AUTHORITIES:

Polybius, Grote, O. Muller, Beckh, Curtius, Clinton, Finlay, etc.

At the foot of the Julian Alps, above the head of the Adriatic, the branch of the Aryas which peopled Greece separated from their brethren who wandered into Italy. Keeping to the coast of Adria, the seceders reached the mountainous gorges of Epirus and the plains of Thessaly. From the southern slopes of the Cambunian mountains and of Olympus, they, in course of time, spread over Greece and Peloponnesus. Such at least are the results of the most recent researches concerning the pioneers whose labors prepared that region for the part it afterward played in history. They cleared the forests, drained the marshes, cut canals to let out the stagnant waters in mountain-basins so common in Greece; they regulated the currents of rivers and streams, made the soil arable, and the region fit for man and for further culture. These primitive cultivators of the valleys of Greece, and builders of the Cyclopean structures, called themselves, or were called by others, Pelasgi (that is, those issuing from black soil, etc.), and are regarded as the earliest occupants of Hellenic soil. They were the first settlers, and most probably offshoots of the same original stem whose successive branches mingled with[Pg 98] the Pelasgi, or crowded them out and took their place in history as Achives, Hellenes, and Ionians—the last being considered been ancient as well as by modern writers as having been the autochthones of Attica and of other neighboring regions. To these Pelasgi and other primitive occupants, to their laborious pursuits and occupations, to their simple social structure, as well as to the essentially primitive social life of the Greeks, Herodotus refers—asserting that at the outset slavery was unknown in Greece, and especially in Attica.

The Pelasgian epoch was succeeded by what is commonly called the legendary or heroic age. In this Homeric epoch free yeomen or agriculturists own and till the soil; all the handicrafts and professions are free. Carpenters, smiths, leather-dressers, etc., were all freemen, and so also were the bards and "the leeches" (a highly esteemed class in primitive Greece). But wealth already began to accumulate, and the farms of the more fortunate were tilled by poor hired freemen called Thetes.

The geographical conformation of Greece furnished, as it still does, a natural incitement to war and piracy. Both formed prominent characteristics of the heroic times. Ph?nician vessels visited the shores, and Ph?nician settlements and factories were built at various points. These traffickers, perhaps, taught the Greeks that the feeble may be profitably enslaved by the strong, or at any rate they were the customers of the Greek pirate.

[Pg 99]

The general Greek word for slave explains the origin of slavery. Dmoos and dmoe, slave, go back to dmao or damao, to subdue, to subjugate, and so bear witness of war and violence either between individuals, or between clans, tribes, and districts, and then of incursions into distant lands. Slavery became an object of luxury, but not of social and economical necessity. It was confined to the dwelling of the chiefs and the sovereign; but did not invade the whole community. Leaders of freebooting expeditions seized every kind of booty, taking as many prisoners as they could on sea and on land. If the expedition or foray failed, the chief and his followers became, in their turn, prisoners and slaves. The prisoners were employed for domestic use within the precincts of the dwelling, as servants, shepherds, etc., or were sold or exchanged for others. The Ph?nicians sold Asiatics or Libyans to Greeks and to Pontian barbarians, and received in exchange the prey made by Greeks in Greece or in Pontus. The Ph?nicians occasionally kidnapped women and boys and sold them to Asiatics, Africans, and Celt-Iberians. Then, as everywhere throughout remotest and classical antiquity, many of the enslaved had previously belonged to the higher and even the highest conditions in their respective tribes, nations, or communities. So Eum?us, the swineherd of Ulysses immortalized by Homer, was the son of a chief of some island or district, who, having been kidnapped by Ph?nicians, was sold to Laertes.[Pg 100] In medi?val times, likewise, the prisoner taken on the battle-field and kept for ransom, if not for service, often was superior in birth and station to his keeper. No such social classifications, however, are intrinsic or normal, but only conditional, relative, and conventional, even when inherited. Logically they have the same signification and value in a well-graduated society, with its castles, palaces, charters and other privileges, as on plantations or among roving nomads and savage tribes. And thus, among the Southern slaves, descending from prisoners of war or from kidnapped Africans, there may be several of a purer aristocratic lineage than many of their drivers, even if the latter were F.F.V.

