Bit of a broad question I know but I hope some specifics can be gleaned - simply put, how did the institute of slavery compare in the United States and Confederacy to slavery in the Biblical context?
To be precise, how could the masters treat their slaves in each situation - which was worse for the slaves? Was their status in societies different? Obviously in the south a slave could be manumitted but a freeman black was still subject to a shitton of racial prejudice.
“Bible slavery” could refer to two different things: slavery among the Hebrews of the Old Testament, or slavery in the Roman world that formed the background of the New Testament.
For the former, slaves had some rights according to Mosaic law—see for example Exodus 21:1-11. Slaves in the Southern USA, as far as I know, had no legal rights.
IIRC Roman slavery was considered more of a temporary status one could find oneself in due to misfortune, couldn’t a Roman slave buy his freedom? Was this a possibility in antebellum United States? I’m guessing not since; where the hell would a slave get the money.
On Hebrew slavery, how does it compare much with Roman slavery? In Rome a slave could be doing quite well for himself comparatively speaking, having his own money and land. But still a penniless Roman citizen in the gutter would be higher in society than the most well to do slave.
Some US slaves were allowed to earn money and buy their own freedom. Other times after attaining freedom one way or another they would buy their family members.
However, in general US slavery was as bad as it can get. It was generational, the children of slaves were born slaves, even if their biological father was their owner. Slaves were property and slave owners could do anything to them they wanted, including killing them. If you killed another man’s slave it was a civil matter, you owed him the value of the slave.
Apparently not completely true. See
describing amongst other things a hanging of a white man for murdering a slave.
Interesting. As the article continues it mentions lax enforcement of such laws. Probably easy to defend yourself by claiming the slave was being uppity.
It doesn’t appear that a US slaveholder was charged with such a crime once the US was independent, although it’s probably not a complete list of incidents.
Yes, absolutely. Slaves were sometimes hired out and allowed to keep a fraction of the money as a stimulus to productivity, or they were allowed to work for pay during slack seasons. Alternatively, someone else (typically a free relative) could buy a slave and set him/her free. However these circumstances were far from common–in the 1850’s there were about 3,000 manumissions per year out of a slave population of 4 million. Also, some Southern states required newly freed slaves to either post bond or leave the state.
I’m far from expert on ancient slavery, but American slavery had three especially bad features. One was automatic matrilinear inheritance, mentioned above. The second was that the slaves were chattels–they were sellable at the whim of the owner, and families could be broken up. Many ancient slaves were tied to the land or to their owner. The third feature was that even freed slaves were subject to so much civil discrimination by virtue of their black skin; ancient slaves in some cases could buy, earn, or be granted their freedom and blend into society.
I don’t think slaves in the US could testify in court, so it would be hard to prove if only other slaves saw the murder.
Regards,
Shodan
For the Roman side, there’s ‘How to manage your slaves’ by Marcus Sidonius Falx with Jerry Turner.
As per the tour guide at Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson (a) designed the octagonal building and the wine cellar and (b) paid any slaves who chose to work on Sundays.
Just by coincidence I am reading some of the writings of Angelina Grimke, a leading abolitionist, and she argued that Southern slavery was very different from Hebraic slavery.
Interesting subject. At the risk of a hijack, are there other types of slavery that developed after the bible days. In Spanish colonies or Africa for example?
You might look at the slaveries practised by the Barbary Pirates or the Arabs or the Ottomans or the Chinese or the Koreans.
In most states, slaves could testify against nonwhites. As a general matter, though, it was almost impossible for a slaveowner to be convicted of any crime pertaining to mistreatment of a slave for that reason. You basically had to do it in front of other white folks.
African slavery was its own thing, as was Islamic slavery, and they had some differences from American slavery. One interesting example in a Christian context is the slavery that developed in the Crusader states following the First Crusade. Christians in the crusader states were allowed to enslave Jews and Muslims, but there were some restrictions placed on the institution: sex with slaves was strictly illegal and punished with castration, for example, and any slave who converted was supposed to be set free.
