The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (6 page)

After God has given humans dominion over all animal species, he “brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.” Adam then symbolically exercises human power by giving “names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.” Human dominion then increases substantially after the Fall from the Garden of Eden and after Noah rescues all the surviving animal species from the disastrous flood. Upon leaving the ark, Noah builds an altar to the Lord and
sacrifices a member of every “clean” beast and fowl as burnt offerings. God is so pleased by the “sweet savour” of the fumes that he promises “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake … neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.” The biblical language suggests that the ritual of sacrificing animals (like animalizing other people) became a way of purging humans of “animality” and thus of a major source of sin.

In addition to being needed for regular sacrifice, animals will now be wholly subordinate, a source of food for humans:

It is important to stress that over the ages these words of Genesis have shaped fundamental assumptions and values in Western culture—even for early church fathers who were more concerned with counteracting pagan views of human-animal interchangeability, and for the countless people who did not literally accept all the details of the story of creation. Moreover,
Keith Thomas, in his invaluable account
Man and the Natural World,
shows that from 1500 to 1800, the biblical sense of human uniqueness and privilege gained considerable new strength in Western Europe. As Europeans entered a wholly new stage of exploration, conquest, and colonization, including the transportation of millions of African
slaves to all parts of the New World, there was a skyrocketing confidence in man’s right and ability to exploit the surrounding world of
nature.

Renaissance men could draw on
Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek writers to reinforce the biblical view that everything in the natural world existed solely to serve man’s interests—that everything had a human purpose. Since beasts supposedly had no souls and no conception of a future, domesticated animals were said to be much better off than their wild brethren, who had to fend for themselves and were vulnerable to predators and the sufferings of old age.
²⁵
Besides, whether wild or tame, most animals were designed to provide food for humans, and Western Europeans were especially carnivorous. Even in the Middle Ages, the more affluent people ate an astonishing variety of meat, increasingly mixed with large quantities of spices from the East. One notable cook in medieval Savoy “instructed his purveyors to set out with forty horses six weeks or even two months before a two-day banquet to acquire deer, hares, partridges, pheasants, small birds … doves, cranes, and herons.”
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Keith Thomas points out that Western Europeans were shocked and expressed “baffled contempt” when they learned of the
Buddhists’ and
Hindus’ respect for animals, even insects.
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By the 1630s, any such respect was further weakened philosophically by the emerging work of the so-called Father of Modern Philosophy,
René Descartes. As a great mathematician, it was perhaps natural for Descartes to conclude that “thinking”
was his essence, the only thing about himself that could not be doubted (“I think, therefore I am”). Hence his body was like a machine, a matter of extension and motion that followed the laws of physics and was controlled by his wholly separate mind and soul. Since he became certain that animals lacked both a cognitive mind and soul, they were really automata, like clocks, capable of complex behavior but totally incapable of speech, reasoning, or perhaps even sensation (a conclusion endorsed by some of his disciples). While
Thomas writes that Descartes had limited direct influence in Britain, he had “only pushed the European emphasis on the gulf between man and beast to its logical conclusion,” “thus clearing the way for the uninhibited exercise of
human rule.” Even in England “the doctrine of human uniqueness was propounded from every pulpit.”
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The widening gulf between man and beast had important implications for what we might term social control and the spread of Christian civilization. Christians had regularly portrayed the devil as a mixture of man and animal, and the Antichrist as a beast. There had always been a tendency to animalize the serfs and peasants, especially those who worked daily with animals and were darkened by manure and soil as well as the sun.
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Thomas points out that
bestiality, the ultimate sexual crime, became a capital offense from 1534 to 1861. The chains, bridles, and cages linked with domestication were used at times for beggars and the insane as well as for criminal offenders.
Edmund Burke expressed a typical dehumanizing view of social class when contemplating the
French Revolution: “Learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of the swinish multitude.”
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Like domestic animals, African slaves transported to the New World were supposed to benefit by being saved from
human sacrifice,
cannibalism, and other cruel practices of savages in the uncivilized world; given a “purpose” in life, they would work for the good of society while being guaranteed food and shelter; some, if they had souls, might even be Christianized.

It was Western Europe’s unprecedented expansion that extended the animalizing process, usually epitomized by enslavement, to
increasing numbers of outsiders, beginning with
Slavs,
Moors,
Canary Islanders,
Irish, Native Americans, and numerous peoples of West and East
Africa. And the widening of the gap between man and beast, symbolized by
Descartes, coincided with much more intense interaction with diverse outsiders, especially sub-Saharan Africans, whose alleged “beastly living” and proximity to apes greatly enhanced the Western Europeans’ rising self-image as the exemplars of global civilization.

In this section we will briefly describe how the search for the ideal animalized slave—a human who, as Aristotle put it, was clearly “born to be a slave”—led to the
racist stereotyping of black Africans by the late eighteenth century. In the section on “Domestication and
Internalization,” below, I will specifically show how Aristotle’s ideal slave pointed to the model of animal domestication and raised the issue of slaves “internalizing” their masters’ attempts at dehumanization—an issue related to the theme of the blacks’ alleged incapacity for genuine freedom in a democracy, which lies at the heart of the long historical legacy of slavery, especially in America.

