Circa1865

It is said that one of the most distinguishing achievements of the American Confederacy was the ingenuity of Southern authorities and businessmen meeting the challenge of a naval blockade of its coasts. They answered the challenge with swift, light draft blockade runners fueled with quick-burning Welsh coal while utilizing two Southern-friendly islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas, for supply transshipments.

Gen. U.S. Grant, III, stated in 1961 that “if the Cambridge Modern History is correct in its allegation that between October 26, 1864 and January 1865 it was still possible for 8,632,000 lbs. of meat, 1,507,000 lbs. of lead, 1,933,000 lbs. of saltpeter, 546,000 pairs of shoes, 316,000 blankets, half a million pounds of coffee, 69,000 rifles and 43 cannons to run the blockade into the port of Wilmington alone, while cotton sufficient to pay for these purchases was exported, it is evident that the blockade runners made an important contribution to the Confederacy’s ability to carry on.” (New York History Quarterly, Vol. XLII, No. 1, January 1961, pp. 49-50).

Helot Rhett Butlers

“There were, of course, precedents for blockade evasion in the history of warfare. One striking parallel to the Southern problem occurred in 425 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians had succeeded in trapping a portion of the Spartan land forces on the island of Sphacteria, off the coast of Pylos, and thus, by maintaining a blockade, learned what the federal navy and government would in time come to understand: a blockade immobilized, perhaps, some of the enemy’s forces, restricted his strategy, and imposed attrition, but it did not of itself bring him to capitulation.

Thucydides records that much time was consumed in the blockade of the island because the Spartans had not stood idly by while the cream of their land forces was being starved to death.

“The fact was,” he wrote, “that the Lacedaemonians had made the advertisement for volunteers to carry into the island ground corn, wine, cheese, and any other food useful in a siege; high prices being offered, and freedom promised to any of the Helots who should succeed in doing so . . . In short, both sides tried every possible contrivance, the one to throw in provisions, the other to prevent their introduction.”

Thucydides reasoned well in considering the material inducement offered the Helots to undertake running the blockade. Those men of the Confederacy who were interested in bringing in supplies from abroad, and who were not involved in the trade officially, had rich material benefits in mind.”

(Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance, Frank E. Vandiver, Texas A&M Press, 1994, excerpt pg. 85)

About 400 years before Christ, Athens, was perhaps the first republic overtaken by economic depression with widespread unemployment and many flocking to the Agora seeking aid. First the farmers were granted handouts, then came the laborers and others wanting their share. The ancient racket continues unabated today.

The New Deal: An Old Racket

“It is clear from Plutarch’s account that Pericles, the political ruler of Athens, understood the cause of the trouble. Plutarch describes the character of the workers who thronged into Athens clamoring for relief. They were, he tells us, brass workers, wood workers, smiths, moulders, founders, stonecutters, goldsmiths, ivory workers, and painters. It was perfectly obvious that Athens was in a depression because of the collapse of the building industry and particularly the extensive shipbuilding industry at Piraeus, the port of Athens. In other words, the capital goods industry was in a slump.

Its effects spread to others – to farmers, who were the first to get grants in aid through the munificence of the great man, Pericles. This encouraged the idle workmen to demand attention and they were given a dole amounting to six cents a day.

Pericles tried to lessen the effects of the depression by settling the unemployed in distant colonies. He sent 500 to the Isle of Naxos, 250 to Andros, a thousand to Thrace, and others to various colonies of Attica. And Plutarch observes that he did this “to discharge the city of the idle,” who were, by reason of their idleness, “a busy and meddlesome crowd of people.”

All this brought down the scorn of the wealthy conservative, Thuycidides (not the historian), who estimated that some 20,000 citizens one way or another were on the government payroll – which was something of an exaggeration.

In the end, Pericles tried to deal with the depression by a huge program of public works . . . a diminutive empire caught in the grip of those merciless economic laws which torment the far mightier empires of today. Thus trapped in an economic crisis, he turned to the second remedy of a sick society – borrowing.  Pericles decide to “borrow” [public defense funds guarded in the sacred treasury] to set in motion a big building program.

Pericles, the arch politician, insisted that [the defense funds] were in the hands of Athens to be used as it saw fit. He prevailed, and these funds were used to erect that magnificent collection of buildings on the Acropolis . . . But, in the end, Pericles turned to the third and most destructive and evil of the elements of his Athens New Deal – war.

