Murray N. Rothbard
13th September 2016, 02:04
[ Democracy writes, “Pro-Slave trade” and “Neo-feudalism” ]
Clearly, liberty and compulsory slavery are totally incompatible, indeed are diametric opposites.
In Western Europe, as in many other civilizations, the typical model of the origin of the State was not via a voluntary “social contract” but by the conquest of one tribe by another. The original liberty of the tribe or the peasantry thus falls victim to the conquerors. At first, the conquering tribe killed and looted the victims and rode on. But at some time the conquerors decided that it would be more profitable to settle down among the conquered peasantry and rule and loot them on a permanent and systematic basis. The periodic tribute exacted from the conquered subjects eventually came to be called “taxation.” And, with equal generality, the conquering chieftains parcelled out the land of the peasantry to the various warlords, who were then able to settle down and collect feudal “rent” from the peasantry. The peasants were often enslaved, or rather enserfed, to the land itself to provide a continuing source of exploited labor for the feudal lords.
[T]he Old Order was able to persist in its slave system for centuries precisely because it awoke no expectations and no hopes in the minds of the submerged masses; their lot was to live and eke out their brutish subsistence in slavery while obeying unquestioningly the commands of their divinely appointed rulers. But the liberal Revolution implanted indelibly in the minds of the masses—not only in the West but in the still feudally-dominated undeveloped world—the burning desire for liberty, for land to the peasantry, for peace between the nations, and, perhaps above all, for the mobility and rising standards of living that can only be brought to them by an industrial civilization. The masses will never again accept the mindless serfdom of the Old Order; and given these demands that have been awakened by liberalism and the Industrial Revolution, long-run victory for liberty is inevitable.
The American Colonies in The Seventeenth Century
Europe at the Dawn of the Modern Era
Western Europe, during the early Middle Ages, was a stagnant and war-torn region, burdened by feudalism, a hierarchical rule based on assumed and conquered land titles, and on the virtual enslavement of the peasantry, who worked as serfs in support of the ruling castes.
In 1441, a few Negro slaves were brought back to Portugal, thus beginning the extensive and barbarous slave trade. After tropical Africa, 1,500 miles from the Strait of Gibraltar, was reached in 1445, large numbers of slaves were purchased from the native chiefs of the coastal districts, and slave stations were constructed by the Portuguese along the West African coast. Although the Cape Verde Islands were discovered in 1445 by a Venetian, Captain Cadamosto, the world of Portuguese exploration largely turned to concentration upon commerce in gold and local West African pepper, as well as to the slave trade for supplying the large feudal estates of southern Portugal, which had been granted by the Portuguese government after taking that region from the Moors.
Due to geographical and political conditions, Spain retained the military spirit of feudalism for a longer time than other European countries. The arid climate and the frontier wars with the Muslims caused the Spanish ruling class to remain essentially horsemen, who in place of agriculture emphasized sheep and cattle farming, occupations in which horsemen could be utilized and trained for war. This style of life had a profound influence on Spanish colonization. The Christian and Muslim farmers conquered by the Spanish nobles were kept in feudal serfdom to provide foodstuffs for the ruling class, to whom their villages had been granted. This feudal system, which had been imposed on the conquered lands of Granada and the Canary Islands, was then applied to the larger islands of the West Indies and later to Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru. The native villages were granted to Spanish conquistadores, who were to govern them so as to live upon the work of the natives. The hapless natives were compelled to provide food, cotton, and forced labor for building the great cities where the Spanish lived and from which they governed, and to work for large mining operations of the Spaniards. Alongside the agriculture of the Indians, the conquistadores developed the raising of sheep, cattle, horses, and mules to provide profits for themselves as well as work and plentiful meat for their keepers. Generally the Spanish colonists did not pursue productive work; instead they entered government and privileged occupations, in which to live from the work of the natives whom they enslaved.
The right to conquer, coercively convert, govern, and enslave the natives of the New World was subjected to intense criticism in a series of lectures in 1539 at the University of Salamanca by the great Dominican scholastic philosopher Francisco de Vitoria. In international law based upon the natural law, insisted Vitoria, the native peoples as well as European peoples have full equality of rights. No right of conquest by Europeans could result from crimes or errors of the natives, whether they be tyranny, murder, religious differences, or rejection of Christianity. Having grave doubts of the right of the Spaniards to any government of the natives, Vitoria advocated peaceful trade, in justice and in practice, as against conquest, enslavement, and political power, whether or not the last mentioned were aimed at individual profit, tax revenue, or conversion to Christianity. Although the Spanish government prohibited further discussion of these questions, the Vitoria lectures influenced the New Laws of 1542, which gave greater legal protection to the natives in America.
Nevertheless, there were defenders of imperialism in Spain who rejected international law and scholastic individualism and returned to the slave theories of the classical authors. Based on the theory of natural servitude—that the majority of mankind is inferior and must be subdued to government by the ruling class, of course in the interest of that majority—these imperial apologists proposed that the natives be taught better morals, be converted, and be introduced to the blessings of economic development by being divided among the conquistadores, for whom they must labor.
The serfdom of the Indians was most strongly and zealously opposed by the Dominican missionary Bishop Bartolome de Las Casas. Tireless in working to influence European public opinion against the practices of Spanish officials in America, Las Casas argued that all men must have freedom so that reason, which naturally inclines men to live together in peace, justice, and cooperation, can remain free and unhampered. Therefore, concluded Las Casas, even pursuit of the great objective of conversion to Christianity cannot be used to violate these rights. Not only was all slavery evil, but the natives had a right to live independently of European government. The papacy, in 1537, condemned as heretical the concept that natives were not rational men or were naturally inferior persons. These progressive views were also reflected in the abolition of conquistador feudalism in the New Laws of 1542; however, this abolition was revoked by the Spanish Crown three years later.
England, the major sovereign over the lands of North America, had been subjected to feudalism since at least the Norman Conquest of the eleventh century. After the conquest of England in 1066, the conquerors parceled out large tracts of land to the ownership of their leading warlords, and this newly created nobility became the liege lords of the subdued peasantry. Since the overwhelming mass of Englishmen were still engaged in agriculture, feudalism became the crucial fact about English—as well as other European—society. The major attributes of the feudal system were: the granting of huge estates to landowning warlords, the coerced binding of the peasants (serfs) to their land plots, and hence to the rule of their lords, and the further bolstering by the state of feudal status through compulsory primogeniture (the passing on of the estate to the oldest son only) and entail (prohibiting the landowner from alienating—selling, breaking up, etc.—his land). This process froze landlordship in the existing noble families, and prevented any natural market or genealogical forces from breaking up the vast estates.
The Virginia Company
The system of plantations in Ireland provided the pattern for establishing plantations in America. Grants of land were made to courtiers, privileged companies, and purchasers of feudal domains with feudal powers.
The bulk of the [Virginia] colonists had been under “indenture” contracts, and were in servitude to the company for seven years in exchange for passage money and maintenance during the period, and sometimes for the prospect of a little land at the end of their term of service. The contract was called an indenture because it was originally written in duplicate on a large sheet—the two halves separated by a jagged line called an “indent.” While it is true that the original contract was generally voluntary, it is also true that a free society does not enforce even temporary voluntary slave contracts, since it must allow for a person to be able to change his mind, and for the inalienability of a person’s control over his will and his body. While a man’s property is alienable and may be transferred from one person to another, a person’s will is not; the creditor in a free society may enforce the collection of payment for money he may have advanced (in this case, passage and maintenance money), but he may not continue to enforce slave labor, however temporary it may be. Furthermore, many of the indentures were compulsory and not voluntary—for example, those involving political prisoners, imprisoned debtors, and kidnapped children of the English lower classes. The children were kidnapped by professional “spirits” or “crimps” and sold to the colonists.
In the concrete conditions of the colony, slavery, as always, robbed the individual of his incentive to work and save, and thereby endangered the survival of the settlement.
Arbitrary land allocations were also made by the governor and the assembly. Thus 3,000 acres in the capital and three other general plantations were reserved to the company, with the settlers being confined to tenants. The proceeds were to go toward the expenses of government. Land was also reserved for support of the local officials and ministers, and as a subsidy for local artisans. A substantial grant was given to Governor Yeardley, and 10,000 acres were reserved for a proposed university at Henrico.
The crucial point, however, is that the planters would not have been able to cultivate these large tobacco plantations—and therefore would not have been moved to acquire and keep so much land—if they had had to rely on free and independent labor. So scarce was such labor in relation to land resources that the hiring of free labor would not have been economically feasible. But the planters then turned to the use of forced labor to render their large plantations profitable: specifically, the labor of the indentured servants and of the even more thoroughly coerced Negro slaves. In slavery, the laborer is coerced not only for a term of years, or for life, but for the lives of himself and all his descendants. It was an ironic commentary on the later history of America that 1619, the very year of the Yeardley reforms, saw the first slave vessel arrive at Jamestown with twenty Negroes aboard, to be sold as slaves to the tobacco planters. Until the mid-seventeenth century, the planters preferred to rely on indentured serf labor. These white servants, once their term had expired, could obtain their land, generally fifty acres each, on the western fringe of the settlement, and become independent settlers. But Negro slavery, unlike indentured service, had no means of dissolving into the general society; once introduced, it became the backbone of the Virginian (and other Southern) labor system. It could only remain as a continual canker on the American body social.
