Slavery in The United States: A Brief Contextual Primer
All servants imported and brought into the Country. . . who were not Christians
in their native Country. . . shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro,
mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion. . . shall be held to be real
estate. If any slave resists his master. . . correcting such slave, and shall
happen to be killed in such correction. . . the master shall be free of all
punishment. . . as if such accident never happened.
- Virginia General Assembly declaration, 1705
We’re interested in how American attitudes toward slavery fit into the larger
historical context we’ve been following in these two courses.
A Brief History Of Ancient,
English and American Slavery
Although slavery was practiced by nearly all cultures, in all parts of the
globe, up until the 18th or 19th century, the legal
conditions of slavery addressed by Douglass – and the Civil War – were somewhat
unique, took centuries to develop and didn’t occur in a vacuum.
Their source was a combination of laws concerning serfs in the European
feudal system and the treatment of slaves by Jews, as described in the Bible, and
by Greeks and
Romans . None of these
earlier societies, however predicated slavery on the basis of race, and racially
based slavery didn’t exist in the US until as late as 1705.
The Bible
Like all ancient (and Medieval etc.) people, the Jews practiced slavery (we need
to be clear that slavery was commonly practiced nearly everywhere in the world
throughout history).
Relevant to American slavery, the Bible
segregated which people could or could not be held as slaves and under what
conditions:
As for
your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female
slaves from among the nations that are around you. You may also buy from among
the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have
been born in your land, and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to
your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of
them, but over your brothers the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over
another ruthlessly.
(Leviticus 25)
Note that
although this passage does not address race, it clearly delineates that
slaves must be from outside one’s cultural cultural and religious group;
this will heavily influence US slavery laws and attitudes.
The Bible also
clarifies how slaves are to be treated with different legal considerations than
slaves, especially in terms of physical violence. For example:
When a man
strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand,
he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be
avenged, for the slave is his money. (Exodus
21)
We also learn
in Genesis that men could have sex with their female slaves (Abraham with Hagar,
Jacob with his two wives’ two slaves), a practice later common in US
slavery, as well.
Greeks and Romans
Greeks: Laws
governing Ancient and Classical Greek slavery varied over time and place, and we
really have very little historical legal data upon which to understand these
diverse systems, but, still, we can generally say that
like the Jews, the Greeks normally
enslaved people who they vanquished in war;
the Greeks maintained a wide variety of different slave categories, some
of which resembled American slavery and some of which resembled indentured
servitude or serfdom; and laws
often protected the slave – to a degree.
Romans
Feudalism
It’s also important to remember that in Medieval Europe and the Americas
slavery was only one of many ways to be a person denied sovereignty.
“Feudalism” broadly refers to the class system differentiating between lords,
vassals and serfs, in which one class, the lords or aristocracy, owns all of the
land; another class, the vassals (lesser aristocracy: dukes, counts, knights),
is granted control of the land; and a third class, the peasantry or serfs, works
the land in a manner that, from our perspective, today, is hard to differentiate
from “slavery”: one's class was based on birth/lineage (although not race) and there was no
social mobility at the bottom;
serfs could not own land, if any private property at all; and of course the
serfdom had no political representation at all.
Columbus And The Conquistadors
Hundreds of years before slavery became a common legal system in North America,
Christopher Columbus planted its seeds in his very first words describing Native
Americans (in what is now the Dominican Republic and Haiti); in his first letter
to King Ferdinand describing the new world, he tells Ferdinand I found “many
islands peopled with inhabitants beyond number. And of them all, I have taken
possession for their Highnesses.”
A couple pages later he notes, in a list of items he is procuring, that
he has procured “slaves as many as they shall order to be shipped – and these
shall be from idolators.”
1492 wasn’t just the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, that year also marked
the end of the Christian “Reconquista”, the war against the Moors when Ferdinand and
Isabella defeated the last Moorish city Sevilla (the Moors invaded Spain in 711,
taking it from the Visigoths) –
and in that year the Spanish also kicked
all the Jews out of Spain.
This is important because it contextualizes Columbus’ attitude toward the
“Indians” as one formed in the Christian battles against Muslims – and Jews:
during the centuries-long conflict for the control of Spain, both
Christians and Muslims had been using the Bible to justify enslaving each other,
and when Columbus “discovered” the New World, this attitude toward other
religions and ethnic groups had reached fever pitch.
Indentured Servitude
By the time Europeans reached the Americas and traditional land-holding systems
were being interrupted by all the new condition of “unclaimed” land, land was
now made available to
people other than the lords and vassals. This created a need for a new
legal class system: indentured servitude.
These were people -- normally Europeans -- who sold their own freedom (or had it sold by the state, as
criminals, or by their parents) to masters for a limited period of time;
they became the legal property of their masters until they had worked off
the debt, at which time they returned to the status of freemen.
Early Colonial America
Initially white/European indentured servants and African slaves were treated
similarly or even identically in the colonies;
they worked alongside one another, could marry, and the condition was
temporary: after a given time both were returned to freedom.
In Virginia, in the 1620s, for example, the census lists Africans as “servants”and
notes the dates at which they gained their freedom and purchased land
This changed in 1640, however, when
a black man named John Punch ran away with two white indentured servants.
Upon their capture the two white servants were punished with an
additional four years of service each, and Punch was
sentenced to "serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural
life."
This is the
point at which American slavery is predicated upon race.
Here is a good article on how this pamphlet rocked Moscow and the UI communities: "The Late Unpleasantness In Idaho"