The war with Sparta and her allies lasted for many years and ended with the downfall and humiliation of Athens and provided the tragic climax of this earliest of New Deals. Depression, caused by collapse of the heavy industries; then government doles paid for with taxes; great building and military enterprises to create work paid for with borrowed funds – in this case misused money – and finally war. Thus ended the New Deal in Athens.”

(The New Deal: An Old Racket; Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John T. Flynn, Gregory P. Pavlik, editor, Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1996, excerpt pp. 55-56)

In the Aztec culture, war and the priesthood were the only paths “toward prestige, honors and riches,” with free land and slaves given as rewards for valor while subjugating neighbors. In the century prior to Spanish conquest, the merchant class included “slave traders whose centers of operation were in some of the large cities, but who kept purchasing bases in the furthermost cities.”

Slavery existed in all classic period Mesoamerican cultures: in Maya culture, the condition of slavery was passed down from one generation to another, often as punishment for offenses against the ruling class. “The majority of slaves, however, were prisoners of war or foreigners bought from traders. The destiny of these slaves was uncertain, and many must have ended their days as sacrificial victims.”  

Slavery Way Down South

“Aztec conquests always had religious or economic motives . . . in the principal cities of the Aztecs and their allies lived an artisan group who were in constant need of raw materials for the manufacture of consumer goods which were traded among the Aztecs themselves or exchanged for products from their neighbors and tribute-paying subjects.

Equally important was the development of the quasi-feudal system with an increasing demand for agricultural land and serfs for the benefit of the growing nobility. Last but not least was the need for slaves to be sacrificed to the gods as state and religion merged into one unified system.

In the last years of their brief history, the Aztec nation included more than 300 vassal tribes which never amalgamated into a political or administrative entity.

While Aztec merchants traveled the trade routes, transacting business and paving the way for new conquests, the warriors and governors exercised dominion by exacting tribute and gathering the designated quotas of prisoners to be sacrificed to the many gods of the Aztec pantheon.”

(Pre-Columbian Cities, Jorge E. Hardoy, Walker and Company, 1973, excerpts pp. 124; 128; 228)

“In the last days of Pope Eugenius the Fourth, two of his servants, the learned Poggius and a friend ascended the Capitoline Hill; reposed themselves among the ruins of columns and temples; and viewed, from that commanding spot, the wide and various prospect of desolation.

The place and the object gave ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spare neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave; and it was agreed that in proportion to her former greatness the fall of Rome was the more awful and deplorable.

Her primeval state, such as she might appear in a remote age, when Evander entertained the stranger of Troy, has been delineated by the fancy of Virgil. This Tarpeian rock was then a savage and solitary thicket: in the time of the poet, it was crowned with the golden roofs of a temple: the temple is overthrown, the gold has been pillaged, the wheel of fortune has accomplished her revolution, and the sacred ground is again disfigured with thorns and brambles.

The hill of the Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings; illustrated by the footsteps of so many triumphs, enriched with the spoils and tributes of so many nations. This spectacle of the world, how it is fallen! How changed! How defaced!

The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill. Cast your eyes on the Palatine hill, and seek, among the shapeless and enormous fragments, the marble theater, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticoes of Nero’s palace: survey the other hills of the city; the vacant space is interrupted only by ruins and gardens.

The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now inclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.”

(The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume III, Edward Gibbon, Modern Library, 1995, excerpt pp. 2426-2427)

To find those responsible for African slavery and its perpetuation, one must first look to the African tribes themselves who enslaved their brethren captured in warfare, and sold many to Europeans in search of cheap labor for their colonies. Next would be King Ferdinand of Spain, who in the early 1500s had already had deported substantial sections of Jews and Moors from his realm as well as approving slaving expeditions for Caribbean Indians to work his colonies. It was also Ferdinand who granted licenses for those carrying slaves to the Americas. This begs the question: had African slaves not been eventually carried to North America in the bottoms of British and New England slave ships, would North and South still have separated into two countries for the same pecuniary reasons, but without the lame New England excuse of slavery being the cause of war?

The Economic Custom of Slavery

“It is strange that it should never have come into the head of philosopher or philanthropist to ascertain the causes of the revival of slavery by all the modern nations of Europe which have engaged in colonization. Political economists were bound to make this inquiry; for without it their science is incomplete at the very foundation; for slavery is a question of labor, “the original purchase of all things.”

Philanthropists, however, have treated it as a moral and religious question, attributing slavery to all times and places, but especially in modern America, to the wickedness of the human heart. [The immediate cause of slavery] is not a wicked or infernal spirit. Neither communities nor individuals keep slaves in order to indulge in oppression and cruelty.