From Company to Royal Colony
King James managed, in 1624, to obtain from a court under his domination, the annulment of the charter of the Virginia Company.
The abrupt change in government, though unwelcome to the Virginia settlers, scarcely altered the social structure of the Virginia colony—for, surprisingly, the king did not disturb the land titles and land privileges that had been allocated to individuals and groups by the company. For many years, indeed, the colony continued to grant land in exchange for the company’s shares. These allotments continued to be made in large tracts, and generally the best tracts—in contrast to the small frontier settlements of the indentured servants—along the navigable rivers. One result of this pattern of land allocation, and of the heavy reliance on forced labor, was that Virginia—in contrast, as we shall see, to the New England system—was thinly settled over an extended area with few towns or villages. The tobacco planters prospered, and increased their reliance on indentured service and, after midcentury, on Negro slavery.
The London Company, after granting land to the individual settlers, had reserved to itself the feudal quitrent, in this case, of two shillings per 100 acres. Since the quitrent was not payable for seven years, until 1625, the Crown upon seizure of the assets of the London Company took over the proprietary privilege and collected the first quitrents from the settlers.
The Social Structure of Virginia: Planters and Farmers
But if the royal governor was the leading governing power, de facto he shared the rule over Virginia society with an oligarchy of very large tobacco planters, who, as we have seen, were granted large tracts of choice river land, and who were able to command and exploit the labor of slaves and indentured servants for their plantations. This ruling class of large planters permeated the officers of colonial government: they constituted the entire Council—the upper house of the Assembly and supreme judicial body—and a majority of the House of Burgesses. In addition, they were the major county officers—judges, colonels of the militia, and revenue officers. The large planters also made up the vestry that governed each parish, the smallest political unit. The next larger unit, the county, was ruled by several justices of the peace, appointed by the governor from among the planters. The justices of the peace held county court, administered roads and police, and assessed taxes. Orders of the county court were executed by the sheriff and the county lieutenant, commander of the local militia; both were appointed by the governor, with the advice of the county court.
The great bulk of the free populace were not large planters, but small farmers with holdings of fifty to a few hundred acres. These were independent yeomen who had acquired titles to the land they were to settle by headright grant, or at the end of their indentured term of service. A few small farmers had one or two indentured servants, but most had none, the labor being performed by the farmer and his family. Despite the rule of the royal governor and the preemption of choice land and the use of slaves by the large planters, the yeomen enjoyed a far freer, more mobile society than they had ever known. They were free, above all, from the hopelessness of the rigid feudalism and caste structure that they had left behind in England. Here they were, at last, owners of their own land and products. They were pioneers, hewing out their living from a new and untapped continent.
As tobacco production grew, its price naturally fell: from sixpence to a penny or less a pound. As a result, the lot of the small tobacco farmers became increasingly difficult, and they found it harder and harder to compete with the larger plantations, which were staffed with slave and bondservant labor. An increased use of slave labor after 1670 widened the gulf between the planters and the small farmers.
The Social Structure of Virginia: Bondservants and Slaves
During his term of bondage, the indentured servant received no monetary payment. His hours and conditions of work were set absolutely by the will of his master who punished the servant at his own discretion. Flight from the master’s service was punishable by beating, or by doubling or tripling the term of indenture. The bondservants were frequently beaten, branded, chained to their work, and tortured.
In all cases, the servant revolts for freedom were totally crushed and the leaders executed. Demands of the rebelling servants ranged from improved conditions and better food to outright freedom.
By the late seventeenth century the supply of bondservants began to dry up. While the opening of new colonies and wider settlements increased the demand for bondservants, the supply dwindled greatly as the English government finally cracked down on the organized practice of kidnapping and on the shipping of convicts to the colonies. And so the planters turned to the import and purchase of Negro slaves. In Virginia there had been 50 Negroes, the bulk of them slaves, out of a total population of 2,500 in 1630; 950 Negroes out of 27,000 in 1660; and 3,000 Negroes out of 44,000 in 1680—a steadily rising proportion, but still limited to less than seven percent of the population. But in ten years, by 1690, the proportion of Negroes had jumped to over 9,000 out of 53,000, approximately seventeen percent. And by 1700, the number was 16,000 out of a population of 58,000, approximately twenty-eight percent. And of the total labor force—the working population—this undoubtedly reflected a considerably higher proportion of Negroes.
How the Negro slaves were treated may be gauged by the diary of the aforementioned William Byrd II, who felt himself to be a kindly master and often inveighed against “brutes who mistreat their slaves.” Typical examples of this kindly treatment were entered in his diary:
2-8-09: Jenny and Eugene were whipped.
5-13-09: Mrs. Byrd whips the nurse.
6-10-09: Eugene (a child) was whipped for running away and had the bit put on him.
11-30-09: Jenny and Eugene were whipped.
12-16-09: Eugene was whipped for doing nothing yesterday.
4-17-10: Byrd helped to investigate slaves tried for “High Treason”; two were hanged.
7-1-10: The Negro woman ran away again with the bit in her mouth.
7-15-10: My wife, against my will, caused little Jenny to be burned with a hot iron.
8-22-10: I had a severe quarrel with little Jenny and beat her too much for which I was sorry.
1-22-11: A slave “pretends to be sick.” I put a branding iron on the place he claimed of and put the bit on him.
It is pointless to criticize such passages as only selected instances of cruel treatment, counterbalanced by acts of kindness by Byrd and other planters toward their slaves. For the point is not only that the slave system was one where such acts could take place; the point is that threats of brutality underlay the whole relationship. For the essence of slavery is that human beings, with their inherent freedom of will, with individual desires and convictions and purposes, are used as capital, as tools for the benefit of their master. The slave is therefore habitually forced into types and degrees of work that he would not have freely undertaken; by necessity, therefore, the bit and the lash become the motor of the slave system. The myth of the kindly master camouflages the inherent brutality and savagery of the slave system.
One historical myth holds that since the slaves were their masters’ capital, the masters’ economic self-interest dictated kindly treatment of their property. But again, the masters always had to make sure that the property was really theirs, and for this, systematic brutality was needed to turn labor from natural into coerced channels for the benefit of the master. And, second, what of property that had outlived its usefulness? Of capital that no longer promised a return to the master? Of slaves too old or too ill to continue earning their masters a return? What sort of treatment did the economic self-interest of the master dictate for slaves who could no longer repay the costs of their subsistence?
It has been maintained in mitigation of the brutality of the American slave system that the Negroes were purchased from African chieftains, who had enslaved them there. It is true that the slaves were also slaves in Africa, but it is also true that African slavery never envisioned the vast scope, the massive dragooning of forced labor that marked American plantation slavery. Furthermore, the existence of a ready white market for slaves greatly expanded the extent of slavery in Africa, as well as the intensity of the intertribal wars through which slavery came about. As is usually the case on the market, demand stimulated supply. Moreover, African slavery did not include transportation under such monstrous conditions that a large percentage could not survive, or the brutal “seasoning” process in a West Indies way station to make sure that only those fit for slave conditions survived, or the continual deliberate breaking up of slave families that prevailed in the colonies.
From the earliest opening of the New World, African slaves were imported as forced labor to make possible the working of large plantations, which, as we have seen, would have been uneconomic if they had had to rely, as did other producers, on free and voluntary labor. In Latin America, from the sixteenth century on, Negro slavery was used for large sugar plantations concentrated in the West Indies and on the north coast of South America. It has been estimated that a total of 900,000 Negro slaves were imported into the New World in the sixteenth century, and two and three-quarter million in the seventeenth century.
Contrary to the views of those writers who maintain that Negroes and whites enjoyed equal rights as indentured servants in Virginia until the 1660s, after which the Negroes were gradually enslaved, evidence seems clear that from the beginning many Negroes were slaves and were treated far more harshly than were white indentured servants. No white man, for example, was ever enslaved unto perpetuity—lifetime service for the slave and for his descendants—in any English colony. The fact that there were no slave statutes in Virginia until the 1660s simply reflected the small number of Negroes in the colony before that date. From a very early date, owned Negroes were worked as field hands, whereas white bondservants were spared this onerous labor. And also from an early date, Negroes, in particular, were denied any right to bear arms. An especially striking illustration of this racism pervading Virginia from the earliest days was the harsh prohibition against any sexual union of the races.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the growing Virginia colony had emerged from its tiny and precarious beginnings with a definite social structure. This society may be termed partly feudal. On the one hand, Virginia, with its abundance of new land, was spared the complete feudal mold of the English homeland. The Virginia Company was interested in promoting settlement, and most grantees (such as individual settlers and former indentured servants) were interested in settling the land for themselves. As a result, there developed a multitude of independent yeomen settlers, particularly in the less choice up-country lands. Also, the feudal quitrent system never took hold in Virginia. The settlers were charged quitrents by the colony or by the large grantees who, instead of allowing settlers to own the land or selling the land to them, insisted on charging and trying to collect annual quitrents as overlords of the land area. But while Virginia was able to avoid many crucial features of feudalism, it introduced an important feudal feature into its method of distributing land, especially the granting of large tracts of choice tidewater river land to favorite and wealthy planters. These large land grants would have early dissolved into ownership by the individual settlers were it not for the regime of forced labor, which made the large tobacco plantations profitable. Furthermore, the original “settlers,” those who brought the new land into use, were in this case the slaves and bondservants themselves, so it might well be said that the planters were in an arbitrary quasi-feudal relation to their land even apart from the large grants.
