Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/21

 

book is intended for general reading, and may also serve as a book of reference. It is an attempt to compile and present in one volume the historical records of slavery in ancient and modern times — the laws of Greece and Rome and the legislation of England and America upon the subject — and to exhibit some of its effects upon the destinies of nations. It is compiled from what are conceded to be authentic and reliable books, documents, and records. In looking up material for that portion of the book which treats of slavery in the nations of antiquity, the compiler found small encouragement among the historians. "There is no class so abject and despised upon which the fate of nations may not sometimes turn;" and it is strange that a system which pervaded and weakened, if it did not ruin, the republics of Greece and the empire of the Cæsars, should not be more frequently noticed by historical writers. They refer, only incidentally, to the existence of slavery. An insurrection or other remarkable event with which the slaves are connected, occasionally reminds the reader of history of the existence of a servile class. The historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire devotes but two pages to what he describes as "that unhappy condition of men who existed in every province and every family, exposed to the wanton rigor of despotism," and who, according to his own account, numbered, in the age of the Antonines, sixty millions! Yet "slavery was the chief and most direct cause of the ruin of the Roman Empire," if we may credit the assertions made in the legislature of Virginia shortly after an insurrection in that state. How few of the historians of England refer to the existence in that country of a system of unmitigated, hopeless, hereditary slavery. Yet it prevailed throughout England in Saxon and Norman times. In the time of the Heptarchy, slaves were an article of export. "Great numbers were exported, like cattle, from the British coasts." The Roman market was partially supplied with slaves from the shores of Britain. Pope Gregory the Great, struck with the blooming complexions and fair hair of some Saxon children in the slave market, sent over St. Augustine from Rome to convert the islanders to Christianity. In the time of Alfred, slaves were so numerous that their sale was regulated by law. As a general thing, however, feudalism strangled the old forms of slavery, and both disappeared in England in the advancing light of Christianity. The historians of the United States, also, with the exception of Hildreth, seldom refer to the subject of slavery. They perhaps imagine that they descend below the dignity of history if they treat of any thing but "battles and seiges, and the rise and fall of administrations." Yet the printed annals of congress, from the foundation of the government to the present time, are filled with controversies upon