Those British colonies – and they are many – which would get slaves tomorrow if we would let them, are not more wicked than we are: they are only placed in circumstances which induce us to long for the possession of slaves notwithstanding the objections to it.

They are not moral, but economic circumstances: they relate not to vice and virtue, but to production. They are the circumstances, in which one man finds it difficult or impossible to get other men to work under his direction for wages. They are the circumstances . . . which stand in the way of combination and constancy of labor, for which all civilized nations, in a certain stage of their advance from barbarism, have endeavored to counteract, and have in some measure counteracted, by means of some kind of slavery.

Slavery is a make-shift for hiring . . . [and is] on the whole much more costly than the labor of hired freemen; and slavery is also full of moral and political evils, from which the method of hired labor is exempt. [But] when slavery is adopted, there is no choice: it is adopted because at the time and under the circumstances there is no other way of getting laborers to work with constancy and in combination.

It happens wherever population is scanty in proportion to land [and has] never existed in very populous countries, and has gradually ceased in the countries where whose population has gradually increased to the point of density. Of plentifulness of labor for hire, the cause is dearness of land: cheapness of land is the cause of scarcity of labor for hire.

The ancient Greeks were themselves colonists, the occupiers of a new territory, in which for a time every freeman could obtain as much land as he desired: for a time they needed slaves; and the custom of slavery was established.

The Romans, it the early stages of their history, were robbers of land, and had more land than they could cultivate without slaves: it was partly because of slavery that they at last grew to be so populous at Rome as to no longer need slavery, but to ask for an agrarian law.”

(Origin of Slavery in the New World, 1765-1860, Gibbon Wakefield; Chapter XV, The Economics of Slavery; Selections From the Economic History of the United States, Guy Stevens Callender, excerpts pp. 742-745)

The slaves of Middle Ages Britain were not African, nor were the slaves of the Church in Europe. In Anglo-Saxon England the slaves and peasants lived in great squalor, in small windowless thatched-roof huts with refuse dump-floors. An open-hearth fire vented to a hole in the roof. Most English slaves were reduced to that state as punishment for crimes, failure to pay fines or for being in debt. Also, children born of slaves of any origin were declared to be slaves as well. What is described below was medieval England, not the American South of 1860.

British Slaves, Serfs and Human Loot

“There were true slaves in the Middle Ages, of course, men who worked like domestic animals, doing whatever kind of labor the lord demanded, and for whatever length of time he ordered. Many had begun their slavery as captives of war. After the Anglo-Saxons invaded England in the fifth century A.D., the word for the person without freedom was “Welshman” – the name of the native Britons that they enslaved.

“Welsh” eventually came to mean slave. (It was what would happen later when the word for “slave” itself was taken from Slav – the name of the Slavic peoples captured and sold into slavery in great numbers).

Until the Normans conquered the country in 1066, many Englishmen were sold abroad in the slavemarkets of Europe and the East. William the Conqueror permitted domestic slavery to continue, but he banned the sale of English slaves overseas.

The slaves who remained at home often saw their children and grandchildren melt into the condition of serfdom. The serfs worked the lord’s lands, but were left time enough to cultivate their own plots, out of which they paid dues and taxes, in money or in goods. They were obliged to be on call with their labor to build castles, bridges and roads. And in some times and places, they were liable for arbitrary taxes, imposed by the lord whenever “necessary.” Unfree to one degree or another, such a peasant was called “serf,” a name taken from the old Roman word for slave – servus.

For many centuries, popes and bishops, churches and monasteries owned slaves. Pope Gregory I (590-814) used hundreds of slaves on the papal estates. Early in the eighth century, the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres near Paris had 8,000 slaves and St. Martin of Tours had 20,000.

It was just before 800 [A.D.] that the Vikings began to raid the coasts of the British Isles. The natives they captured were of little use in their own service, so they traded most of them to Constantinople (the Byzantium of earlier days and now Istanbul) or Islamic Spain. In those markets the human loot was converted into gold, silks, wine and weapons.

A glimpse into an English slave’s life is given in the writings of Bishop Aelfric of the late tenth century. A plowman in one of his works says:

“I go out at dawn driving the oxen to the field and yoke them to the plough. It is never so harsh a winter that I dare lurk at home for fear of my master, but when the oxen have been yoked and the ploughshare and coulter fastened to the plough, I must plough each day a full acre or more . . . I must fill the oxen’s manger with hay, and water them, and clear out the dung . . . It is heavy work, because I am not free.”