Enfranchisement, manumission, and ransom were largely practised in legendary Greece. The children of freemen by slave-women were free, and equal to those of legitimate birth. Most of the wars and expeditions during the heroic or Achivian piratical epoch, were made for the sake of kidnapping men and women, to sell or to exchange with the Ph?nicians for various luxuries. Such was the general origin of slavery at the time when history throws its first rays on the Grecian world.

Many defend slavery on the plea that it softened and softens the results of wars and inroads; that prisoners, once slaughtered, are preserved for the sake of being sold into slavery. But already, during the so-called heroic age of Greece, wars and forays were made for the express purpose of getting captives[Pg 101] or for kidnapping. The robber or pirate was always sure to find a buyer for his booty, otherwise he would have had no inducement to act. And thus slavery, instead of softening war, was its very source. The Greeks of the heroic age were incited to make inroads and depredations by the facility and security they had of profitably disposing of their captives by selling them into slavery. The bloody drama played, many, many centuries ago, in Peloponnesus and Greece, on the Ionian and Egean seas, and among the islands of the Archipelago, is repeated to-day on both sides of the Atlantic—on African and on American shores and islands. The tribes in Africa war with each other, destroy and burn towns and villages, expressly and exclusively because they find customers for slaves among Christians, and among self-styled civilized, humanized white men. Thus much for the assertion that American slavery contributes to soften the fate of prisoners of war in Africa, and humanizes the savages. It bestializes them, together with their piratical purchasers and their Southern patrons. The analogy holds good here, at a distance of many thousand years and many thousand miles, among different social conditions, in a different civilization, and in the higher moral development of the white man.

New invasions successively rolled over the valleys of Hellas; they changed considerably the social condition of the populations, expelling or subduing many of the former occupants and yeomen. From the north, from Thessaly, poured Hellenes, Heraclides, and Do[Pg 102]rians, west and south, principally into the Peloponnesus. Henceforth the whole Greek family was represented in history by two cardinal social, political, and intellectual currents, through the so-called Doric and Ionic races.

In Thessaly, serfdom—but not chattelhood—seems to have been anciently established. New-comers subdued the earlier tillers of the soil. The subdued became villeins, bondsmen, adscripti gleb?. Such dependent cultivators were the Thessalian Penest?, who paid over to the landowners a certain proportion of the produce of the soil; furnished those retainers by which the families of the chiefs, or the more powerful, were surrounded, and served in war as their followers. But they could not be sold out of the country; they had a permanent tenure in the soil, and enjoyed family and village relations. Perhaps more than twenty centuries afterward, this was also the condition of the rustics all over western and medi?val Europe, and in some parts this condition even lasted down to our century—everywhere similar events generating emphatically analogous results and conditions. The holdings of the Thessalian Penest? were protected by the state, whose subjects they were, and not chattels of the individual proprietors. The Thessalian and Doric invaders and conquerors imposed a similar yoke wherever they were victorious and finally settled. The last Doric and Heraclidic invasion, which culminated in the institutions and history of Sparta, subdued the former occupants[Pg 103] of Peloponnesus, some of whom were likewise of Doric origin. Of such origin, in considerable proportion, were the renowned Helots. So, also, in course of time, the descendants of the companions of Achilles became, in the north, serfs under certain conditions of a more liberal nature; while others, descending from the companions of Agamemnon and Menelaus, became Sparta\'s Helots.

The condition of the Helots, in many respects, was similar to that of the Penest? of Thessaly. They could not be sold beyond the borders of the state, not even by the state itself, which apportioned them to citizens, reserving to itself the power of emancipation. They lived in the same villages which were once their own property, before conquest transformed the free yeomen or peasants into bondsmen. The state employed the Helots in the construction of public works. Their fate, however terrible it may have been, was altogether within the law, whereas other domestic slaves in Greece, just like those in the Southern States, depended upon the arbitrary will of individuals. The Spartan law had various provisions for the emancipation of the Helots. They served in the army and fought the great battles of the Lacedemonians. Will the South intrust their chattels with arms and drill them into military companies?

