Circa1865

Much of Britain’s difficulty with its American colonies came from New England smuggling and dependence upon French West Indies molasses which it distilled into rum, which in turn fueled its slave trade. In his last years, Boston’s John Adams “saw the Revolution, at least in part, as a struggle over molasses. He said “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence.

It takes no great imagination to conclude that without British and New England populating the American colonies with African slaves, and perpetuating this into the mid-nineteenth century, the war which destroyed the American republic in 1861 might not have occurred.

Tampering with New England’s Trade in Slaves

“[The Molasses Act of 1733 enacted by the British Parliament] was introduced as a result of complaints from the British islands in the West Indies, whose economy was based on the production of sugar, against the competition of the French sugar islands – St. Dominique, Guadeloupe and Martinique. The British West Indies – Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, Monserrat and St. Christopher – were such an immense source of wealth that they were considered at the time to be more important to the empire than the North American colonies.

Molasses, a by-product of the islands’ sugar mills, was turned into rum in New England. There were so many distilleries in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut that they were known as the Rum Coast. Rum, to a degree hard to believe in a later and much different world, was essential to the New England economy.

It was one of the main means of profitable exchange for furs from the Indians and slaves and ivory from Africa. Some of the greatest early New England fortunes were based on the rum trade, most of which was carried on illegally. Boston alone was said to have about fifty distilling houses. Nothing could set off a panic in New England more surely than tampering with this trade.

The trouble arose because the British islands could not supply all the molasses needed by the North American distilleries or supply them as cheaply as the French islands. The French West Indian molasses manufacture and the New England rum production were as if made for each other. By [Sir Robert] Walpole’s time, an immensely important trade had developed between the French islands and the New England colonies. Everyone benefited, except the British sugar islands.

The result was the Molasses Act, which was designed to cut off the [French-New England] trade by putting a 100 percent duty upon non-British sugar. The agent of Massachusetts and Connecticut in London foretold funereally that the act was bound to ruin “many thousand families there.” Richard Partridge, the New York agent in London, brought up the argument of nonrepresentation in Parliament to denounce the act . . .”

By passing the act, [Walpole] legally appeased the British East West Indian planters. By doing little or nothing to enforce it, he appeased New England rum merchants. Smuggling was not a particularly American vice. Even when Secretary at War he had been engaged in smuggling his wines up the Thames.”

(The Struggle for Power: The American Revolution, Theodore Draper, Vintage Books, 1997, excerpts pp. 95-96)

The Portuguese began the transatlantic slave trade during the Fifteenth century when it was able to expand to overseas and reach Africa. There they found an already active Arab slave traffic and African chieftains eager to sell captive men, women and children to buyers.

The Portuguese Slave Traffic

“The slave-trade is still extensively carried on in the Portuguese settlements on the East Coast of Africa. The Portuguese Government, which is bound by treaty to suppress it, is generally reticent on the subject, and as we have had no Consul at Mozambique, the capital of those extensive settlements, since 1858, it is on rare occasions that the veil which covers that dark part of Africa is lifted.

The principal traffic in the Mozambique Channel still is the slave-trade, and probably the principal market beyond the sea, Madagascar. The Portuguese ministers allege that the oversea traffic cannot be large, because the seizure of their vessels is rare.

But the traffic is carried on in Arab dhows [and under the Arab flag], and when seizures take place the Portuguese escape the stigma. The following passage from the evidence of Captain Sullivan, before the Select Committee of the House of Commons, shows the working of the affair:

“Another reason why the fact of the Portuguese sharing in this slave-trade . . . they have recently adopted, the title of “free Negroes” for the slaves . . . Ask any of the ten thousand Negroes that crowd the streets of Mozambique where they come from, and the reply is the same as that of the slaves captured on board of the dhows – stolen, dragged from their homes and families, sold and bought, sold and bought again, and brought from the markets on the mainland to this place, where they are worse off than they were before.”

The Blue-Book of 1873 contains the following remarks in a paper by Captain Elton to Sir Bartle Frere:

“About Christmas 1870, a gang of about one hundred women and children were brought down from the Shire by a native chief to the town of Quiliman for sale. I arrived there from Mozambique about the 10th of January 1871, when the matter was openly talked about, and I saw a number of recently-purchased slaves.”

(The Lost Continent, or Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa, 1875, Joseph Cooper, Longmans, Green Company, 1875, excerpts pp. 25-26)

The Dutch, French and British established state-sanctioned organizations to purchase and carry already-enslaved Africans to work their colonies. In the British American colonies and after 1789, New England was the unofficial seat of the transatlantic slave trade and profited greatly to the extent that the region’s economic prosperity was built upon that trade.

When the Mauritius planters saw the British end the slave traffic in 1834, they began importing coolies from Ceylon and India to replace the Africans.

Perpetuating Slavery on Mauritius

“Mauritius was discovered by the Portuguese in 1505 and continued in their possession until 1598, when it was ceded to the Dutch, who gave it the name by which it is now known. The Dutch finally abandoned it in 1710 when the island was taken over by the French.