Temporary indentured service, both “voluntary” and compulsory, and the more permanent Negro slavery formed the base of exploited labor upon which was erected a structure of oligarchic rule by the large tobacco planters. The continuance of the large land tracts was also buttressed by the totally feudal laws of entail and primogeniture, which obtained, at least formally, in Virginia and most of the other colonies. Primogeniture compelled the undivided passing-on of land to the eldest son, and entail prevented the land from being alienated (even voluntarily) from the family domain. However, primogeniture did not exert its fully restrictive effect, for the planters generally managed to elude it and to divide their estate among their younger children as well.
Religion in Virginia
England suffered not only under feudalism, but under its corollary, the established state church.
British Mercantilism over Virginia
Rule in the European governments of the seventeenth century was exercised, not only by the great landowners—through feudalism—but also by groups of merchants and capitalists specially privileged and subsidized by the state, in the system that later came to be known as “mercantilism.” The essence of mercantilism was the granting or selling of monopolistic privilege and subsidy by the state to favored groups of businessmen. Thus, Crown, feudal nobility, and privileged capitalists exercised rule over the exploited remainder of the populace—which included the bulk of merchants and capitalists who sought profit by voluntary service in the marketplace rather than by obtaining privileges from the coercive power of the state.
From the beginning, government meddling—especially by the English government—fastened the mercantile system on the American colonies.
English enforcement of the Navigation Acts was unfortunately rigorous, especially in the Southern colonies.
[T]he canker of slavery was also due partly to the Navigation Acts. The economic pressure of the acts on the planters led them to look to slavery as a way to cut costs by exploiting forced labor. Moreover, the English government forbade Virginia from restricting the infamous slave trade, the monopoly of which had by the wars against the Dutch been assured to British traders.
Maryland
The land system, however, in keeping with the vast feudal powers given to Calvert, was established on the most rigidly feudal lines in America. Calvert early advertised that every settler who would finance the transport of five other settlers to the colony would receive a grant as “Lord of the Manor” of 2,000 acres of land—not outright, however, or in fee simple, but as a feudal tenancy with a quitrent of 400 pounds of good wheat per year to the proprietor. The manor lords, most of them Catholic, in turn rented their land to smaller planters in exchange for rent in produce. This restrictive method of allocating land or landownership decidedly hampered the growth of the entire colony during the seventeenth century. Furthermore, Calvert gave vast estates as manors to his friends and relatives.
Maryland’s economy and social structure developed in a way similar to neighboring Virginia’s.
Again, quasi-feudal land allocation led to large plantations, although small up-country farms growing subsistence crops and tobacco were more numerous but not dominant in the colony. Once more, the land was extensively settled and thinly populated. The labor base for the plantations was indentured service and Negro slavery.
Perhaps the major economic and social difference between Maryland and Virginia was Maryland’s far more feudal structure. The land was kept in a hierarchy of overlordships and tenancies, with the Calverts owning all the land and collecting a quitrent from all the landholders, while the manor lords of the vast estates given to them by the overlords leased the land to smaller planters. The small yeoman farmers of the back country could not therefore gain their land outright, but could only stay as tenants paying quitrents to the proprietary overlord. Large stretches of tidewater land were held by a few large planters.
A Negro slave in Maryland had the distinction of staging perhaps the first demonstration of nonviolent resistance in America. In 1656 Tony, a slave of one Symon Overzee, ran away and was captured with the aid of bloodhounds. When he ran away and was captured a second time, Tony sat down and refused to rise and work as a slave. Mr. Overzee bound and beat him repeatedly, but Tony still refused to act as a slave. Enraged because “his property” was refusing to function as property, Overzee poured hot lard over Tony and killed him. A court acquitted Overzee of the murder because, after all, Tony had proved to be “incorrigible.”
Virginia After Bacon’s Rebellion
While Virginia, in the decades after Bacon’s Rebellion, increasingly settled down to a rather placid oligarchic rule, one element in Virginia society persisted in being the reverse of placid about its condition. From Bacon’s Rebellion to 1710, the colony seethed with incipient and actual revolts by the Negro slaves. Being an oppressed minority of the populace, the slaves, in revolt by themselves and lacking mass white support, could not hope to succeed, and yet they continued to try to break through to freedom.
The Founding of Massachusetts Bay
John Endecott’s idea of rule was that God had chosen him as “a fit instrument” for establishing a new Canaan for the chosen people by rooting out all lesser folk, red and white, preferably by means of the pillory and the whipping post. His major struggle was to cripple the livelihood of the old settlers by prohibiting their tobacco culture and beaver trade, turning these over to the New England Company. The “old planters” could only protest in vain that they were becoming slaves to a monopoly company.
The Puritans “Purify”: Theocracy in Massachusetts
Generally, then, it was the lower orders who had to bear the main brunt of the severely enforced “moral” rules of the Puritan code. Indeed, Massachusetts imposed maximum ceilings on wage rates in order to lower wage costs to employers. The temporarily enslaved indentured servants were particularly oppressed by Puritans trying to maintain them as the efficient property of their masters; they therefore tried to suppress all deviant tendencies from the norm. (The sources of servants in Massachusetts and the other Northern colonies were the same as those of the servants coming to Virginia, as described above.) Many servants were branded like cattle with their initials and the date of purchase, so as to assure their rapid identification in case of flight. When found unsatisfactory or troublesome, servants were generally punished, whipped, and imprisoned, or had their tenure of servitude extended. Orphan boys were bound out as servants by the state until they reached the age of twenty, while illegitimate boys were especially punished by being bound out until the age of thirty. In addition, indentured servants could, like slaves, be sold by their masters to other masters, and thus be forcibly separated from their families. Servants caught escaping were often punished by having their ears cut off.
Suppressing Heresy: The Flight of Roger Williams
Williams proceeded to strike another fundamental blow at the social structure of Massachusetts Bay. He denied the right of the king to make arbitrary grants of the land of Massachusetts to the colonists. The Indians, he maintained, properly owned the land and therefore the settlers should purchase the land from them. This doctrine attacked the entire quasi-feudal origin of American colonization in arbitrary land grants in the royal charters, and it also hit at the policy of ruthlessly expelling the Indians from their land. Williams, indeed, was the rare white colonist courageous enough to say that full title to the soil rested in the Indian natives, and that white title could only be validly obtained by purchase from its true owners. The whites, charged Williams, lived “under a sin of usurpation of others’ possessions.” The denial of the king’s right to grant title to land he did not justly own, of course, hit directly at the basis of the Massachusetts charter itself, which, Williams argued, the colonists had a moral duty to turn from and renounce.
The Further Settlement of Rhode Island: The Odyssey of Samuell Gorton
As president, and then as moderator of the Assembly the following year, Gorton was able to enact the outlawing of slavery in the colony, and also to limit the term of any indentured service to ten years. Unfortunately, the former law remained a dead letter, but it was the first act of abolition of slavery in American history. Gorton also secured the elimination of imprisonment for debt. Samuell Gorton had successfully completed his odyssey of persecution to become one of the foremost leaders of the colony.
Economics Begins to Dissolve the Theocracy: The Failure of Wage and Price Control
As in the South, there were at the base of New England’s economic structure indentured servants and Negro slaves, who sometimes were farm labor but mostly were artisans, helpers, and domestic servants. After the servants’ terms expired, they received small grants of land and became farmer—settlers. The Massachusetts gentry also supplemented this system of labor with general compulsory service in harvesting neighboring farms—a neat way of exploiting the local citizenry at wage rates far below the market.
Maximum-wage control always aggravates a shortage of labor, as employers will not be able to obtain needed workers at the statutory price. In trying to force labor to be cheaper than its price on the free market, the gentry only made it more difficult for employers to obtain that labor. By 1640 Winthrop was admitting that Massachusetts had “found by experience that it would not avail by any law to redress the excessive rates of laborers’ and workmen’s wages, etc. (for being restrained, they would either remove to other places where they might have more or else being able to live by planting or other employments of their own, they would not be hired at all)….”