Sparta was the seat of an oligarchy, which owned the greater part of the lands of Laconia, and kept in dependency the other autochthonous tribes, which in some way or other escaped the fate of the Helots.[Pg 104] Such were the Periokes, enjoying certain political and full civil rights. But, in the course of events, the oligarchy tried to violate those rights, and the Periokes joined Epaminondas against Sparta, facilitating its subjugation, just as, centuries afterward, they joined Flaminius and the Romans against their Spartan masters. In Lacedemonia, as in Attica, there existed small landholders, called gamori or geomori, and others called autougroi—rustics possessing petty patches of land, or farming small parcels owned by large proprietors. Just so in the South the large plantations are surrounded by poor whites, by "sand-hillers," etc., some of them owning small patches, generally of poorer soil; others altogether homeless and landless. Subsequently these geomori, etc.—poor, free populations and their homesteads—were almost wholly engulfed by large plantations and domestic slavery. This was the work of time, as in her great days scarcely any chattel was known in Sparta.

The landed oligarchy of our Southern plantations is in more than one respect analogous with that of Sparta. The city of Sparta itself was rather an agglomeration of spacious country habitations than resembling other great cities.

When the Dorians made Sparta the centre of their power, the lands of Laconia were divided into ten thousand equal lots for the ten thousand Spartan citizens. Undoubtedly the homesteads, cleared and owned by the first settlers and colonists in the South, were more equally divided than they are now; and the[Pg 105] increase in the extent of plantations on the one hand, and the decrease of the respectability of the poorer settlers and their transformation into "poor oppressed white men,"[12] on the other, were both effected by domestic slavery. At the time of Lycurgus—about four hundred years after the division—the above number of oligarchs was reduced to nine thousand; at the time of Herodotus—about four hundred years after Lycurgus—to eight thousand; and thus a reduction of one-tenth took place during each period of from three hundred to four hundred years. This was the time of the world-renowned Spartan poverty and virtue. But wars, conquests, etc., changed the character of the Spartans; luxury and wealth crept in, and with them came large estates and domestic slaves, the latter chiefly consisting of Greek prisoners of war. At the beginning of the first Peloponnesian war, Sparta may have had two hundred and twenty thousand Helots, and there were comparatively few domestic slaves in that number. The Peloponnesian war made the Spartans leaders of Greece, but filled Sparta with prisoners from other Greek states, and introduced wealth: from that war begins the decline of the Spartan spirit. The Helots and the impoverished poor whites successively became chattels. Sparta could only muster seven hundred citizens against Epaminondas at Leuctra. During the period between Herodotus and Aristotle the number of citizens was reduced to little above one thousand. At the Macedonian conquest,[Pg 106] Sparta averaged fourteen chattels for every three freemen. One hundred years after Aristotle, under King Agis, about two hundred oligarchs constituting the body politic, the citizens of Sparta owned nearly all the lands of Laconia, and worked them by chattels.

This numerical reduction of citizens and deterioration of their historic character principally affected the military standing of Sparta. Causes so obvious as not to require explanation prevent at present a similar diminution of the number of Southern oligarchs, notwithstanding the existing numerical disproportion between them and the non-slaveholding whites, whose political freedom, to a rational appreciation, is rather nominal than real. The disease is the same—its workings alone are different. The sword was the soul of Spartan institutions: the pure and elevated conception of the American social structure rests not on physical but on intellectual and moral force; but its deterioration is visible in the new conception of slavery inaugurated and sustained by the militant oligarchs. The process of moral and intellectual decomposition in the South would be still more rapid but for the various influences from the Free States, which, like refreshing breezes, fan its fainting energies.