Under the French, the island was considerably developed, especially during the second half of the eighteenth century, and this new step, as the majority saw it, necessitated the introduction of [African] slavery. During the Napoleonic Wars, Mauritius was captured by England and was formally ceded by France in 1814.

The significance of the Negroes in Mauritius, however, dates from the year 1723 when the East India Company of France, in order to promote agriculture in the Island, sanctioned the introduction of slaves, whom they sold to the inhabitants at a certain fixed price.

The slave trade, at this period, was principally in the hands of those pirates who had formed a settlement at Nossibe (Nosse Ibrahim) on the northeast coast of Madagascar . . . they excited a war between the tribes of the interior and those inhabiting the seacoast, and purchased the prisoners made by both for the purpose of conveying them for sale to Bourbon or Mauritius.

If the prisoners thus obtained proved insufficient to the demands of the slave market, a descent was made on some part of the Island, a village was surrounded, and its younger and more vigorous inhabitants were borne off to a state of perpetual slavery.

[Of] every five Negroes embarked at Madagascar, not more than two were found fit for service in Mauritius. The rest either stifled beneath the hatches, starved themselves to death, died of putrid fever, became the food of sharks, fled to the mountains, or fell beneath the driver’s lash.

[Mauritius Colonial Governor] Mahe de Labourdounais was not the founder of slavery. The institution preceded his arrival. Slavery existed in Mauritius even under the Dutch regime. From first to last Mauritius has been the tomb of more than a million of Africans. Many became fugitives . . . in order to check the fugitive slaves, Labourdounais employed their countrymen against them, and formed a mounted police who protected the colonists from their incursions.

The first attempt to emancipate the slaves was made by the leaders of the French Revolution, who, while they professed to discard Christianity as a revelation from God, deduced the equality of all men before God from the principle of natural reason.

The prohibition of slavery was rendered null and void by the planters of Mauritius and the members of the local government, all of whom were slaveholders and opposed any change.”

(The Negroes in Mauritius, A.F. Fokeer, Journal of Negro History, April 1922, Volume VII, No. 2, excerpts pp. 197-201)

Writing in 1857, author Guy Stevens Callender observes below that the discovery of America made the slave trade from Africa inevitable, as Europeans were too few to cultivate such a vast wilderness. The cheapness of land made slave labor necessary, and the willingness of Africans to sell their enslaved brethren ensured a large labor supply for the New World.

Slavery and a Superabundance of Land

“The serfdom of the Middle Ages was for all Europe, what it is for Poland and Russia still, a kind of slavery required by the small proportion of people to land; a substitute for hired labor, which gradually expired with the increase of population, as it will expire in Poland and Russia when land shall, in those countries, become as scarce and dear as it became in England sometime after the Conquest.

Next comes the institution of slavery in America by the colonies of nations which had abolished serfdom at home; colonies in whose history, whether we read it in Raynal, or Edwards, or Grahame, we find the effect and the cause invariably close together; the slavery in various forms of bondage, growing out of superabundance of land.

It was the cheapness of land that cause [Bartolome de] Las Casas to invent the African slave trade. It was the cheapness of land that brought African slaves to Antigua and Barbadoes . . . it was the cheapness of land that caused the introduction of Negroes into Virginia, and produced the various forms of bondage practiced by all the old English colonies in America.

At the epoch of the discovery of America, the population of Europe was small, and it could make only scanty contributions of people to the New World; and as it was just itself emerging from a state of barbarism, it could not extend into new regions any elevated or enlightened civilization.

Slavery was one of the established systems of that period, and the holding of heathen slaves enjoyed the full sanction of the church. And it had so happened, that the value of the Negro in the condition of servitude had been long tried, especially in Spain and Portugal, and was well understood.

What has occurred in America, was, under the circumstances, inevitable. Incalculable resources existed in the mine and in the soil, but by whose hands could they be developed? Where it was practicable to enslave the native people of the country, their physical organization was unequal to the forced labors imposed upon them, and they perished speedily from the earth.

The people who could subdue and cultivate the New World existed only in Africa. Their number was definitely large; and not only did no existing moral and religious scruples forbid their coerced appropriation to that work, but it was considered rather to be in the safe line of religious duty, to subject the Negro heathen to Christian baptism and Christian masters. It is oftentimes loosely said, that America has been settled by the European races . . . The truth really is, that America, including its islands, has been settled chiefly from Africa.”

(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. 745-749)

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)

It is astonishing to many that as their former Northern colonies began a war in 1861 upon their Southern neighbors ostensibly because of African slavery, England would not have intervened with offers of compensated emancipation due to a guilty conscience.

After all, the Royal African Company (RAC) was chartered by the Stuart family and London merchants in 1660 for the express purpose of trade along the West Coast of Africa. The RAC was led by the Duke of York, for whom New York City is named. In the 1680s, 5000 slaves were carried annually across the Atlantic by the RAC and branded with “DY” or “RAC” on their chests, clearly indicating whose property they were.