Of course, one method of alleviating this induced shortage was by using the forced labor of slavery, servitude, and compulsory harvest service. Thus, one intervention by violence in the market created conditions impelling a further and stronger intervention. But apart from forced labor, the Massachusetts authorities, as we have noted, found it extremely difficult to enforce maximum-wage control.
Mercantilism, Merchants, and “Class Conflict”
The homogeneity emerges from the intervention of the government in society. Thus, under feudalism or other forms of “land monopoly” and arbitrary land allocation by the government, the feudal landlords, privileged by the state, become a “class” (or “caste” or “estate”). And the peasants, homogeneously exploited by state privilege, also become a class. For the former thus constitute a “ruling class” and the latter the “ruled.” Even in the case of land privilege, of course, the extent of privilege will vary from one landed group to another.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania continued to be unique in its widespread opposition to Negro slavery. As early as 1688, German Quakers, headed by Francis Pastorius, had attacked slavery, and a yearly meeting of Quakers in 1696 at least urged discouragement of further importation of Negro slaves. The Keithians had gone much further, declaring in 1693 that slavery was theft and opposed to the Golden Rule, and warning that it was only moral to buy Negroes for the purpose of freeing them.
The Colonies in the First Decade of the Eighteenth Century
A proprietary always meant that there would be annoying attempts to collect feudal quitrents from the landowners. The Crown too tried to impose quitrents, but they proved, despite continuing efforts by the governors, to be virtually impossible to collect. The dissolution of the quitrent threat meant that true feudal tenure could not take hold in America, since the proprietary could not enforce its claims to feudal tribute. Even less could such plans as Maryland’s consciously created feudal hierachy of land claims persist under American conditions of abundant cheap land and individual independence. Of course, such feudalistic institutions as servitude and Negro slavery greatly increased the privileged ownership of large tracts of land. Fortunately, although the tobacco country of the Southern colonies and isolated areas such as the Naragansett Country and West New Jersey had large plantations, no permanent landlord–tenancy relations prevailed—even where arbitrary and privileged land grants had been extensive.
Except for the master–slave relation, all major aspects of feudalism in the colonies disappeared rather quickly upon their introduction—New York, of course, excepted; here essentially feudal landholding continued for at least a century. As a result, New York’s growth, compared with that of the other colonies, was retarded.
Negro slaves were becoming an increasingly large part of the coerced labor force. They were used everywhere in the colonies, but especially and increasingly on the large plantations of the South.
The American Colonies in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
Liberalism in Massachusetts
It was not only in the South that the proportion of Negro slaves to white bondservants greatly increased after the turn of the eighteenth century. Although forced labor played a less dominant role in the Northern economy, a similar shift occurred in Massachusetts. From a class of young English servants bonded to family masters, the coerced laborers became largely an alienated heterogeneous group of non-English whites and Negro slaves. In the 1630s, ninety-five percent of forced labor in Massachusetts was white and five percent Negro; by the 1740s, however, twenty-five percent of forced labor was white and seventy-five percent Negro. The increasing alienation of the slaves and the servants led the Puritan members of the oligarchy to try to win their allegiance by rationalizing their ordeal as somehow natural, righteous, and divine. So have tyrants always tried to dupe their subjects into approving—or at least remaining resigned to—their fate. Hence, the Reverend Samuel Willard, in his A Complete Body of Divinity (1726), slyly linked the supposed hierarchical order of heaven to the existing order on earth, to the “ranks and orders among mankind in this world,” which “God rather than the oligarchy hath appointed.” Especially, the subjection of servants to masters was divinely appointed, made necessary by man’s fall: “All servitude began in Curse….” Servants, according to the emphatically non-servant Willard, were duty-bound to revere and obey their masters, to serve them diligently and cheerfully, and to be patient and submissive even to the crudest master. A convenient ideology indeed for the masters!
In the midst of this general miasma of opinion, some courageous voices were raised in behalf of liberty, even for Negroes. The eminent merchant Judge Samuel Sewall wrote, in The Selling of Joseph (1700), that “liberty is a real value next to life”; despite the Fall, all men, as the sons of Adam, “have equal rights into liberty.” To the excuse that the Negroes had already been enslaved through wars in Africa, Sewall trenchantly replied that “an unlawful war can’t make lawful captives. And by receiving we are in danger to promote and partake in their barbarous cruelties.” Indeed, the excuse of humanitarianism for purchasing Negro slaves rings thin; if true, the slave traders should have instantly released their charges instead of herding and dragging them at great cost in life to the New World.
The Virginia Land System
The Southern colonies generally had a much less eventful history in the first half of the eighteenth century than their more northerly sisters. These colonies expanded but retained roughly the same social and political structure: a large plantation economy, growing mainly tobacco, and staffed with forced labor—with Negro slaves increasing more and more in relation to indentured servants. The headright system of land grants, among other political institutions, had subsidized the importation of indentured servants, and the availability of forced labor in turn permitted large plantations, otherwise uneconomic, to develop and prosper.
The Virginia Political Structure
The political structure of eighteenth-century Virginia featured the form of democracy (except of course for slaves and servants), prettifying the hard reality of oligarchic rule by the large planters.
Slavery in Virginia
The condition of the slaves was what we might expect, where some people are owned by others as capital. Slaves were kept in compounds where they were condemned to miserable lives of severe labor, little food, long working hours, and savage treatment; above all, they lived absolutely and continuously under the direction of their masters. Torture was systematically used even by the “kindest” of masters. For instance, Landon Carter, one of the most eminent planters of the colony, systematically whipped female slaves who were wasting their time tending their young children or daring to feign pregnancy. Stealing the master’s property was a particularly heinous offense. When two slaves were caught killing a sheep, Carter ordered them tried and declared that “one shall be hanged to terrify the rest.” Legal marriages by slaves were forbidden, and unofficial slave families were often broken up. The prevalent practice of fornication by the masters with the female slaves was regarded as “a pleasant method to secure slaves at a cheap rate.” In law, the cards were stacked against the slaves: a slave received thirty lashes for daring to hit a white Christian, but any owner could kill a slave at will in the process of punishment; runaway slaves refusing to return could be killed, and if such a slave were killed, or executed for any other crime, the government compensated the slave owner. Many runaways committed suicide rather than return to their owner.
Virginia provided that when a runaway slave should be caught, he be taken from one constable to another along the way back to his master; each constable was to whip the slave in his turn.
The Virginia legislature was all too eager to comply, and passed new laws forbidding all unlicensed meetings of slaves, as well as the death penalty without benefit of clergy for conspiracy. Furthermore, the crackdown touched even the few free Negroes: they were deprived of the vote, burdened with discriminatory tax rates, and forbidden to possess arms. Moreover, even voluntary manumission of slaves by masters was restricted by the legislature and approval was required by the governor and the Council.
Despite all the restrictions, in the year 1729 a number of Virginia slaves rebelled, procured arms, ammunition, and agricultural equipment, and escaped west to settle in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There the former slaves harmed no one, but the force of their example could have been a standing reproach and a beacon light to the colony of Virginia and even to the entire system of slavery. Hence, Virginia mobilized a strong troop of whites to march against the Negro settlement to destroy it, which they did after a pitched battle. The Negroes left alive were taken back to bondage.
The Quakers and the Abolition of Slavery
So it was that the Quakers, always possessing a great individualist heritage, moved into close alignment with developing rationalist and libertarian thought in England and America. The old pessimistic emphasis on man’s natural depravity had bred a passive and quiescent attitude in many Quakers. The plea of the conservative antiabolitionist Quakers was not to disturb the Society and to wait for God to act against any worldy evils. But the new rationalist libertarianism of the Enlightenment demonstrated that individual freedom was a good in itself and a necessary condition for leading a virtuous life. It showed that where man had been invading this freedom, man himself could now act to remove the invasion. Furthermore, they now saw that reason and justice need not balk at the weight of irrational and oppressive social custom.
Before long, all the Quaker meetings north and south had followed Philadelphia’s lead and abolished slavery, finally enforcing the decree with threat of expulsion.
Advance to Revolution, 1760–1775
Rhode Island Joins Nonimportation
By no means all Rhode Islanders, it should be noted, lagged behind in the resistance movement. As early as September 1767, an article in the Providence Gazette spoke eloquently of the natural rights of mankind, declaring it a self-evident truth that all were by nature equal in rights. The obligation to obey man-made laws rested on the consent of men. Therefore, it concluded, Parliament not only had no right to tax unrepresented Americans; it had no right to regulate them either. Leader of these logical advances in libertarian thought in Rhode Island was Silas Downer, a lawyer and a leader of the Sons of Liberty of Providence. In a speech to the Sons at the Providence Liberty Tree in July 1768, Downer, while admitting allegiance to George III, denied the right of Parliament to make “any laws whatsoever to bind us….” He went on to apply this principle, denouncing royal post office charges in America as a tax and therefore illegal. Moreover, Downer attacked the British laws of trade and manufacturing as violations of the natural rights of men.
