Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
are his uses of the language of slavery, galleys, Turkish cruelties, and the intolerable yoke of bondage. But as striking as Hakluyt’s choice of words may seem in retrospect, they were unremarkable for the period and likely would not have confused English readers had this private document been distributed more widely. Indeed, Hakluyt could toss about references to these different forms of human bondage without explanation because he understood that both his immediate audience and the English public at large had well-formed and often quite sophisticated ideas about slavery. A few prescient souls were able to perceive the developing plantation system on the horizon, involving as it did a commitment to chattel slavery, but few people living at the time thought about slavery as a labor system or a way of organizing human populations in terms of superficial phenotypical categories. Both the received wisdom of the ages and contemporary experience suggested that slavery could manifest itself in a variety of ways and that it was a characteristic feature in many parts of the world. It was hardly shocking, then, when Hakluyt claimed that Spanish America was besotted by slavery.
Slavery, for all intents and purposes, was alive and well in England even if actual slaves were hard to find. Slavery lived in England’s most important texts: the Christian Bible, where bondage was both a defining spiritual theme and an acknowledged historical condition, and the classical works being read in both Latin and newly fashionable English translations by England’s educated elite. Slavery also existed in English society as a contemporary social issue that manifested itself, variously, in the lingering vestiges of manorial villeinage, in intermittent proposals to expand galley slavery, and even as a practical solution to a range of social ills that plagued the nation. Thus, when English men and women wrote or talked about slavery, when they heard references to it from the pulpit or from government officials, they were not necessarily inclined to dream up something far off, foreign, or characterized by groups of people whose race, nation, ethnicity, or religion set them apart. Instead, slavery made Englishmen think, and worry, about themselves as individuals and a nation whose personal liberty and collective autonomy hung in the balance.
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Sixteenth-century Englishmen liked to claim that they were uniquely free, yet slavery was undoubtedly an integral part of their national story. In particular, the idea of slavery resonated in English religious and intellectual circles. Indeed, it would have been difficult to avoid the issue, if only because slavery pervaded the nation’s most ubiquitous text, the Christian Bible. Literate English men and women may have been especially aware of the specific contents of the Bible as a result of the publication of the Geneva Bible in English in 1560.7 The Geneva Bible was laced with references to slaves and slavery and established human bondage as an apt metaphor for the complete submission of humankind and particular individuals to God. Throughout the book of Exodus, one could read of the children of Israel who “sighed for the[ir] bondage and cryed” (2:23) in an Egypt so miserable and cruel that when Moses told them that Yahweh would free them of their burdens and lead them to a better place they could not listen, “for anguish of spirit & for cruel bondage” (Exodus 6:9). But even as the Bible could be read as a story of liberation, of God freeing his chosen people from slavery, the Old Testament also granted tacit justification for the legality of human bondage, provided it conformed to certain religious precepts. The book of Leviticus, for example, made it clear that slaves should come from foreign nations and that “ye shal take them as inheritance for your children after you, to possesse them by inheritance, ye shal use their labours for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel ye shal not rule one over another with crueltie” (Leviticus 25:44–46).8 The New Testament, particularly the letters of Paul, also endorsed slavery as a legitimate human institution and contained injunctions that upheld the status quo, such as the assertion that slaves must “counte their masters worthie of all honour, that the Name of God, and his doctrine be not evil spoken of” (1 Timothy 6:1).9 Resistance to earthly slavery, in this instance, was an affront to God.
Other often-cited religious authorities similarly elaborated on the subject of slavery. Most notably, within the Christian tradition, theologians debated whether either the condition or the institution of slavery was natural. St. Augustine of Hippo’s conception of slavery as a consequence of man’s fall from a state of innocence was typical of the views expressed by the early church fathers and those who followed them during the first millennium. In the City of God, a work first published in English in 1610, Augustine recounted that, before man’s fall from a state of grace, God made man “reasonable,” and wished for human beings to rule “onely over the unreasonable, not over man, but over beastes.” Servitude was only subsequently “layde upon the backe of transgression. And therefore in all the scriptures wee never reade the word, Servant, untill such time as that just man Noah … layd it as a curse upon his offending sonne. So that it was guilt, and not nature that gave originall unto that name.” Slavery, in Augustine’s schema, was brought upon mankind not by God’s design but by man’s actions. Slavery was therefore a natural condition insofar as human beings no longer lived in a world of God’s original design.10
The centerpiece of Augustine’s explanation for slavery—the “transgression” to which he referred—was Noah’s curse. According to Genesis 9:21–27, as it appeared in the 1560 edition of the Bible, Noah became intoxicated on the ark and “was uncovered in ye middes of his tent. And when Ham the father of Canaan sawe the nakednes of his father, he tolde his two brethren without. Then toke Shem and Japeth a garment and put it upon bothe their shulders and went backward, and covered the nakednes of their father.” When Noah awoke “from his wine, and knewe what his yonger sonne had done unto him” he said “Cursed be Canaan: servant of servantes shall he be unto his brethren. He said moreover, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.” In case there was any doubt about the severity of the punishment, a marginal notation was attached to the phrase “servant of servantes” reading: “That is, a moste vile slave.”11
Whether St. Augustine’s work was read widely in England, his characterization of slavery as a product of sinfulness remained the dominant strain of thought within Christian theology for more than a thousand years and Augustine continued to influence English theologians well into the seventeenth century.12 Western Europeans also leaned heavily on secular sources. In the twelfth century, Europeans famously rediscovered Aristotle’s Politics, a work that was subsequently influential in the thirteenth-century writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, who incorporated many of Aristotle’s ideas into Christian thought. Aristotle’s treatment of the subject of slavery in his Politics, ultimately translated into English from an older French source, was therefore doubly important in early modern England. Here, readers could learn that slavery was not only natural, it was part of a “universal natural pattern” in which those with the capacity to reason should rule over those whose “function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them.” Aristotle even declared that it was “nature’s purpose to make the bodies of free men to differ from those of slaves, the latter strong enough to be used for necessary tasks, the former erect and useless for that kind of work, but well suited for the life of a citizen of the state.”13
Working within the confines of Augustinian doctrine, Aquinas maintained the presumption that slavery could not have existed before the Fall, yet he allowed that natural disparities existed among individuals based on sex, age, strength, and wisdom. Aquinas believed that “the condition of men in the state of nature was not more honourable than the condition of the angels. Yet among the angels some lord over others.” Hierarchy and dominion almost certainly existed in a state of nature, something repeatedly urged in Tudor sermons on the ever popular theme of obedience.14 Therefore, the emergence of full-fledged slavery and mastery, much less dependency and bondage, in the post-lapsarian world could only be viewed as a logical extension of things and not necessarily inconsistent with, much less contrary to, natural design. In rationalizing the legitimacy of slavery this way, Aquinas challenged Roman and earlier Christian ideas, both of which suggested that slavery was inconsistent with natural law. Aquinas therefore lined up much more closely with Aristotle in his assertion that slavery was in accord with what he called the second intention of nature and that it ultimately benefited both masters and slaves.15
The influence of the Bible and Christian thought clearly shaped the