I can find information only as relates to US slavery, and then it seems to vary state by state(it sounds crazy complicated) here Frederick Douglas explains how Maryland operates:
So what was stopping someone from being “dissapeared” back into slavery? Some papers, seems like unless you were rich and had community connections you were pretty much always at risk right?
It gets more complicated for slavery like Rome or Barbary slave trade - Wikipedia where there was no racial element so pretty much anyone could be a slave, so what prevents someone from just grabbing vagrants off the street and claiming they have been owned for life? Sounds like it would be a constant risk.
Was there any effort to stop this from happening? If not it seems like things would get pretty chaotic, hell hire a hot chick to lure in travelers and drug them and bingo expensive slaves for sale!
It was a constant risk and one of the reasons why you needed family connections or traveled in a group. The recent TV series Rome (while not historically accurate, it does try to portray daily life) had one plot thread where Lucius Vorenus, an officer in the Army, curses his children and succumbs to grief (over his dead wife); a criminal guy in the neighborhood who had previous disagreement with Vorenus just grabs the children and sells them as slaves because he knows Vorenus is no longer interested in them. (Once Vorenus recovers, he goes around inquiring and the criminal ends badly).
This is still a problem for street people today, not only in the third world, but also the first world: nobody cares much about a homeless person or a prostitute, nobody keeps tabs on them (except for a social worker, if they are around), so when they disappear, nobody notices (and if they have mental problems, they often don’t form friendships with other homeless who might notice).
Do you mean effort from the state or from other parties? The state didn’t much care about individual crime, more about riots. Don’t you have sections of the city where gangs rule and cops don’t go in anymore? And a police force didn’t exist in the sense of today for most of history.
The only prevention was the knowledge that you didn’t grab the wrong people - just like today, every thug knows you don’t attack a mafia member, back then you didn’t grab people with connections. People without backup were out of luck.
Unless they somehow also prevented the captives from ever being able to talk or write, I just can’t see how this can work.
I am a free man, you lure me in using a hot chick, hit me over the head, take me to a slave market, and while I am on the block I say " I am a free man, that man lured me in using a hot chick, hit me over the head and took me to this slave market". You now have some very serious questions to answer regarding kidnap and fraud. You better hope to hell that you have also forged some paperwork showing that you owned me for threats 10 years, and that I am utterly unable to provide even a single piece of evidence that contradicts your paperwork.
The only way that what you are suggesting could possibly work is if everybody was involved: police, auctioneers, buyers sellers and so forth. Because if they are not all in cahoots, you are in for a world of hurt. You are attempting to sell a stolen horse. The person you are selling it to is going to be royally pissed off, if only because I will find it trivially easy to escape and go back home. The owner of the market is going to be royally pissed off because you are giving his business a reputation of selling stolen goods. Other sellers are going to be pissed off because you are devaluing their legal assets by flooding the market with stolen goods. Anybody that I owe debts to is going to be royally pissed off because you have stolen their income.
I just don’t see how this is in any way as simple as you suggest. Kidnapping people for slavery only works if you can take them somewhere where enslaving them is legal, and where they can’t escape back home. Kidnapping someone in Rome and selling them in Rome just ain’t gonna work.
BTW, it didn’t “get more complicated for slavery like Rome where there was no racial element”. There was no racial element to slavery in the US either, although slavers often pretended their was. There were vast numbers slaves in the US who were indistinguishable from “white” people, despite being legally black. And that includes large numbers of blonde haired, blue eyes slaves. There was quite a market in white slaves for brothels especially. So there was certainly nothing preventing someone from grabbing a legally white person and selling them in the US, except for the problem I pointed out above: they could simply tell everyone at the auction that they had been kidnapped.
Well I guess what I mean is the institution of slavery itself doesn’t seem like it would exist without state laws backing it. If every person has value, aside from possessions, seems like shit would get crazy. It also seems to be of little point buying your freedom if it is meaningless.
Of course you did—this pretty much formed the basis of piracy in the ancient world. Pirates would sail around, attacking and capturing random people. If the prisoners turned out to be important people with connections, then all the better for the pirates, since that meant they could demand a hefty ransom. Prisoners for whom no ransom was demanded or paid were sold into slavery.
Julius Caesar himself was once captured by pirates and held for ransom. It’s hard to think of any contemporary more important and well-connected.
And every single bit of historical evidence I have seen suggests that while its not as simplistic as popular views hold, US slavery did have a racial element which wiki covers:
If you are talking about stuff like indentured servitude and share croppers there are subtle differences which wiki covers.
Just for example Frederick Douglas recounts how the conductor of a train he was on asked every man in the “negro car” for his free papers. Are you saying all train passengers were asked for these papers?
Why would every slave say that? There owner has papers proving they bought them, and they have a dozen eyewitnesses, including other slaves, who can vouch for the fact that they were owned by that person for 15 years. There is no way that a legitimate slave could convince anyone by saying that, and they would get a flogging from both their owner and the local law enforcement once the issue was settled?
So why would they say it?