At least one Rhode Island writer trenchantly called for extending the libertarian doctrine to one group often neglected by the Americans: Negro slaves. If the cry for liberty is sincere, why is not the principle extended to the Negro slaves at home, the writer challenged? The only way to prevent enslavement from abroad, he declared, was to end “that hellish practice of…enslaving another part of the human species,” for Negroes were surely Sons of Liberty, too.
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The Revolutionary War, 1775–1784
The Response in Britain
The outbreak of war had a great and critical impact upon the liberal Whigs, many of whom were high-ranking officers in the British armed forces.
A typical Whig defection among leading Englishmen was that of Granville Sharp, the man chiefly responsible three years earlier for the legal action that had outlawed slavery within England. When the American Revolution broke out, Sharp was assistant to the secretary of ordnance and was in charge of ordering the munitions for the British army in the colonies. By midsummer, he obtained extended leave from his duties, because “I cannot return to my ordnance duty whilst a bloody war is carried on, unjustly as I conceive, against my fellow-subjects.” As the war dragged on, Sharp finally resigned his post, winning public applause for his courageous act.
The Sudden Emergence of Tom Paine
Landing in Philadelphia toward the end of 1774, he got a job with a Philadelphia printer and soon rose to the editorship of the printer’s insignificant Pennsylvania Magazine. He quickly proved himself an outstanding writer and publicist and quickly made his reputation as a libertarian by publishing a blistering attack on the institution of slavery. In “African Slavery in America,” written shortly after his arrival and published in early March 1775, Paine pointed out that the African natives were often peaceful and industrious farmers brought into slavery either by European man-theft or by outsiders inducing the African chieftains to war on each other and to sell their prisoners into slavery. He also riddled the common excuse that purchase and ownership of existing slaves was somehow moral, in contrast to the wickedness of the original enslavement: “Such men may as well join with a known band of robbers, buy their ill-got goods, and help on the trade; ignorance is no more pleadable in one case than the other…and as the true owner has the right to reclaim his goods that were stolen, and sold; so the slave, who is proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold.” The slaves, being human, have not lost their natural right to their freedom, and therefore, concluded Paine, "the governments…should in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery.”
Shortly after this article was published, the first abolitionist society—The Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery—was established at Philadelphia. Largely Quaker, it included the deist Paine as one of its members.
Lexington and Concord moved Paine to turn his talents to the radical revolutionary cause. In July he urged upon the Quakers the justice of taking up arms in defense of liberty so long as disarmament is not universal. He denounced the British government as highwaymen setting forth to plunder American property; therefore, in self defense, “arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe.” For the British, “nothing but arms or miracles can reduce them to reason and moderation.” And in October he combined his antislavery and proindependence views to castigate Great Britain for trafficking in human flesh, and he looked forward to an independence that would end the slave trade and, ultimately, all of slavery.
All this culminated in Paine’s tremendous blow for American independence. His fiery and brilliant pamphlet Common Sense, off the press in early January 1776, spread like wildfire throughout the colonies.
[A] vital contribution of Common Sense to libertarian thought was Paine’s sharp quasi-anarchistic distinction between “society” and “government.”
The Drive Toward Independence
In late February 1776, opinion in the Continental Congress shifted sharply leftward toward independence. The shift was spurred by news of the British Prohibitory Act as well as the Proclamation of Rebellion and the impact of Common Sense, and was quickened by the arrival in Philadelphia of Elbridge Gerry—an arrival which swung the opportunistic Hancock back to the radical line. Furthermore, Lee returned to his seat at Philadelphia to lead the Virginia radicals, and the conservative Virginia oligarch, Benjamin Harrison, shifted into the radicals’ camp, thus giving them the vital majority of their delegation. The Continental Congress then had a probable majority for independence, a majority intensified by the good news of the British evacuation of Boston.
Beyond this Congress could not go, for it could not bind the separate colonies to independence. Indeed, some of the provincial delegations were instructed against independence by their constituencies. The final push for independence had first to be taken by the separate colonies themselves.
If the Virginia Left was middle-of-the-road on the structure of government, the same caution and moderation were not shown on another critical struggle waged in the provincial convention. In one of the monumental libertarian advances of political history, the Virginia Left decided to enact a Declaration of Rights committing themselves, at least in theory, to protect and not to invade the natural rights of each individual. Thus was born the monumental concept of a bill of rights designed to prevent government from invading the rights of the individual. On this issue the Virginia Left proved to be radical indeed.
Drafted almost completely by Mason, the Declaration of Rights was introduced by the committee and modified by the convention. Some of the changes strengthened the declaration, but the central struggle grew out of the determined attempt by the archconservatives led by Nicholas to weaken or block it altogether. Patrick Henry’s disquieting defection on forbidding ex post facto laws and bills of attainder cut these clauses from the declaration, but the major battle was waged over its magnificent first clause. Mason had there written “that all men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and attaining happiness and safety.” Here, in a scintillating and compact form, was the essential statement of the radical libertarian theory of natural rights.
The conservatives, possessed of the clarity given to them by their vested interests, saw immediately the main danger of this clause. If every person has a natural right to be equally free and independent, what happens to the institution of slavery on which rested the power and pelf of the Virginia planter aristocracy? Undoubtedly, Mason knew what he was about, for as early as 1765 he had criticized the institution of slavery on moral and economic grounds. Nicholas and his “set of aristocrats” and “masters” (in the words of Thomas Ludwell Lee) fought the clause fiercely. To declare all men created free and independent would invite a slave revolt, they argued. The conservatives were able to force modification of the clause: “natural" was excised from “inherent…rights,” and “God and Nature” was excised from another important clause. “Namely” was substituted for “among which are” to restrict the scope of individual rights. But most important, the clause “when they enter into a state of society” was inserted between “of which" and "they cannot.” This made it possible for the conservatives to rest content with interpreting natural rights as belonging only to those men who had “entered into a state of society.” Clearly, the slaves had never been given a chance to make this entrance.
Despite these modifications, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, unanimously adopted by the convention on June 12, 1776, is one of the great documents in American history. It set the pattern for all future state and national—and foreign—bills of rights, and stamped the libertarian doctrine of natural rights, at least in theory, upon the American Republic.
Independence Declared
The republic of the united states needed a justification, a philosophical explanation and groundwork for the unprecedented act which could inform and inspire the citizenry and the world at large. Heading the committee to frame such a declaration, at the age of thirty-three one of the youngest members of Congress but already renowned for his brilliant pen, was Thomas Jefferson.
Some paragraphs in Jefferson’s draft were excised by the Congress, and historians have been decidedly unfair to Jefferson in ascribing his chagrin at these changes to mere personal pique and undue pride of authorship. High principle was often involved, and it was not personal pique that led his fellow committee member John Adams to fight tooth and nail against any changes in Jefferson’s draft. One critical paragraph condemned King George in the severest terms for establishing slavery in America. This paragraph boldly, clearly, and specifically applied the general doctrine of the inalienable rights of life and liberty to the Negro slaves:
He [George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither. … Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.
This paragraph, however, was excised at the insistence of the delegates from ardently proslavery Georgia and South Carolina, as well as by some northern reluctance to condemn a trade largely in the hands of northern merchants. Already a libertarian Left was beginning to emerge in America—Jefferson, Paine, Mason—highly critical of the institution of slavery.
New York Succumbs to Independence
English reaction to the Declaration was predictably hostile; although the brilliant young liberal Charles James Fox declared that the Americans “had done no more than the English had done against James II.” The virtually official reply to the Declaration was written by the barrister John Lind, who largely devoted himself to refuting the “calumnies” against the king. As for the philosophy of the Declaration, Lind thought it sufficient to make the penetrating observation that these doctrines “put the axe to the root of all government,” since every existing or conceivable government alienates some of these supposedly inalienable rights—in short, that the logical conclusion of the natural rights philosophy was anarchism.
Response in Britain and France
In setting forth his theory of liberty, Price came close to a stand for anarchism. The polar opposites in political regimes were slavery on the one hand, and self-government on the other, and self-government or self-direction was the key to liberty, not government by law, since laws can be and are made by one person or set of persons to bind others.
The Western Lands and the Ordinance of 1784
Jefferson tried manfully to include the requirement that the western territories create no hereditary titles, nor allow any slaves or indentured servants after 1800. Given national control over western territories, only one proviso would have been consistent with liberty and justice and would have avoided the Civil War from the very beginning: Jefferson’s plan for the early outlawing of slavery. Only nipping the slave question in the bud might have prevented the vast conflict and bloodshed that was to come. But the slavery proviso—which significantly applied to Southwest as well as Northwest lands—lost by a single vote: only six states agreed out of thirteen. The four New England states, New York, and Pennsylvania voted for the prohibition; but the illness of New Jersey’s John Beatty deprived the proviso of the seven affirmative votes required. The opposition to the slavery proviso was led by Richard Dobbs Spaight of North Carolina and Jacob Read of South Carolina. All of this points up the growing sectional North–South division over slavery in the United States, a division that had begun years before around the controversy over the basis of apportioning tax requisitions under the Articles. In the 1784 vote, the northern states were lined up against slavery, and the southern—with the exception of a few liberals such as Jefferson and his young Virginian disciple James Monroe—in favor.