Therefore, those responsible for populating North and South America with African slaves should be arraigned for perpetuating slavery, as well as those in Africa who captured their own brethren and sold them to the Europeans in the first place.

Slavery in British Territory, Circa 1875

“It has been recently brought to light in England, by the indefatigable Dr. [Wilhelm] Leitner [1840-1899], the principal of the Government College at Lahore, that a large and barbarous slave-trade is carried on by the Ameer of Afghanistan, who is a quasi-feudatory [ally] of Great Britain, by who he is regularly supplied with improved Snider rifles and a large subsidy.

Barbarous raids are continually carried on, on the neighboring tribe of Siah Posh Kafirs, which at present number about 300,000, but is threatened with destruction. The people are described as a noble race, supposed to the descendants of a settlement of Christians of remote antiquity. Armed only with rude weapons they are unable to resist the Afghans with the Sniders supplied to their enslavers by the Indian Government.

In reference to this this subject the Editor of Public Opinion, at Lahore, wrote in May 1874:

“It is well-known, that slaves are purchased by British subjects within the boundaries of British territory, and that many a beautiful Siah Posh girl has been torn from her relations and friends, and has ended her days in misery in the harems of our native fellow subjects.

It is well-known, to everyone well acquainted with the Kafirs, that within the last few years numerous villages of Siah Posh have been conquered by the Afghan Mohammedans, almost solely on account of the high market value of female slaves from Kafiristan; and it ought to be well-known, although we believe it is not as well-known as it should be, that there are agents for the purchase of slaves, who carry on their unholy traffic even in British Territory.”

In speaking at a public meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in London, Dr. Leitner said:

“Then it comes the case of Ameer of [Kabul] . . . and giving the Ameer money and arms, we have certainly assumed the position of a “paramount” power towards him. These Kafirs consider themselves the brothers of the Europeans – they are neither Hindoos nor Mohammedans, but is has been said have a sort of quasi-Christianity . . . this is the race that is now successfully preyed upon by the Ameer.

The slavery in the British settlements on the West Coast of Africa, which has long been a reproach to Great Britain, has now received its death blow [though] the greatest difficulties will probably be raised by European merchants.”

(The Lost Continent; or, Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa, 1875, Joseph Cooper, Longman’s, Green & Company, 1875, excerpts pp. 19-22)

Nearly always missing in a discussion of slavery in North America is the question of how Africans arrived and who conveyed them – and it was not slave ships flying the Confederate Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.

The responsibility for African slavery begins with the African tribes themselves who enslaved each other, then the Portuguese, Spanish, French and British who needed labor for their New World colonies, and the New England slavers who ruled the transatlantic slave trade in the mid-1700s. By 1750, Providence, Rhode Island had surpassed Liverpool as the center of slave-ship construction, with the latter departing for Africa’s west coast laden with rum and Yankee notions, trading these for already-enslaved men, women and children, transporting them to the West Indies to be traded for molasses, and then returning to New England to distill more rum from the molasses. Add to this New England’s textile mills of the early 1800s whose fortunes depended upon slave-produced cotton.

African Slavery in America

“There are three important points to keep in mind in the study of the African-American population of the 1850s. First, we should avoid presentism. Attitudes toward working people of all races were different at that time than those we find acceptable today.

The Dutch did keelhauling of sailors as late as 1853 and the British did no ban the flogging of soldiers until 1860. The working classes in industrialized areas such as Manchester, England, worked under conditions that left many crippled and maimed from injuries of breathing dust from textile mills and mines. This left most unfit for work at 40 years of age and almost none at 50. Children as young as 7 or 8 worked up to 12 hours [a day], some “seized naked in bed by the overlookers, and driven with blows and kicks to the factory.”

Second, regardless of good treatment, being a slave has many costs which few of us would be willing to pay. Third, trying to have a realistic understanding of slavery is not an apology. It is a mistake to oversimplify slavery to chains, whips, and division of families; it is likewise a mistake to say that they were better off as slaves. The objective should be to understand as best we can.

A difficulty is finding objective writings at a time when Northern writers emphasized the horrors of slavery in a continuing regional attack, Southern writers emphasized slavery’s benefit to the African, and the bonded people themselves left few written records. The slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s offer the best testimony we have by the slaves themselves, although, of course, memories of 70 years ago have problems of certainty.

Many Americans, including Abolitionists, advocated that Africans be sent to Africa or some place in the New World where they would be removed from American society. Toward this goal, the American Colonization Society, to which many prominent Northern and Southern Americans belonged to, established the western African nation of Liberia.

The attitude of most Americans of the time was summed up by Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, “I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people . . . I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

It would not be until January of 1863 that the North would allow black men to serve in the Union army, and then in segregated units at lower pay and with white officers. U.S. “Colored Troops” were often used as labor or in “forlorn hopes,” such as fighting at the Crater and Battery Wagner.”

(Characteristics of the African-American People During the 1850s: American History for Home Schools, 1607-1885, with a Focus on the Civil War, Leslie R. Tucker, Society of Independent Southern Historians, 2018, excerpts Chapter 10)

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)