In contrast, I can very easily provide a description of where I lived and worked two days ago, before you kidnapped me. Anyone who wants to make the most cursory effort of writing a letter to my employer or the local general store, to whom I owe $5, will be able to confirm my story. You have no witnesses at all who will corroborate whatever story you choose to make up about where you obtained me, and you have no paperwork to prove ownership.
This isn’t a minor issue here. It’s not like nobody has a vested interest in preventing slavery and kidnap, so there is no doubt that there will be a cursory investigation, or that you will face punishment when you are caught. Once I claim that I am a free man, there will be an investigation, and a cursory investigation will prove that I am telling the truth. You will then be in all sorts of shit, not necessarily for kidnapping a black man, but for selling stolen goods, fraud and depriving my creditors of their rightful income. You are in for a heap of hurt because what you are doing is hurting some very rich individuals. More importantly, if this becomes common practice those rich individuals will be hurt a lot, so they are going to make a very large example of you.
Never mind law enforcement. Slave owners, money lenders land owners are all going to be in for a world of hurt if it becomes common practice to kidnap and sell share croppers and indentured labourers on the slave market. You might be the first to do this, and they will try their hardest to make sure you are the last.
What you are failing to understand is that, while Black people were all assumed to be slaves, not all slaves were Black people. Not by a long, long chalk. Large numbers of slaves were White. They had not even the slightest trace of “Black” features. Some of them probably had no black genetics whatsoever. They were slaves because they had some remote Black ancestry, but every male progenitor for the past 10 generation had been white. They looked as white as Britney Spears.
Because of that, it was perfectly possible, in theory, to sell a white person into slavery in the US. If you could somehow take Paris Hilton back to Alabama, 1815, and convince people that she was your legal slave, you could sell her for a very good price. People had no objection at all to buying white slaves, they just pretended that they were Black, which they legally were because of the “one drop” law. In the case of Spanish slave owners especially, the owners probably had more Black ancestry than some of their slaves.
I have to disagree. A Roman citizen could not be enslaved (at least by a fellow citizen) and nor could people within the imperium of Rome (IIRC). The most common source of slaves were people captured in foreign wars; the Emperor Septimus Sevrerus for instance captured 200,000 citizens of Csteisphon and sold them into slavery in 197 AD. Although slaves had distinguishing marks or articles of clothing or amulets on them, for many, escape was not really an option (if they were houseslaves,) or furthermore, some slaves could be better off as slaves then they would be as free men, Posca in Rome for instance and even many of the slaves of upper class families.
Well you’re certainly talking about massive governmental support behind it which I’m guessing only really existed in the USA and not older instances I talked about.
I guess I was curious about the nitty gritty legal technicalities, and if there is no state enforcement well then outside the protected cities it seems anything goes.
I think the fact that non-governmental officials like train conductors would assume a “black” man was a slave and demand free papers from him if he claimed not to be, while temporally displaced Pairs Hilton would not be, does make their experiences different. For one thing a “white” slave would have a much easier escape.
Not once. Twice. And he later hunted them down and had them crucified. However, at the time he was not the Caesar that we have come to know and love, he was a rather unimportant patrician who had managed to make himself unloved by a Dictator and whose main claim to fame was being the King of Bithynia’s bum boy.
Through much of history, no he wouldn’t have. You’re assuming a level of literacy and paper-every-where-ness which simply didn’t exist even in the more literate cultures.
And many slaves had, as has been mentioned, become slaves through capture. If your capturer was from Elsewhere, you probably couldn’t speak the language and the only people you knew were your captors; if you were a free immigrant fresh off the ship and had no relatives, you could be in a similar situation. If your capturer was a shipsmaster, what did you do, swim to shore?
My point is that whether in the USA or elsewhere, it wasn’t easy to kidnap someone unless you were able to transport them far, far away from home, to a place where kidnapping and enslaving foreigners was legal. You couldn’t just grab a traveller at an inn and sell them as you claimed. You would need to ship them far, far from where you captured them, and the destination would need to be OK with that knowing full well that they were kidnapped and not born slaves. That’s very different to the scenario you proposed in the OP where you could simply disappear a US citizen back into slavery within the US. Trying to do that would be in no sense simple.
I’m also not suggesting that there was massive governmental support needed to prevent kidnapping and enslavement. Quite the opposite. Whether in Rome or in the USA, the powerful of society had a vested in interest in catching an punishing anyone who tried to enslave a freeman, and any slave claiming to be a kidnap victim would be investigated. The only way to sell someone as a slave would be to take them far, far away from where you caught them. You couldn’t catch someone in Rome and sell them in Pisae, or even in Iberia. You would basically need to ship them to someone outside the empire.
I’m not saying that their experience would not be different. I am simply disputing your original claim that it was less complicated in Rome because Rome enslaved White people and the US did not. Whether in the US or in Rome, you could sell a White person as a slave perfectly legally. The US didn’t have any more objection to selling White people than Rome did. It wouldn’t be any more complicated to sell a kidnapped White citizen in the US than it would be in Rome.
But as I just explained, that would not seem to be true. Horse theft wasn’t tolerated outside the big cities, so why would slave theft be tolerated? If anything I suspect you would be in more shit if you tried this outside the big cities, just as small towns hung horse thieves while cities just flogged and fined them.