Yes, in many forms of historic slavery, manumission made you a proper free man – you could even be a citizen, if of the lower order, in Rome’s case. One thing to bear in mind is that through most of history, you got slaves from whatever population you conquered, and slaves could even be of your same ethnicity. The chattel slavery models in the various parts of the Americas evolved during and after the Colonization and how liberally was emancipation applied varied.
Towards the end of the US slave period the state of freedmen in the slave states had started to deteriorate, with rulings such as the Dred Scott case, to deny freed slaves not just citizenship but also many of the rights of free noncitizens, lest the still-enslaved get ideas. That pattern re-emerged in other forms under Jim Crow and segregation.
Old Testament slavery also distinguished between “fellow Israelites” and foreign slaves; foreign slaves were property and could be bequeathed to your children (see Leviticus 25:39-55), which sounds more like antebellum Southern slavery.
As has already been pointed out, this wasn’t strictly true–at least in theory slaves in antebellum America frequently or usually did have at least some rights. The 1819 Constitution of Alabama declared that
And the 1861 secessionist constitution, while clamping down on any prospects of emancipation even more than the earlier constitution had, maintained the earlier constitution’s provisions regarding jury trials for slaves accused of crimes, at least theoretical protection of slaves against abitrary murder or dismemberment, and a general provision for laws for “humane treatment” of slaves:
(Of course the jury trials of slaves accused of crimes mentioned in both constitutions would be before juries of white men; they certainly wouldn’t have been convening juries of slaves in antebellum Alabama.)
The provisions for jury trials for slaves and provisions barring arbitrary murder or dismemberment of slaves seem to have been common or even standard in antebellum slavery; the provision against arbitrary murder and dismemberment can be found as far back as the 1798 Georgia constitution (although if you killed a slave “by accident in giving such slave moderate correction” you were in the clear, and all of these provisions included the “insurrection” loophole); the 1845 Constitution of Texas and the proposed pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas both included the “humane treatment”, jury trials for slaves accused of serious crimes, and ban on arbitrary murder and dismemberment of slaves.
Presumably the institution of slavery varied a lot during each period. Fatality rates in the Caribbean for example were a lot higher than in the antebellum southern US. Being an ancient galley slave doesn’t sound like a fun time either.
Following the transportation revolution, 18th and 19th century new world slavery was embedded in a web of international trade. For most of human agricultural history, local crop failure meant higher local agricultural prices, while bumper crops tended to lower them. This led to a certain stabilizing force with respect to farm incomes, though famine was a recurring problem. Once you open up international trade, then the price received is tied more to regional or even worldwide conditions. Furthermore the additional competition exerts pressures to minimize costs, to drive your slaves harder and provide them with fewer resources. Modern capitalist economies offer unemployment insurance partly to provide the worker with a modicum of bargaining power. You can think of chattel slavery as the extreme opposite of that policy.
Those few who felt that they should uplift their slaves found it more difficult to stay in business. So they might sell them to a more competitive and hard-driving owner. The system tended to discourage certain paternalistic habits.
The situation with ancient Roman slavery was complicated. I’m no expert, but from what I’ve read, it was up to the owner how a slave was treated. A cruel owner might crucify a slave for minor or imagined offenses, like insolence, or being too attractive (in the opinion of a jealous spouse); a generous owner might allow a slave to work for pay, or be generally treated like a member of the family. But note that a Roman father could kill his children without fear of consequences if he judged them deserving of it, so being treated like one of the family had a different meaning back then.
As noted above, the Bible distinguishes between Hebrew and foreign slaves. Exodus 21, the chapter immediately following the Ten Commandments, gives a list of other commandments, including the treatment of slaves. It says a Hebrew slave must be freed after six years, but he is not allowed to take his wife and children with him, if his wife was given to him by his master (which silently implies the plight of female slaves). If he wants to stay with his family, he must renounce his freedom for life.
And there is this:
[QUOTE=Moses, KJV]
Exo 21:20 And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.
Exo 21:21 Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.
[/QUOTE]
So, it was a useful skill to be able to beat a slave so severely that he died after two days, but not before.
Foreign slaves were routinely taken by conquest, if they lived outside the Promised Land (the Bible orders the complete annihilation of all men, women, and children in cities located within the Promised Land). They were chattel, with their descendants belonging to the owner’s descendants, forever.