Elimination of Feudalism and the Beginnings of the Abolition of Slavery
The American Revolution brought about an important smashing of feudal elements in land ownership and their transformation into a far more liberal land structure. Land monopoly was transformed by the opening of free and virgin land in the West, Virginia’s thwarting the designs of the speculative land companies, the liquidation of huge British proprietary estates and quitrents (in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina), and the confiscation and resale of Crown lands, and through the confiscation, subdivision, and resale—largely to tenants—of huge Tory estates, especially in southern New York. One other antifeudal measure came into prominence during the Revolution: the abolition of entail and primogeniture.
One critical element of coercion—and of land monopoly—remaining in American life after the Revolution was Negro slavery. The relatively cheap and coerced labor provided by slavery made large plantations for such products as tobacco and rice profitable which would not have been viable on the free market. This was true because the simplicity and easy supervision of field work on a single crop made slavery particularly adaptable to plantation labor. Furthermore, the concentration of slaves on plantations had already brought about fundamental sectional divisions in America, divisions that were, of course, exacerbated once the colonies became independent and united. While in the North, Negroes, some of whom were free, constituted less than 5 percent of the population, in the South (Maryland and below) they formed 40 percent of the population, virtually all of them slaves.
The staunchest and most principled libertarian in the New York legislature was New York Assemblyman Aaron Burr, who not only argued persistently for the Negro’s right to vote, to be a witness and juror, and to intermarry freely, but who also fought unsuccessfully for immediate and unconditional abolition of all slavery in New York.
But while slavery was being largely liquidated in the North, it was being cemented in the South, despite the staunch opposition of such men as Jefferson. Indeed, the states actively encouraged slavery.
For a New Liberty
Classical Liberalism
[T]he classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian “revolution” against what we might call the Old Order—the ancien régime which had dominated its subjects for centuries. This regime had, in the early modern period beginning in the sixteenth century, imposed an absolute central State and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older, restrictive web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions. The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes, and monopoly privileges to produce and sell conferred by central (and local) governments upon their favorite producers. This alliance of the new bureaucratic, war-making central State with privileged merchants—an alliance to be called “mercantilism” by later historians—and with a class of ruling feudal landlords constituted the Old Order against which the new movement of classical liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Resistance to Liberty
[C]classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the political and economic interests—the ruling classes—who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines, the State bureaucracies.
[C]onservatism began, in the early nineteenth century, as a conscious attempt to undo and destroy the hated work of the new classical liberal spirit—of the American, French, and Industrial revolutions. Led by two reactionary French thinkers, de Bonald and de Maistre, conservatism yearned to replace equal rights and equality before the law by the structured and hierarchical rule of privileged elites; individual liberty and minimal government by absolute rule and Big Government; religious freedom by the theocratic rule of a State church; peace and free trade by militarism, mercantilist restrictions, and war for the advantage of the nation-state; and industry and manufacturing by the old feudal and agrarian order. And they wanted to replace the new world of mass consumption and rising standards of living for all by the Old Order of bare subsistence for the masses and luxury consumption for the ruling elite.
To establish this new system, to create a New Order which was a modernized, dressed-up version of the ancien régime before the American and French revolutions, the new ruling elites had to perform a gigantic con job on the deluded public, a con job that continues to this day. Whereas the existence of every government from absolute monarchy to military dictatorship rests on the consent of the majority of the public, a democratic government must engineer such consent on a more immediate, day-by-day basis. And to do so, the new conservative ruling elites had to gull the public in many crucial and fundamental ways. For the masses now had to be convinced that tyranny was better than liberty, that a cartelized and privileged industrial feudalism was better for the consumers than a freely competitive market, that a cartelized monopoly was to be imposed in the name of antimonopoly, and that war and military aggrandizement for the benefit of the ruling elites was really in the interests of the conscripted, taxed, and often slaughtered public.
In the early nineteenth century, the conservatives, conceding reason to their liberal enemies, relied heavily on the alleged virtues of irrationality, romanticism, tradition, theocracy. By stressing the virtue of tradition and of irrational symbols, the conservatives could gull the public into continuing privileged hierarchical rule, and to continue to worship the nation-state and its war-making machine.
Slavery—the Opposite of Freedom
Slavery—the opposite of freedom—is a condition in which the slave has little or no right of self-ownership; his person and his produce are systematically expropriated by his master by the use of violence.
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Violence
Under slavery, the master treats the slaves as he does his livestock, horses, and other animals, using them as factors of production to gratify his wants, and feeding, housing them, etc., just enough to enable them to continue in the master’s service.
Labor under these conditions is qualitatively different from labor not under the threat of violence, and may be called compulsory labor as compared to free labor or voluntary labor.
Involuntary Servitude
If there is anything a libertarian must be squarely and totally against, it is involuntary servitude—forced labor—an act which denies the most elemental right of self-ownership. “Liberty” and “slavery” have ever been recognized to be polar opposites. The libertarian, therefore, is totally opposed to slavery.
The Ethics of Liberty
A Theory of Liberty
[A] crucial point in libertarian theory is the inalienability of the will, and therefore the impermissibility of enforcing voluntary slave contracts.
Interpersonal Relations: Voluntary Exchange
A person’s labor service is alienable, but his will is not.
The distinction between a man’s alienable labor service and his inalienable will may be further explained: a man can alienate his labor service, but he cannot sell the capitalized future value of that service. In short, he cannot, in nature, sell himself into slavery and have this sale enforced—for this would mean that his future will over his own person was being surrendered in advance. In short, a man can naturally expend his labor currently for someone else’s benefit, but he cannot transfer himself, even if he wished, into another man’s permanent capital good. For he cannot rid himself of his own will, which may change in future years and repudiate the current arrangement. The concept of “voluntary slavery” is indeed a contradictory one, for so long as a laborer remains totally subservient to his master’s will voluntarily, he is not yet a slave since his submission is voluntary; whereas, if he later changed his mind and the master enforced his slavery by violence, the slavery would not then be voluntary.
The Theory of Contracts
[T]he only valid transfer of title of ownership in the free society is the case where the property is, in fact and in the nature of man, alienable by man. All physical property owned by a person is alienable, i.e., in natural fact it can be given or transferred to the ownership and control of another party. I can give away or sell to another person my shoes, my house, my car, my money, etc. But there are certain vital things which, in natural fact and in the nature of man, are inalienable, i.e., they cannot in fact be alienated, even voluntarily. Specifically, a person cannot alienate his will, more particularly his control over his own mind and body. Each man has control over his own mind and body. Each man has control over his own will and person, and he is, if you wish, “stuck” with that inherent and inalienable ownership. Since his will and control over his own person are inalienable, then so also are his rights to control that person and will. That is the ground for the famous position of the Declaration of Independence that man’s natural rights are inalienable; that is, they cannot be surrendered, even if the person wishes to do so.
Or, as Williamson Evers points out, the philosophical defenses of human rights
are founded upon the natural fact that each human is the proprietor of his own will. To take rights like those of property and contractual freedom that are based on a foundation of the absolute self-ownership of the will and then to use those derived rights to destroy their own foundation is philosophically invalid.
Hence, the unenforceability, in libertarian theory, of voluntary slave contracts. Suppose that Smith makes the following agreement with the Jones Corporation: Smith, for the rest of his life, will obey all orders, under whatever conditions, that the Jones Corporation wishes to lay down. Now, in libertarian theory there is nothing to prevent Smith from making this agreement, and from serving the Jones Corporation and from obeying the latter’s orders indefinitely. The problem comes when, at some later date, Smith changes his mind and decides to leave. Shall he be held to his former voluntary promise? Our contention—and one that is fortunately upheld under present law—is that Smith’s promise was not a valid (i.e., not an enforceable) contract. There is no transfer of title in Smith’s agreement, because Smith’s control over his own body and will are inalienable. Since that control cannot be alienated, the agreement was not a valid contract, and therefore should not be enforceable. Smith’s agreement was a mere promise, which it might be held he is morally obligated to keep, but which should not be legally obligatory.
But should Smith at least be required to pay damages to the Jones Corporation, measured by the expectations of his lifelong service which the Jones Corporation had acquired? Again, the answer must be no. Smith is not an implicit thief; he has retained no just property of the Jones Corporation, for he always retains title to his own body and person.
