In a contemporary context,
you may not find Abraham Lincoln's famous assertion that “if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong” all that
remarkable a statement. You think of
that as natural, and always have. In fact, as far as you know, pretty much everyone thinks of it as natural. And
always has. If you or
someone you know doesn’t feel slavery
is wrong, such a sentiment is not likely to get public expression. We all
understand that there are plenty of ills in American society today, but we tend
to think slavery isn’t one of them, even though there are anecdotal reports of
it surfacing again, particularly in poor immigrant communities. Some of those
responsible for such evils justify their exploitation of others by
distinguishing what they do from slavery – “Hey, she can quit whenever she
wants” – and we (perhaps grudgingly) accept that distinction. There’s a line
there, a line between slave and free, that’s real and clear.
Except that there isn’t. Even when
slavery was widely practiced, there were different kinds. The kind you tend to
think of when you think about early American history is chattel slavery, in which some human beings were the personal
property of other human beings. They could be bought and sold like livestock or
inanimate objects, and had no say in their fate. But elsewhere in the world,
and at earlier times in the history of the world, slavery took different forms.
In the ancient world, winning armies would take the losers – or, very commonly,
their wives and children – as prizes, enslavement as the fruit of victory. In
many societies, however, slaves had formal and informal legal rights (like
religious privileges), might enjoy some degree of autonomy and mobility, and
could hope for earning or receiving their freedom. In ancient Rome, for
example, slaves could attain positions of considerable administrative power in
managing the affairs of their elite masters, and enjoy at least an element of
status greater than most freedmen.
In English North America this was rare.
Most slavery was chattel slavery. The practice of indentured servitude, in
which individuals were bound to a master for a fixed (in theory) term, was
technically not slavery. But during the period when a person was under such
supervision, they were for all intents and purposes enslaved – indentured
servitude was de facto, if not de jure, slavery. For much of American
history, people have also been subject to wage
slavery. Unlike chattel slaves, wage slaves are actually paid for their work.
But the pay they receive is so meager that they are entirely dependent on their
wages for their biological survival. As Karl Marx’s collaborator Frederick
Engels explained the concept in 1847, “The slave is sold once and for all; the
proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.”
You may disagree that wage slavery is,
strictly speaking, slavery. You may say the same about indentured servitude
(though indentured servants were known to sell the services of their own
children in the hope of climbing out of debt themselves). But I think you would
have to admit that slavery has not really been exactly the same at all times
and places, and that whatever essence it may have is more subtle than it
appears. (You might also say that no man is a slave who can think for himself
or who can find some way to resist or subvert the will of his master – like the
proverbial “lazy” slave who can never seem to get work done – and at least some
people will agree with you. But not everybody.) To at least some degree,
slavery has a threshold – it’s less of a line than a spectrum.
If that’s that case, then what’s the
other end of that spectrum? Or, to put it more starkly: what’s the opposite of slavery? I believe most
people would say that the opposite of slavery is freedom. But I think the
matter is more complicated than that. Yes: slavery is a form of being subject
to restraint, and freedom is matter of lacking restraints, but the two tend to
interlock rather than diverge. In
fact, many people have argued – for thousands of years – that not only are
freedom and slavery compatible, but that freedom depends on slavery. For the ancient Greeks, a citizen could only
participate in politics when he had slaves to take care of the daily drudgery
of maintaining an estate and freeing him for the higher calling of statecraft.
Freedom is also more than political: there’s also religious freedom, economic
freedom, personal freedom, and so on.
There’s also the distinction to be made between positive freedom (freedom to) and negative freedom (freedom from).
In an American context, freedom is
typically defined in political terms: a negative freedom, expressed in limits
on what the government can do to you (limits like those in the Bill of Rights
in the Constitution, for example). One of the most cherished limits in
Anglo-American law is property rights – your sense of security in knowing that
what’s yours is yours, and that no one can take it away: that’s freedom. Including the freedom to own other people.
You think that sounds strange. But for almost 250 years, that was common sense.
It was also explicitly the law of the land.