(The Medieval Slave; Slavery: A World History, Milton Meltzer, Da Capo Press, 1993, excerpts pp. 209-211; 213)

The “Code Noir” issued by Louis XIV to establish governance in relation to African slaves in French colonial possessions was far more humane than what came before. Slaves had no rights at all under Roman law, Old Testament law only distinguished between Hebrew and non-Hebrew slaves, and the New Testament only spoke of the obedience of slaves to their masters. Further, most saw none if any difference between serfs and slaves, and used the terms interchangeably. Above all, the African was not alone in slavery as the term “slave” has its origins in the Slavic regions of Eastern Europe. Slavs were taken into slavery by Spanish Muslims during the Ninth Century A.D.; the texts of Islam, Judaism and Christianity all recognize slavery, and the Aztec and Mayan cultures kept slaves. In Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, several kingdoms and societies kept their own brethren as slaves.

Jesuits and the Code Noir

“The Jesuits were the first missionary order to settle in the French West Indies, coming to Martinique in 1640. It was Jesuits who started the first sugar plantation on Martinique, and by 1650 they had become the second largest slaveholder on the island.

Given that the Church in France had long supported itself with the labor of slaves and serfs, it is not surprising that religious orders in France’s Caribbean colonies used slave labor to support their activities. Father Labat, a Dominican priest who directed a slave plantation in Martinique, did not seem at all embarrassed at being a slave owner, but he became extremely upset when people accused him of dabbling in commerce.

The earliest draft of the Code Noir, submitted by the governor of France’s Caribbean colonies on May 20, 1682, dealt with issues of slave subsistence, policing, judgments, and punishment, but did not mention religion at all. Later that year the Jesuits of Martinique submitted a memorandum to King Louis XIV warning him about the harmful religious influences that Jews and Protestants were exerting on slaves in the islands.

The Jews, the Jesuits charged, “have in their own homes a great number of slaves whom they introduce to Judaism, or at least divert from Christianity.” As for the Protestants, the Jesuits urged, “they should not be allowed to practice their religion in any way.”

When the Code Noir was issued by Louis XIV in March 1685, its religious emphasis was obvious. The preamble specified that its primary purpose was “to maintain the discipline of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church . . .” [and] required that all slaves should be baptized and given instruction in the Catholic religion . . . and ordered all subjects to observe all Catholic holidays.

The Jesuits saw the Code Noir as a humanitarian document that curbed some of the worst abuses of slaveholders. It set minimum food and clothing rations for slaves, forbade masters from murdering their slaves, and made provision for their manumission. At the same time, however . . . it [declared] the slaves moveable property and stating that any personal property possessed by the slave belonged to his or her master.

(The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade, Robert Harms, Basic Books, 2002, excerpts pp. 25-26)

The idea of democracy under the ancient Greeks was far different than what is practiced today under the name of democracy. The Greek aristocracy despised democracy and planned its overthrow; the American Founders understood the problems inherent in democracy and avoided it. The Greeks held slaves: those caught in raids upon Mediterranean barbarians, prisoners of war who could not ransom themselves, unwanted children, and debtors.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Greek Democracy

“If the right of every citizen, whatever his rank or means, to participate in political decisions and in the direction of the state, and the obligation of every citizen to serve the state with money and in person according to his wealth and ability constitute a democracy, then Athens was democratic.

The charge is often made, however, that the Athenian citizen body constituted a small, privileged group ruling over a large number of foreigners and slaves resident in Athens who could not acquire citizenship, and that Athens was therefore not a true democracy.

From the modern point of view the contention is valid, but it is one which the ancient Greek would hardly have understood. Citizenship was a natural right acquired by inheritance and protected by ancestral divinities. Residence in a city, therefore, no more made one a citizen than the renting of a room today makes one a member of the family of the house.

The foreigners were citizens of their own communities who were residing in Athens by their own choice, and under no constraint to remain there. Since they could not worship the ancestral gods of the Athenians, they could not hope to participate in the activities which were under the protection of the gods unless the state, in return for services rendered, granted them those rights by an act equivalent to adoption.

Slavery was a recognized institution. In the Greek view, slaves were inferior subjects, and any thought of allowing them participation in politics was absurd. Athens, governed by its body of citizens, the demos, as the Athenians called it, was, by the standards of the ancient Greeks, democracy.”

(The Ancient World, Volume I, Wallace Everett Caldwell, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1937, excerpts pp. 221-227)

Post 1 verbiage goes here.