedo and concludes that kindness is no safeguard76. Woolman finds that bondage of rational creatures breeds a discontent that afflicts masters’ families77. Rousseau’s man of new wants becomes in a sense the slave of those he commands78. Comedy and fable turn the relation upside down. Aristophanes has Xanthias and Dionysus trade the hero’s costume back and forth79. Andersen’s Shadow takes its master’s place80. Caliban rejoices in “freedom” while merely exchanging Prospero for Stephano81.
Economically, Smith argues that free labor comes cheaper than slave labor, because the free man manages his own upkeep frugally while the master manages it negligently82. Woolman makes the parallel moral observation that slaves lack any incentive to industry83. Slavery also underwrote the citizen life of antiquity. Bacon notes that ancient states left manufactures to slaves so that citizens were free for arms84, and Taine sees in Greek slaves the source of citizens’ leisure85. Smith shows the cost of this arrangement at Rome, where slave labor left poor freemen without employment or independence86. Macaulay adds that numerous slaves force every freeman to master arms against these household enemies87.
Freedom came in many ways. Odysseus promises his loyal thralls wives and houses88, Athens enfranchised slaves who fought at sea89, and the Koran makes freeing a believing captive an act of expiation90. Pliny readily manumits his slaves91. Trajan rules that exposed children raised as slaves may claim their freedom92. Some slaves freed themselves by flight. Drake’s Cimaroons fled Spanish cruelty and became a free nation93. Darwin tells of an old woman who killed herself rather than return to slavery, and he sets her love of freedom against the obstinacy others ascribed to her94. The law answered flight. The Constitution requires fugitives from service to be delivered up95. The Act of 1850 bars the fugitive’s own testimony and punishes those who harbor him96. Whittier’s Massachusetts refuses fetters on her soil97, and Lincoln asks for safeguards so that no free man is surrendered98. Modern emancipation follows: the English abolition in the West Indies99, the Emancipation Proclamation100, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which still excepts punishment for crime101. Darwin’s freed slaves on St. Helena are poor but value their freedom102. Dana’s mission Indians, by contrast, are freed only in name103.
The Atlantic trade is where the modern controversy took shape. Columbus offers the sovereigns as many heathen slaves as they wish104. Vespucci’s company sells 222 captives at Cadiz105. Burns gives voice to the African torn from Senegal and sold into Virginia106. Opposition took organized form among the Quakers, chiefly through Woolman. He was uneasy at eating at tables supported by slave labor and left money for the slaves who served him107,108. He pressed the Yearly Meeting, saying delay was not permissible109, and the Friends resolved to treat slave buyers as offenders110. He went so far as to question trading in West India produce111. Emerson likewise reckons the sugar on our tables against slaves dying in Cuba112. In the law of nations, the Treaty of Ghent calls the traffic irreconcilable with humanity and justice113, and later both powers agree to maintain squadrons to suppress it114. The Constitution, meanwhile, counts three fifths of “other persons” and allows importation until 1808115,116.
In America the question came to a war. At his first inauguration Lincoln disclaims any right to interfere with slavery where it existed, and he names its extension as the only substantial dispute117,118. By the Second Inaugural he calls slavery the cause of the war and an offense to be atoned for in unrequited toil119. Mill condemns the slave power’s expansion as the worst tyranny of men over men120. Lowell judges that emancipation was forced by circumstances rather than avowed as an aim121, and that slaveholders’ arrogance made more abolitionists than the agitators did122.
Alongside the literal institution, the metaphor of slavery carries a whole moral psychology. Epictetus holds that whoever places his good in outward things becomes the slave of those who control them123. Marcus Aurelius calls obedience without changed opinion a form of slavery124. Samson judges his former bondage to effeminacy worse than the mill125. Penn’s miser is a slave to his gold126. Christianity transposes the theme. Paul calls the believing bondservant the Lord’s freedman127. Luther teaches that bodily bondage cannot enslave the soul128. Pascal finds Christians called to serve and yet free children129. This spiritual freedom may console the slave, but it may also dull the urgency of setting him free. The political metaphor pulls the other way. Rousseau warns that slavery cannot be judged from the praises the enslaved give their peaceful chains130. Byron refuses to live in a land of slaves131. Emerson holds that a Toussaint in irons would overmatch his captors132. Mill finds new servitudes in mental conformity and in bureaucracy133,134.
Some questions remain open at the end of these books. One is whether the inner freedom of the Stoic and the Christian is a refuge for the bondman or an excuse for leaving him in chains. Another is whether formal emancipation ends servitude, when it may survive under other names: the penal exception of the Thirteenth Amendment, the mission Indians free only in name, and the wage bondage Morris sees in the market135.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
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