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more, the last British governor of Virginia, at the commencement of the American Revolution, followed this example.

We have now exhibited to the reader the principal features of slavery in Rome. We have seen the origin, numbers and condition of the slaves, their treatment, and the laws that governed them. We have seen the general prevalence of the institution, but not its effects upon the Romans themselves, and upon many of the prominent events of their history. To such as may feel interested in this branch of the subject, we present the views of an able writer upon the Influence of Slavery on the Revolutions in Rome. We have already referred to the condition of the poorer class of freemen in the time of the elder Gracchus. The writer proceeds:

'Gracchus found the inhabitants of the Roman State divided into three classes. The few wealthy nobles; the many indigent citizens; the still more numerous class of slaves. Reasoning upon the subject, he perceived that it was slavery which crowded the poor freeman out of employment, and barred the way to his advancement. It was the aim of Gracchus, not so much to mend the condition of the slaves, as to lift the brood of idle persons into dignity; to give them land, to put the plow into their hands, to make them industrious and useful, and so to repose on them the liberties of the State. He resolved to increase the number of landed proprietors; to create a Roman yeomanry. This was the basis of his radical reform; the means were at hand. The lands of Italy were of two classes; private estates and the public domain. With private estates he refused to interfere. The public domains, even though they had been usurped by the patricians, were to be reclaimed as public property, and to be appropriated to the use of the people, under restrictions which should prevent their future concentration in the hands of the few. To effect this object required no new order; the proper decree was already engraved among the tablets of the Roman laws. It was necessary only to revive the law of Licinius, which had slumbered for two centuries unrepealed.

In a republic, he that will execute great designs, must act with an organized party. Gracchus took counsel with the purest men of Rome; with Appius Claudius, his fatner in-law, a patrician of the purest blood; with the great lawyer, Mutiv 3 Scævola, a man of consular dignity, and with Crassus, the leader of the priesthood; men of the best learning and character, of unimpeachable patriotism, and friends to the new reform. But his supporters at the polls could be none other than the common people, composed of the impoverished citizens, and the very few husbandmen who had still saved some scanty acres from the grasp of the aristocracy.

The people rallied to the support of their champion; and Gracchus, being elected their tribune, was able to bring forward his Agrarian Law. This law, relating only to the public domain, was distinguished by mitigating clauses. To each of those who had occupied the land without a right, it generously left five hundred acres; to each of their minor children, two hundred and fifty more; and it also promised to make from the public treasury further remuneration for improvements. To every needy citizen it probably allotted not more than ten acres. Thus it was designed to create in Italy a yeomanry; instead of planters and slaves, to substitute free laborers; to plant liberty firmly in the land; to perpetuate the Roman Commonwealth, by identifying its principles with the culture of the soil. No pursuit is more worthy of freemen than agriculture. Gracchus claimed it for the free.

Philanthropy, when it contemplates a slave-holding country, may have its first sympathies excited for the slaves; but it is narrow benevolence which stops there. The

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indigent freeman is in a worse condition. The slave has his task, and also his home and his bread. He is the member of a wealthy family. The indigent freeman has neither labor, nor house, nor food; and, divided by a broad gulf from the upper class, he has neither hope nor ambition. The poor freeman claims sympathy; he is so abject, that often even the slave despises him. The slave-holder is the competitor of the free laborer, and by the lease of slaves, takes the bread from his mouth. The wealthy Crassus, the richest man in Rome, was the competitor of the poorest free carpenter. The Roman patricians took away the business of the sandal-maker. The existence of slavery made the opulent owners of bondmen the rivals of the poor; greedy after the profits of their labor, and monopolizing those profits through their slaves.

The laws of Gracchus cut the patricians with a double edge. Their fortunes consisted in land and slaves; it questioned their titles to the public land, and tended to force emancipation by making their slaves a burden. In taking away the soil, it took away the power that kept their live machinery in motion.

The moment was a real crisis in the affairs of Rome; such a crisis as hardly occurs to a nation in the progress of many centuries. Men are in the habit of proscribing Julius Cæsar as the destroyer of the Commonwealth. The civil wars, the revolutions of Cæsar, the miserable vicissitudes of the Roman emperors, the avarice of the nobles and the rabble, the crimes of the forum and the palace,—all have their germ in the ill success of the reform of Gracchus.