From very early times, slaveholders had much preferred outsiders—“
barbarians” (
barbaroi
) in the case of the ancient Greeks. While the Greeks did enslave one another in their wars, they favored foreigners who spoke barbaric languages and were thus “ignorant of the political institutions and cultural characteristics of the city.”
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Even more striking was the way ancient
Israelites sought to mitigate the servitude of their own people (mostly
debt slaves, with seven years of service) and limit perpetual chattel slavery, which involved more dehumanization, to outsiders and foes, especially
Canaanites. As later Christians searched the Old Testament for proslavery sanctions, they found this crucial justification in
Leviticus:

This portentous if very human distinction between people like us and the foreign outsiders not only validated perpetual slavery but even seemed to imply that non-Hebrew slaves could be ruled ruthlessly or, as phrased elsewhere, “with rigor.” Yet Leviticus and
Exodus
also proclaim versions of the
Golden Rule: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers, in the land of
Egypt.” Both
Jews and
Christians have long struggled to reconcile these oppressive and compassionate passages and precepts. (Some later captains of
slave ships claimed that their treatment of Africans conformed to the Golden Rule.)
³³

Even when the forces of demand and supply often led to the enslavement of local debtors and abandoned babies, it was surely easier to dehumanize the foreigners captured in wars and often traded by merchants who specialized in such commerce.
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It is highly significant that beginning in the tenth century, Western Europeans began attaching a foreign ethnic connotation to their words for “slave” as they purchased increasing numbers of bondspeople from the
Dalmatian coast. The Latin words
servus
and
mancipium
were gradually replaced by
sclavus,
meaning a “Slav” or person of Slavic descent, which became the root for the English word
slave
and its counterparts—
schiavo
in Italian,
esclave
in French,
esclavo
in Spanish,
sklave
in German. And from the early thirteenth to the late fifteenth century, Italian merchants participated in a booming long-distance seaborne trade that transported tens of thousands of “white” Armenian, Bulgarian, Circassian, Mingrelian, and Georgian slaves from regions around the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to Mediterranean markets extending from Muslim Egypt and Syria to Christian Crete, Cyprus, Sicily, and eastern Spain. Such slave labor was increasingly used for the production of sugar.
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As a remnant of this white slave trade, which was cut off after the
Ottoman Turks captured
Constantinople in 1453, there were a few Greek and Slavic slaves in Spanish
Havana as late as 1600.
³⁶
But by the late 1500s, the Portuguese settlers in Brazil, having earlier relied on
Indian captives, were turning almost exclusively to black African slaves, and a century later, after the “Africanization” of the
Caribbean, the English colonists in
Virginia and
Maryland were following the same path.

Historians long engaged in a debate over whether antiblack
racism preceded the widespread enslavement of Africans or emerged as a result of that enslavement. There is some truth on both sides, but in general the second alternative is supported by more evidence. It is easy enough to dwell on the negative symbolism of the “noncolor” black or even to point to a preference for dark-skinned slaves on the part of the
Aryan invaders in India or the
T’ang Dynasty Chinese. Beginning
in the sixteenth century, the first English voyagers and traders described sub-Saharan Africans as “a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth.” Such writers drew on earlier non-English precedents, among them the Moroccan Christian convert Leo Africanus, who in the 1520s described the blacks’ “beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexteritie of wit, and of all arts.” Numerous commentators noted the blacks’ near nakedness and their supposed unrestrained lust, symbolized by the male’s large penis.
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With respect to human-animal relations, it was a “tragic happenstance of nature,” as Winthrop
Jordan put it, that Europeans discovered the
chimpanzee, then called “orang-outang,” in the same West African regions where they purchased slaves. As a result, while it was not claimed that black Africans were themselves a species of apes, there was much comparison of their low and flat nostrils, thick lips, and other features with those of the tailless apes. There was also much continuing lore about male “orang-outangs” having sex with black women.
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But in the sixteenth century, the English were well aware that the
Portuguese had long been purchasing and transporting thousands of African slaves to
Iberia and the
Atlantic Islands, a fact that already made them seem like a people “made to be slaves.” Moreover, the Portuguese had shown respect for African rulers and traders and had dealt with them as equals. To complicate matters further, a study of the image of black Africans in Western art suggests that medieval European culture, prior to New World slavery, can hardly be described as “racist,” at least with respect to black Africans (as opposed to
Jews).
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Countless whites derived their first impressions of Africans from depictions of
Mansa¯ Mu¯sa¯, the very wealthy black king of Mali, laden with gold on his pilgrimage to
Mecca; or from numerous pictures of a black African magus, or wise man, in scenes of the
Nativity; or from illustrations of the black
Queen of Sheba or even a black Virgin
Mary. While churches also portrayed black-faced executioners in the
Passion of Christ, the distinctive African facial features were far more evident in the many paintings and statues of the heroic
Saint Maurice, a black African clothed in armor who appeared in churches and cathedrals in Germany and Switzerland. Amazingly, Saint Maurice was supposedly a leader of the
Teutonic Knights in the
Holy Roman Empire’s crusade against the pagan
Slavs to the east! Despite the negative depictions of
West Africans in later English traveler accounts,
a relative absence of antiblack racism extended on into the
Renaissance and beyond, as evidenced in Western European literature and the humanistic portraits of blacks by
Memling,
Rubens,
Hals,
Rembrandt, and others.