The Peculiar Institution, pt. 5

Last stop before we get to American slavery

This will be the final piece of groundwork we lay before getting into the more familiar territory of New World and American slavery. It’s a little heavy, but it’s important to get under our belt to understand how people at the time were thinking and talking about the topic. By the time the American colonies came together, Western Europe had progressed a long way down the path to bourgeois modernity, and the old assumptions that underlay the feudal order were decaying and being overthrown. When slavery was planted in America, it was still an institution that was universally accepted everywhere in the world. In all of history, there had never been an abolitionist movement, or even a serious intellectual challenge against slavery. Why not?

Under the feudal system, power was based on relationships, not institutional status; legitimacy was based on loyalty, not law. The exercise of power, even by kings and popes, was always a negotiation, and a ruler who alienated his noble supporters would not last long on the throne. To “rule” a territory essentially meant that one had the ability to tax its peasantry and expect fealty from the local nobility. A king who sought to regulate the daily lives of his far-flung subjects would have simply been ignored or laughed at, and few would have even thought to claim such a prerogative. Battles were often fought with hundreds, or a few thousand, soldiers on each side - compare that to the total force of 600,000+ fielded by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century and you get an idea of what people meant by the Dark Ages. Small bands of Viking and Muslim raiders were able to prey upon the coasts and riverways of Europe at will for centuries. Royal holdings were not contiguous, but often spread all over Europe, or else were broken up by countless independent principalities. Just look at this political map of the Holy Roman Empire (Germany and its periphery) at the outbreak of the 30 Years’ War in 1618:

Almost two centuries later, at the time of American independence and the French Revolution, the territory was still minutely divided:

The point I’m trying to make is that, even if some hypothetical king or pope woke up one morning feeling the same horror about slavery that we do today, there is nothing they could have done about it. Issuing edicts they had no ability to enforce would have only served to weaken and delegitimize them. In our modern era, technological power and the rapidity of change have instilled in us a certain arrogance with regard to the past, so that every college sophomore feels comfortable rejecting the accrued wisdom of the ages, but this was not so in the past. Medieval thinkers knew that Greece and Rome had built civilizations in many ways superior to their own - the remnants were scattered all around - and did not feel at liberty to casually question Roman law, or the great thinkers of the Classical era. Only with the advent of the modern state did people begin to get it in their heads to radically reshape the morality of their society. To be clear, I’m not suggesting European popes or rulers wanted to ban slavery, but couldn’t; I’m saying that, because they couldn’t, it never even would have occurred to them.