The sword, it is true, may have decimated whole Spartan communities; but such losses were supplied from the class of the Periokes and other freemen, and even sometimes from the Helots. Domestic slavery devoured the small estates, degraded the freemen, and[Pg 107] dried up the sources of political renovation. Five thousand Spartans fought at Plate?, which gives a total population of about forty thousand. The number of Helots owned by them at that time amounted to one hundred and seventy-five thousand. Subsequently, after the Peloponnesian and Macedonian wars, these Helots were transformed into chattels, and the degenerate Spartans attempted to transform the Periokes into Helots, but made them simply deadly enemies. Almost in proportion as the Spartan oligarchs increased in wealth and possessions, not only did the number of Helots and slaves increase, but military ardor decreased. At Leuctra, Sparta hired her cavalry; and soon after, Sparta, rich in Helots and chattels but poor in citizens, was forced passively to witness the curtailing of her frontiers by Philip of Macedon.

The Helots often revolted; and frequent conspiracies were discovered and subdued in terrible slaughter, when the oligarchs believed themselves again safe. The old laws of most of the American colonies, north and south, contain repeated regulations, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concerning conspiracies, revolts, and tumults perpetrated by negroes; and this, too, several generations before the birth of active abolitionism. For not to abolitionism but to the love of liberty inborn in human nature—in the Spartan Helot as in the colored chattel of the Southern oligarch—are to be attributed the conspiracies continually fermenting among Southern slaves. At times the Spartans were obliged to ask[Pg 108] succor from the Athenians and other allies against their revolted Helots. To-day the union is fully able to suppress servile revolts, but in some future time the South may vainly look in all quarters of the horizon for active allies. It may find some well-wishers among its interested northern sympathizers, but the chattels will have the sympathy of the civilized Christian and heathen world, besides finding allies among the free colored populations of the Antilles. Under England\'s fatherly and humane direction, these colored populations are being initiated into genuine Christian civilization, and make comparatively great strides and progress in material and political culture, in orderly life, in self-government, in the employment of the free press, and in debating their interests in legislative assemblies and cabinet councils. Ever since the establishment of American slavery on a social and religious basis, the mass of the white population in the South, and, above all, the great heroes, apostles, and combatants of the new political creed, are returning to barbarism—willingly and deliberately renouncing all genuine mental and moral culture. And thus the two extremes may meet in some future emergency—the colored inhabitant of the Antilles as a superior civilized being, will face the barbarized white oppressor in the South.

The Spartan Helot increased with a fecundity fearful for the oligarchs, who resorted to the horrible kryptea, or slaughter of unarmed Helots all over Laconia at a time appointed specially and secretly by[Pg 109] the ephors. This was the last resort to avert the danger, and more than once was it used during the brilliant epoch of Sparta.

In the South the chattels likewise increase very rapidly, but not rapidly enough to satisfy the breeders, planters, and slave-traders. All things considered, the colored enslaved population increases in a proportion by far more rapid than the white. After 1783 the blacks were estimated at between five and six hundred thousand: the census of 1860 will find them full four millions: and no wonder. Trafficking slave-breeders, as well as planters, organize breeding as systematically as cattle-raisers attend to their stock. In Virginia this is the principal pursuit, and the chief source of income from domestic husbandry. The breeders have small enclosures to gently exercise the young human stock like the breeders of valuable horses. In some States, principally in the cotton region, the colored chattels outnumber the whites; in others the respective numbers are nearly equal. About one hundred and fifty years ago, South Carolina, through the voice of her law-makers, referring to the increase in chattels, declared it an "afflicting providence of God that the white persons do not proportionably multiply." Nowadays South Carolina finds the affliction a blessing. Though her colored population already outnumbers the white, she is first in assaulting humanity by reopening the slave-trade.

Cotton is a plant indigenous to the old world—to Asia and Africa. Its culture by free labor may soon[Pg 110] become very profitable in other regions of the globe. Sooner or later this will end the exclusive American monopoly of its production, and then the dead weight of chattelhood will press fearfully on the oligarchs in economical as in social ways, even if the chattels remain quiet: this is, however, impossible to suppose, on account of their continually increasing numbers. Already slaves are tortured, murdered, burnt and slaughtered at the first danger, even though it be imaginary. Now this is done individually, and, even according to Southern notions, illegally. When the profits from slave-labor shall dwindle, and the danger from great masses of chatt............