If mere promises or expectations cannot be enforceable, but only contracts that transfer property titles, we can now see the application of the contrasting contract theories to an important real-life case: do enlistee-deserters from the army, as well as draftees, deserve total amnesty for their actions? Libertarians, being opposed to the draft as compulsory slavery, have no difficulty in calling for total exoneration for deserting draftees. But what of enlistees, who enlisted in the army voluntarily (and setting aside the case of those who may have enlisted only as an alternative to the compulsory draft)? The “promise” theorist must, strictly, advocate both punishment of the deserters and their compulsory return to the armed forces. The title-transfer theorist, on the contrary, maintains that every man has the inalienable right to control his own body and will, since he has that inalienable control in natural fact. And, therefore, that the enlistment was a mere promise, which cannot be enforceable, since every man has the right to change his mind at any time over the disposition of his body and will. Thus, seemingly minor and abstruse differences over the theory of contracts can and do imply vital differences over public policy.
In contemporary America, outside the glaring exception of the armed forces, everyone has the right to quit his job regardless of whatever promise or “contract” he had previously incurred. Unfortunately, however, the courts, while refusing to compel specific personal performance of an employee agreement (in short, refusing to enslave the worker) do prohibit the worker from working at a similar task for another employer for the term of the agreement. If someone has signed an agreement to work as an engineer for ARAMCO for five years, and he then quits the job, he is prohibited by the courts from working for a similar employer for the remainder of the five years. It should now be clear that this prohibited employment is only one step removed from direct compulsory slavery, and that it should be completely impermissible in a libertarian society.
Suppose that a celebrated movie actor agrees to appear at a certain theater at a certain date. For whatever reason, he fails to appear. Should he be forced to appear at that or at some future date? Certainly not, for that would be compulsory slavery. Should he be forced, at least, to recompense the theater owners for the publicity and other expenses incurred by the theater owners in anticipation of his appearance? No again, for his agreement was a mere promise concerning his inalienable will, which he has the right to change at any time. Put another way, since the movie actor has not yet received any of the theater owners’ property, he has committed no theft against the owners (or against anyone else), and therefore he cannot be forced to pay damages. The fact that the theater owners may have made considerable plans and investments on the expectation that the actor would keep the agreement may be unfortunate for the owners, but that is their proper risk. The theater owners should not expect the actor to be forced to pay for their lack of foresight and poor entrepreneurship. The owners pay the penalty for placing too much confidence in the actor. It may be considered more moral to keep promises than to break them, but any coercive enforcement of such a moral code, since it goes beyond the prohibition of theft or assault, is itself an invasion of the property rights of the movie actor and therefore impermissible in the libertarian society.
Again, of course, if the actor received an advance payment from the theater owners, then his keeping the money while not fulfilling his part of the contract would be an implicit theft against the owners, and therefore the actor must be forced to return the money.
Natural Law and Natural Rights
Particularly striking is the flaming prose of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, applying natural-rights theory in a revolutionary way to the question of slavery:
The right to enjoy liberty is inalienable. … Every man has a right to his own body-to the products of his own labor-to the protection of law. … That all these laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery, are, therefore, before God, utterly null and void…and therefore they ought instantly to be abrogated.
Thus, the libertarian abolitionist of slavery, William Lloyd Garrison, was not being “unrealistic” when in the 1830s he first raised the glorious standard of immediate emancipation of the slaves. His goal was the morally proper one.
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Property and Criminality
The fundamental axiom of libertarian theory is that each person must be a self-owner, and that no one has the right to interfere with such self-ownership. From this there follows immediately the total impermissibility of property in another person. One prominent example of this sort of property is the institution of slavery. Before 1865, for example, slavery was a “private property” title to many persons in the United States. The fact of such private title did not make it legitimate; on the contrary, it constituted a continuing aggression, a continuing criminality, of the masters (and of those who helped enforce their titles) against their slaves. For here the victims were immediately and clearly identifiable, and the master was every day committing aggression against his slaves.
When slavery was a common practice, much discussion raged as to whether or how much the master should be monetarily compensated for the loss of his slaves if slavery were to be abolished. This discussion was palpably absurd. For what do we do when we have apprehended a thief and recovered a stolen watch: do we compensate the thief for the loss of the watch, or do we punish him? Surely, the enslavement of a man’s very person and being is a far more heinous crime than the theft of his watch, and should be dealt with accordingly. As the English classical liberal Benjamin Pearson commented acidly: “the proposal had been made to compensate the slaveowners and he had thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated.” And clearly, such compensation could only justly have come from the slaveholders themselves, and not from the ordinary taxpayers.
It should be emphasized that on the question of slavery, whether or not it should have been abolished immediately is irrelevant to problems of social disruption, of the sudden impoverishing of slave masters, or of the flowering of Southern culture, let alone the question—interesting, of course, on other grounds—whether slavery was good for the soil, and for the economic growth of the South, or would have disappeared in one or two generations. For the libertarian, for the person who believes in justice, the sole consideration was the monstrous injustice and continuing aggression of slavery, and therefore the necessity of abolishing the institution as soon as it could be accomplished.
The Problem of Land Theft
[A]ny existing property title to never-used land would have to be considered invalid.
[S]uppose that centuries ago, Smith was tilling the soil and therefore legitimately owning the land; and then that Jones came along and settled down near Smith, claiming by use of coercion the title to Smith’s land, and extracting payment or “rent” from Smith for the privilege of continuing to till the soil. Suppose that now, centuries later, Smith’s descendants (or, for that matter, other unrelated families) are now tilling the soil, while Jones’s descendants, or those who purchased their claims, still continue to exact tribute from the modern tillers. Where is the true property right in such a case? It should be clear that here, just as in the case of slavery, we have a case of continuing aggression against the true owners—the true possessors—of the land, the tillers, or peasants, by the illegitimate owner, the man whose original and continuing claim to the land and its fruits has come from coercion and violence. Just as the original Jones was a continuing aggressor against the original Smith, so the modern peasants are being aggressed against by the modern holder of the Jones-derived land title. In this case of what we might call “feudalism” or “land monopoly,” the feudal or monopolist landlords have no legitimate claim to the property. The current “tenants,” or peasants, should be the absolute owners of their property, and, as in the case of slavery, the land titles should be transferred to the peasants, without compensation to the monopoly landlord. (The term “feudalism,” as used here, is not intended to apply to any specific landed or other relation during the Middle Ages; it is used here to cover a single kind of action: the seizure of land by conquest and the continuing assertion and enforcement of ownership over that land and the extraction of rent from the peasants continuing to till the soil.)
Note that “feudalism,” as we have defined it, is not restricted to the case where the peasant is also coerced by violence to remain on the lord’s land to keep cultivating it (roughly, the institution of serfdom). (Serfdom, like slavery, constituted a continuing aggression by the lord against the person of the serf, as well as against his rightful property.) Nor is it restricted to cases where additional measures of violence are used to bolster and maintain feudal landholdings (such as the State’s prevention by violence of any landlord’s sale or bequest of his land into smaller subdivision). (Such measures include entail (forcibly preventing the landowner from selling his land) and primogeniture (coercively preventing him from bequeathing his land except intact to his eldest son).) All that “feudalism,” in our sense, requires is the seizure by violence of landed property from its true owners, the transformers of land, and the continuation of that kind of relationship over the years. Feudal land rent, then, is the precise equivalent of paying a continuing annual tribute by producers to their predatory conquerors. Feudal land rent is therefore a form of permanent tribute. Note also that the peasants in question need not be the descendants of the original victims. For since the aggression is continuing so long as this relation of feudal aggression remains in force, the current peasants are the contemporary victims and the currently legitimate property owners. In short, in the case of feudal land, or land monopoly, both of our conditions obtain for invalidating current property titles: For not only the original but also the current land title is criminal, and the current victims can very easily be identified.
Land Monopoly, Past and Present
Thus, there are two types of ethically invalid land titles (in addition, of course, to government titles): “feudalism,” in which there is continuing aggression by titleholders of land against peasants engaged in transforming the soil; and land-engrossing, where arbitrary claims to virgin land are used to keep first-transformers out of that land. We may call both of these aggressions “land monopoly”—not in the sense that some one person or group owns all the land in society, but in the sense that arbitrary privileges to land ownership are asserted in both cases, clashing with the libertarian rule of non-ownership of land except by actual transformers, their heirs, and their assigns.
Land monopoly is far more widespread in the modern world than most people—especially most Americans—believe. In the undeveloped world, especially in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, feudal landholding is a crucial social and economic problem—with or without quasi-serf impositions on the persons of the peasantry. Indeed, of the countries of the world, the United States is one of the very few virtually free from feudalism, due to a happy accident of its historical development. (This happy exception does not hold for those Mexican lands seized from their owners and redistributed by the conquering Yankees-as can be seen by the recent movement of Mexican–Americans, led by Reies Lopez Tijerina, to return to the heirs of the victims the land stolen from them by the U.S. conquerors.) Largely escaping feudalism itself, it is difficult for Americans to take the entire problem seriously. This is particularly true of American laissez-faire economists, who tend to confine their recommendations for the backward countries to preachments about the virtues of the free market. But these preachments naturally fall on deaf ears, because “free market” for American conservatives obviously does not encompass an end to feudalism and land monopoly and the transfer of title to these lands, without compensation, to the peasantry. And yet, since agriculture is always the overwhelmingly most important industry in the undeveloped countries, a truly free market, a truly libertarian society devoted to justice and property rights, can only be established there by ending unjust feudal claims to property. But utilitarian economists, grounded on no ethical theory of property rights, can only fall back on defending whatever status quo may happen to exist—in this case, unfortunately, the status quo of feudal suppression of justice and of any genuinely free market in land or agriculture. This ignoring of the land problem means that Americans and citizens of undeveloped countries talk in two different languages and that neither can begin to understand the other’s position.