We pass over the proofs of moderation which the man of the people exhibited, by appearing in the Senate, where he had hoped to obtain from the justice of the patricians some reasonable compromise. The attempt of the aristocracy to check all procedures in the assembly of the people, by instigating another tribune to interpose his veto, was defeated by the prompt decision of the people to depose the faithless representative; and the final success of Gracchus seemed established by the unanimous decision of the commons in favor of his decree. But such delays had been created by his opponents, that the year of his tribuneship was nearly passed; his re-election was needed in order to carry his decree into effect. But the evil in Rome was already too deep to be removed. The election day for tribunes was in mid-summer; the few husbandmen, the only shadow of a Roman yeomanry, were busy in the field, gathering their crops, and failed to come to the support of their champion. He was left to rest his defense on the rabble of the city; and though early in the morning great crowds of people gathered together; and though, as Gracchus appeared in the forum, a shout of joy rent the skies, and was redoubled as he ascended the steps of the Capitol, yet when the aristocracy, determined at every hazard to prevent his election, came with the whole weight of their adherents in a mass, the timid flock, yielding to the sentiment of awe rather than of cowardice, fled like sheep before wolves, and left their defender, the incomparable Gracchus, to be beaten to death by the clubs of senators. Three hundred of his more faithful friends were left lifeless in the market-place. In the fury of triumphant passion, the corpse of the tribune was dragged through the streets, and thrown into the Tiber.

The deluded aristocracy raised the full chorus of victory and joy. They believed that the Senate had routed the democracy, when it was but the avenging spirit of slavery, that struck the first deadly wound into the bosom of Rome.

The murder of Gracchus proved the weakness of the senate; they could defeat the people only by violence. But the blood of their victim, like the blood of other martyrs, cemented his party. It was impossible to carry the Agrarian Law into execution; it was equally impossible to effect its repeal.

Gracchus had interceded for the unhappy indigent freeman, whose independence was crushed by the institution of slavery. The slaves themselves were equally sensible of their wrongs; and in the island of Sicily they resolved on an insurrection. Differing

in complexion, in language, in habits, the hope of liberty amalgamated the heterogene-
ous mass. Eunus, their wise leader, in the spirit of the East, employed the power of
superstition to rally the degraded serfs to his banner, and, like Mahomet, pretended a
revelation from heaven. Sicily had been divided into a few great plantations; and now
the voice of a leader, joining the fanaticism of religion to the enthusiasm for freedom,
with the hope of liberty awakened the slaves, not in Sicily only, but in Italy, to the use
of arms. What need of dwelling on the horrors of a servile war? Cruel overseers were
stabbed with pitchforks; the defenseless were cut to pieces by scythes; tribunals, hith-
erto unheard of, were established, where each family of slaves might arraign its master,
and, counting up his ferocities, adjudge punishment for every remembered wrong. Well
may the Roman historian blush as he relates the disgraceful tale. Quis aequo animo
ferat in principe gentium populo bella servorum? The Romans had fought their allies,
yet had fought with freemen; let the queen of nations blush, for she must now contend
with victorious slaves. Thrice, nay, four times, were the Roman armies defeated; the
insurrection spread into Italy; four times were even the camps of Roman prætors
stormed and taken; Roman soldiers became the captives of their bondmen.
The army
of the slaves increased to 200,000. It is said, that in this war a million of lives were
lost; the statement is exaggerated; but Sicily suffered more from the devastations of
the servile, than of the Carthaginian war. Twice were Roman consuls unsuccessful.
At length, after years of defeat, the benefits of discipline gave success to the Roman
forces. The last garrison of the last citadel of the slaves disdained to surrender, and
could no longer resist; they escaped the ignominy of captivity by one universal suicide.
The conqueror of slaves, a new thing in Rome, returned to enjoy the honors of an

ovation.

The object of Tiberius Gracchus, continued by his eloquent and equally unhappy brother, who moreover was the enlightened and energetic advocate of a system of internal improvement in Italy, aimed at ameliorating the condition of the indigent freemen. The great servile insurrection was designed to effect the emancipation of slaves; and both were unsuccessful. But God is just and his laws are invincible. Slavery next made its attack directly on the patricians, and following the order of Providence in the government of the moral world, began with silent but sure influence to corrupt the virtue of families, and even to destroy domestic life. It is a well ascertained fact, that slavery diminishes the frequency of marriages in the class of masters. In a state where emancipation is forbidden, the slave population will perpetually gain upon the numbers of the free. We will not stop to develop the three or four leading causes of this result, pride and the habits of luxury, the facilities of licentious indulgence, the circumscribed limits of productive industry; some of which causes operate exclusively, and all of them principally, on the free. The position is certain and is universal; no where was the principle more amply exemplified than in Rome. The rich slaveholders preferred luxury and indulgence to marriage; and celibacy became so general, that the aristocracy was obliged by law to favor the institution, which, in a society where all are free, constitutes the solace of labor and the ornament of life. A Roman censor could, in a public address to the people, stigmatize matrimony as a troublesome companionship, and recommend it only as a patriotic sacrifice of private pleasure to public duty. The depopulation of the upper class was so considerable, that the waste required to be supplied by emancipation; and repeatedly there have been periods, when the majority of the Romans had once been bondmen. Emancipation was essential to the preservation of a class of freemen, who might serve as a balance to the slave population. It was this extensive celibacy and the consequent want of succession, that gave a peculiar character to the Roman laws relating to adoption.