So if the opposite of slavery is not
freedom, then what is? I’m not sure. But if slavery is a spectrum, I believe
the far end of it is equality. Equality – social, political, whatever – means
treating everybody the same. It means all people having an equivalent degree of
power in their relationship with each other, which means that no one has the
ability, or the right, to dominate or control anybody else. Equality is in this
sense a check on freedom, but the
experience of equality is also a form
of freedom, a knowledge that domination cannot be achieved nor imposed. Conversely,
inequality is the power differential,
the enabling mechanism, by which slavery becomes possible. Not inevitable – it’s possible to have
inequality without slavery: there’s space on the spectrum for that. But there
can be no slavery without inequality, and the greater the concentration of
inequality the greater tyranny can be.
The thing that I find endlessly
compelling – fascinating, confusing, troubling – is that while slavery is
virtually inadmissible in American life today, inequality is not. Plainly put,
we take it for granted. In a way, that’s not hard to understand at all. Certain
kinds of inequality not only seem permissible or necessary, but are actively
celebrated, like the championship team that prevails over its rivals and is
rewarded with a wealth of attention. Others are more ordinary: there are
certain things I can do, wages I will receive, by virtue – note that word – of
this degree or that expertise.
One reason we don’t find this especially
problematic is that some kinds of inequality have a sense of reciprocal
responsibility built into them. Parents have all kinds of power children don’t,
but there’s a collective social understanding that they are accountable for the
welfare of their children. That doesn’t always happen, of course. But it’s what
we expect. Similarly, as a teacher I have certain privileges that students
don’t – I don’t get detention – but my job is to aid your intellectual and
social development, and if I fail to do that there are any number of negative
consequences that will follow, ranging from you tuning me out, to making fun of
me behind my back, to me losing my job. One of the reasons I (unlike some)
don’t really consider the medieval institution of serfdom in medieval feudalism
to be a form of slavery is that there was always an understanding that the
serfs of a manor had a right to expect protection from their lord, which is one
of the reasons why medieval warfare so often took the form of armies ravaging
the countryside as a way of showing peasants that their current lord is failing
them and that they should transfer their loyalty. One could make the argument –
some did – that slavery, too, rested on reciprocal responsibility, but
slaveholders were inconsistent at best in making that argument, and it was
never codified as such in law. Under chattel slavery in the United States, you
had no more obligation to your slave than your hat.
There are forms of inequality in
contemporary life where there is no such sense of reciprocal responsibility,
either. Take good looks. We all
know that some of us are more physically attractive than others, and that while
there’s some degree of subjectivity involved in this, there’s general consensus
about who’s attractive and who’s not. But we don’t feel that being beautiful
confers any particular obligation to those who are less so. Unlike a college
degree, attractiveness is not something you can systemically acquire (even if
it requires increasing amounts of maintenance and will ultimately perish). Beauty
falls into the realm of what might be considered God-given. Like intelligence.
Or health. Or, to a great degree, wealth, which is very often inherited, and
where there’s no formal expectation you should simply give it all away, even if
there are pressures, internal or external, to convert it to some good use.
One key difference between feudalism and
more contemporary forms of inequality is that unlike feudalism, we tend not to
think of our inequalities as fixed. Children are not the equal of parents at the
start of their lives, but they often grow up and become parents themselves.
Intelligence, like wealth, may be inherited, but knowledge and money can be
earned – and such earned capital may prove to be more pivotal than the
inherited kind. Health gets gained, lost, and is relative. Even ugly ducklings
can turn into swans.
This is an important reason why we don’t
simply live with equality – we embrace
it, even promote it. A life where
everyone was equal in every way seems boring at best and oppressive at worst.
But, as we know, the reality of inequality imposes its own oppressions, some of
them very great. Moreover, if we look hard, we often find that inequalities are
a lot less fluid than they might seem. Not all
ugly ducklings become swans, or even that many. Enough do – or we tell ourselves enough do – so that we
can get away with assuring ourselves that the inequalities we live with are
temporary, inoffensive, even good.
This doesn’t happen with slavery: we
don’t accept it, much less celebrate it. We assume slavery is – was – bad. But that’s a problem. To be
clear: I’m not saying slavery is good, though I am saying it that it might be
helpful to understand a little better why there was a time when its evil was
not an assumption – in particular, I want to zero in on a specific moment when
slavery was aggressively upheld as a positive good – and to get a better sense
of its allure. Perhaps by acknowledging the appeal of slavery for those who
advocated it, we might gain a new understanding of its relationship with
inequality. In the process, we
might also gain a better of the what freedom, the concept that sits uneasily
between them, really means.
Next: Freedom an inequality before the Civil War