As I pointed out, the local slave owners, money lenders and land owners are going to be hurt by you kidnapping free men, regardless of whether you do it in the city or in the rural areas. If I’m a Roman noble with an Estate or a Virgina gentleman with a plantation, the last thing I will tolerate is you kidnapping my indentured servants and those sharecroppers who owe me money. The second last thing I will tolerate is you devaluing my livestock by flooding the markets with free men you kidnapped in the next county over. Those acts are not in my interest in any way, and I will act to stop them.
You are underestimating the amount of paperwork that existed form Roman times to the present that listed every asset that every rural person had for taxation purposes. Those lists were made for everyone from the poorest peasant to the highest nobles. Very few of them survive, but those that do exist are astonishingly detailed,listing for example how many buckets each peasant had, or how many geese there were on a noble’s estate.
This idea that there were large numbers of slaves, in Rome or the US, with no documentary evidence of their existence simply ain’t true.
Yes, that has been mentioned: by me.
As I noted, you can’t just capture a US or Roman free man at an inn and sell them elsewhere in US or Roman territory. You need to either find a way to stop them talking or if you can take them somewhere where enslaving them is legal, and where they can’t escape back home. Your own ship would be a good example of the latter.
You’re missing the point. In many cases, the free blacks were kidnapped and moved hundreds of miles away before they were sold. No one would know them, and no one would care what they could prove. Certainly not the sellers, and also not the buyers, who spent money for the slave and weren’t going to let him go. They’d just ignore whatever he claims. Even if he manages to contact someone who could vouch for him, that person probably wouldn’t be willing to travel to testify, and any written corroboration would just be destroyed or ignored.
Whether every slave says it or not, slaves were believed to be untrustworthy. Also, if the slave was purchased, then moved 500 miles away to be auctioned, there wouldn’t be any eyewitnesses to argue against him. There would only be a bill of sale – which could be forged if you grabbed a free black man for sale.
The problem with trying to enslave a freeman in Rome - remember, even if they could not read, the Roman empire was one big small town. Everyone knew a lot about their neighbours, everyone knew everyone else’s business around them. Ethnic was a lot more obvious than today (think of England from 400 years ago, where even within London accents were so pronounced they were like foreign languages). You weren’t going to grab someone from the other side of town and make him a slave without everyone noticing (a) you had a new boy and (b) from his accent, where he came from. Odds are they knew enough about your finances to know if you could afford another slave.
Slaves gossip. Households are full of them. People gossip. There was no privacy. The idea that you lock up your house and go away for a week and leave it empty is a modern conceit; back then, if you didn’t leave the (slave) staff to tend it, it would be robbed… and everyone in the neighbourhood knew you were heading out. For those too poor to have slaves, the only protection was large families and neighbours.
Privacy is a modern conceit. Even as late as the 1800’s everyone knew each others’ business. People did not live alone; the household chores meant you at least had a maid come in a few days a week.
Yes, slaverly as in “kidnap someone from the neighbouring kingdom” worked - as long as the local government (or lack of) did not worry that that kingdom would get fed up, hunt you down, burn the town, and crucify the ringleaders. As long as you were far enough from the neighbouring kingdom that slaves had no hope of escaping home…
What changed all this was the size of the industrial revolution - cities and states became so big that people could “disappear” by going a few dozen miles away. They could be 10 times that far away in a day, thanks to railroads and steamships. With so many strangers and so much more mobility, kidnapping of an underclass that nobody cared about could happen.
However, the danger still exists - you kidnap the wrong person. Even some negroes had some white friends; some may actually have been house slaves on an errand - then you REALLY tick off the white guys, stealing their property, and land up being hanged. Like robbing banks today - it usually works, but to make a decent living, you would have to do it on such a scale that the authorities would have to notice; at best they would enforce the law, at worst they would worry about the locale’s reputation.
It’s fictional, but the research seems quite good - Barbara Hambly has a mystery series set in antebellum New Orleans with a free man of color as the protagonist. A major part of the books is the increasing “Americanization” of Louisiana, with Southern slave-owners displacing Creoles, endangering the vibrant free black culture, and making it a whole lot easier to be abducted into slavery way out in the swamp where you don’t have anybody to make your argument to in the first place. Or sold up the river where nobody gives a rat’s ass.
ETA - realized I didn’t give the title! The first book is A Free Man of Color.
Other slave traders are going to care when someone new shows up and tries to cut into their market with poorly-documented slaves. Given how expensive slaves were, my guess would be that slave traders were well-connected in local government and could bring some heat on a newcomer.
Note that officials that made apprehensions were entitled to bonuses and promotions, providing incentive for corruption and abuse.
Northerners believed, at least, Southerners used the Fugitive Slave Act to seize freedmen as well as slaves.
Did it actually happen? Certainly American Civil War histories indicate that it not only happened, but it was a contributing factor to the regional animosities building toward civil war. I’ve read it in many places.
David Brion Davis has written that many free blacks were forced into slavery, after being unable to defend themselves of slavery accusations.