American conservatives, in particular, exhort the backward countries on the virtues and the importance of private foreign investment from the advanced countries, and of allowing a favorable climate for this investment, free from governmental harassment. This is all very true, but is again often unreal to the undeveloped peoples, because the conservatives persistently fail to distinguish between legitimate, free-market foreign investment, as against investment based upon monopoly concessions and vast land grants by the undeveloped states. To the extent that foreign investments are based on land monopoly and aggression against the peasantry, to that extent do foreign capitalists take on the aspects of feudal landlords, and must be dealt with in the same way.
A moving expression of these truths was delivered in the form of a message to the American people by the prominent left-wing Mexican intellectual, Carlos Fuentes:
You have had four centuries of uninterrupted development within the capitalistic structure. We have had four centuries of underdevelopment within a feudal structure. … You had your own origin in the capitalistic revolution. … You started from zero, a virgin society, totally equal to modern times, without any feudal ballast. On the contrary, we were founded as an appendix of the falling feudal order of the Middle Ages; we inherited its obsolete structures, absorbed its vices, and converted them into institutions on the outer rim of the revolution in the modern world. … We come from…slavery to…latifundio [enormous expanses of land under a single landlord], denial of political, economic, or cultural rights for the masses, a customs house closed to modern ideas. … You must understand that the Latin American drama stems from the persistence of those feudal structures over four centuries of misery and stagnation, while you were in the midst of the industrial revolution and were exercising a liberal democracy.
We need not search far for examples of land aggression and monopoly in the modern world; they are indeed legion.
When the Indians retook their land through mass non-violent action, the Peruvian government, at the behest of the Cerro de Pasco and the regional latifundia owners, sent troops to eject, assault, and even murder the unarmed Indians. Sebastian Salazar Bondy, “Andes and Sierra Maestra,” in Whither Latin America? p. 116, says:
From time to time, the Lima newspapers publish stories about such and such a community’s having “invaded” properties of latifundists or miners. The informed reader knows what is happening. Disgusted with being dispossessed, lacking official justice, the Indians have decided to take through their own effort what has always belonged to them.
[T]here are cases where the oil company uses the government of the undeveloped country to grant it, in advance of drilling, a monopoly concession to all the oil in a vast land area, thereby agreeing to the use of force to squeeze out all competing oil producers who might search for and drill oil in that area. In that case, as in the case above of Crusoe’s arbitrarily using force to squeeze out Friday the first oil company is illegitimately using the government to become a land-and-oil monopolist. Ethically, any new company that enters the scene to discover and drill oil is the proper owner of its “homesteaded” oil area. A fortiori, of course, our oil concessionaire who also uses the State to eject peasants from their land by force—as was done, for example, by the Creole Oil Co. in Venezuela—is a collaborator with the government in the latter’s aggression against the property rights of the peasantry.
We are now able to see the grave fallacy in the current programs for “land reform” in the undeveloped countries. (These programs generally involve minor transfers of the least fertile land from landlords to peasants, along with full compensation to the landlords, often financed by the peasants themselves via state aid.) If the landlord’s title is just, then any land reform applied to such land is an unjust and criminal confiscation of his property; but, on the other hand, if his title is unjust, then the reform is picayune and fails to reach the heart of the question. For then the only proper solution is an immediate vacating of the title and its transfer to the peasants, with certainly no compensation to the aggressors who had wrongly seized control of the land. Thus, the land problem in the undeveloped countries can only be solved by applying the rules of justice that we have set forth; and such application requires detailed and wholesale empirical inquiry into present titles to land.
In recent years, the doctrine has gained ground among American conservatives that feudalism, instead of being oppressive and exploitative, was in fact a bulwark of liberty. It is true that feudalism, as these conservatives point out, was not as evil a system as “Oriental despotism,” but that is roughly equivalent to saying that imprisonment is not as severe a penalty as execution. The difference between feudalism and Oriental despotism was really of degree rather than kind; arbitrary power over land and over persons on that land was, in the one case, broken up into geographical segments; in the latter case, land tended to concentrate into the hands of one imperial overlord over the land-area of the entire country, aided by his bureaucratic retinue. The systems of power and repression are similar in type; the Oriental despot is a single feudal overlord with the consequent power accruing into his hands. Each system is a variant of the other; neither is in any sense libertarian. And there is no reason to suppose that society must choose between one and the other—that these are the only alternatives.
North America’s relative escape from the blight of feudal land and land monopoly was not for lack of trying. Many of the English colonies made strong attempts to establish feudal rule, especially where the colonies were chartered companies or proprietorships, as in New York, Maryland, and the Carolinas. The attempt failed because the New World was a vast and virgin land area, and therefore the numerous receivers of monopoly and feudal land grants—many of them enormous in size—could only gain profits from them by inducing settlers to come to the New World and settle on their property. Here were not, as in the Old World, previously existing settlers on relatively crowded land who could easily be exploited. Instead, the landlords, forced to encourage settlement, and anxious for a quick return, invariably subdivided and sold their lands to the settlers. It was unfortunate, of course, that by means of arbitrary claims and governmental grants, land titles were engrossed ahead of settlement. The settlers were consequently forced to pay a price for what should have been free land.
Some of the colonial proprietors tried to keep collecting quitrents from the settlers—the last vestige of feudal exactions—but the settlers widely refused to pay or to treat the land as anything but their own. In every case, the colonial proprietors gave up trying to collect their quitrents, even before their charters were confiscated by the British Crown. In only one minor case did feudal land tenure persist (apart from the vital case of slavery and the large Southern plantations) in the English colonies: in the Hudson Valley counties in New York, where the large grantees persisted in not selling the lands to settlers, but in renting them out. As a result, continuing resistance and even open warfare were waged by the farmers (who were even known as “peasants”) against their feudal landlords. This resistance culminated in the “Anti-Rent” wars of the 1840s, when the quitrent exactions were finally ended by the state legislature, and the last vestige of feudalism outside the South finally disappeared.
The important exception to this agrarian idyll, of course, was the flourishing of the slave system in the Southern states. It was only the coercion of slave labor that enabled the large plantation system in staple crops to flourish in the South. Without the ability to own and coerce the labor of others, the large plantations—and perhaps much of the tobacco and later the cotton culture—would not have pervaded the South.
We have indicated above that there was only one possible moral solution for the slave question: immediate and unconditional abolition, with no compensation to the slavemasters. Indeed, any compensation should have been the other way—to repay the oppressed slaves for their lifetime of slavery. A vital part of such necessary compensation would have been to grant the plantation lands not to the slavemaster, who scarcely had valid title to any property, but to the slaves themselves, whose labor, on our “homesteading” principle, was mixed with the soil to develop the plantations. In short, at the very least, elementary libertarian justice required not only the immediate freeing of the slaves, but also the immediate turning over to the slaves, again without compensation to the masters, of the plantation lands on which they had worked and sweated. As it was, the victorious North made the same mistake—though “mistake” is far too charitable a word for an act that preserved the essence of an unjust and oppressive social system—as had Czar Alexander when he freed the Russian serfs in 1861: the bodies of the oppressed were freed, but the property which they had worked and eminently deserved to own, remained in the hands of their former oppressors. With the economic power thus remaining in their hands, the former lords soon found themselves virtual masters once more of what were now free tenants or farm laborers. The serfs and the slaves had tasted freedom, but had been cruelly deprived of its fruits.
In recent years, a new wave of pro-abolitionist historians—such as Staughton Lynd, James McPherson, and Willie Lee Rose—have recognized the critical importance of the abolitionist demand for “forty acres and a mule,” for turning over the old plantations to the slaves.
The Unanimity and Compensation Principles
A stark but not atypical example of the fallacies and the unjust devotion to the status quo of the Compensation Principle was the debate in the British Parliament during the early nineteenth century on the abolition of slavery. Early adherents of the Compensation Principle were there maintaining that the masters must be compensated for the loss of their investment in slaves. At which point, Benjamin Pearson, a member of the libertarian Manchester School, declared that he “had thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated.” Precisely! Here is a striking example of the need, in advocating public policy, to have some ethical system, some concept of justice. Those of us ethicists who hold that slavery is criminal and unjust would always oppose the idea of compensating the masters, and would rather think in terms of requiring the masters to compensate the slaves for their years of oppression. But the “value-free economist,” resting on the Unanimity and Compensation Principles, is, on the contrary, implicitly placing his unsupported and arbitrary value imprimatur on the unjust status quo.
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