The continued and increasing deleterious effects of slavery on Roman institutions,

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majority of the citizens,

may be traced through the changes in the character of that whom it left without the opportunity or the fruits of industry. Even in the time of the younger Gracchus, they retained dignity enough to hope for an amelioration of their condition by the action of laws, and the exercise of their own franchises. Failing in this end through the firmness of the nobles, the free middling class was entirely destroyed; society soon became divided into the very rich and the very poor; and slaves, who performed all the labor, occupied the intermediate position between the two classes. The first step in the progress of degradation constituted the citizens, by their own vote, a class of paupers. They called on the state to feed them from the public granaries. But mark the difference between the pauper system of England, or America, and that of Rome. We cheerfully sustain in decent competence the aged, the widow, the cripple, the sick and the orphan; Rome supplied the great body of her citizens. England, who also feeds a large proportion of her laboring class, entrusts to her paupers no elective franchises. Rome fed with eleemosynary corn the majority of her citizens, who retained, even in their condition of paupers, the privileges of electing the government, and the right of supreme, ultimate legislation. Thus besides the select wealthy idlers, here was a new class of idlers, a multitudinous aristocracy, having no estate but their citizenship, no inheritance but their right of suffrage. Both were a burden upon the industry of the slaves; the senate directly from the revenues of their plantations, the commons indirectly, from the coffers of the Commonwealth. It was a burden greater than the fruits of slave industry could bear; the deficiency was supplied by the plunder of foreign countries. The Romans, as a nation, became an accomplished horde of robbers. This first step was ominous enough; the second was still more alarming. A demagogue appeared, and gaining office, and the conduct of a war, organized these pauper electors into a regular army. The demagogue was Marius; the movement was a revolution. Hitherto the senate had exercised an exclusive control over the brute force of the Commonwealth; the mob was now armed and enrolled, and led by an accomplished chieftain. Both parties being thus possessed of great physical force, the civil wars between the wealthy slaveholders and the impoverished freemen, the select and the multitudinous aristocracy of Rome, could not but ensue. Marius and Sylla were the respective leaders; the streets of Rome and the fields of Italy became the scenes of massacre; and the oppressed bondmen had the satisfaction of beholding the jarring parties, in the nation which had enslaved them, shed each other's blood as freely as water.

This was not all. The slaves had their triumph. Sylla selected ten thousand from their number, and to gain influence for himself at the polls, conferred on them freedom, and the elective franchise.

Of the two great leaders of the opposite factions, it has been asserted that Sylla had a distinct purpose, and that Marius never had. The remark is true, and the reason is obvious. Sylla was the organ of the aristocracy; to the party which already possessed all the wealth, he desired to secure all the political power. This was a definite object, and in one sense was attainable. Having effected a revolution, and having taken vengeance on the enemies of the senate, he retired from office. He could not have retained perpetual authority; the forms of the ancient republic were then too vigorous, and the party on which he rested for support, would not have tolerated the usurpation. He established the supremacy of the senate, and retired into private life. Marius, as the leader of the people, was met by insuperable difficulties. The existence of a slave population rendered it impossible to elevate the character of his indigent constituents; nor were they possessed of sufficient energy to grasp political power with tenacity. He could therefore only embody them among his soldiers, and leave the issue to Providence. His partisans suffered from evils, which it required centuries to ripen and to heal; Marius could have no plan.

Thus the institution of slavery had been the ultimate cause of two political revolutions. The indigence to which it reduced the commons, had led the Gracchi to appear as the advocates of reform, and had encouraged Marius to become their military leader. In the murder of the former, the senate had displayed their success in exciting mobs; and in resistance to the latter, they had roused up a defender of their usurpations. The slaves, also, who had found in Eunus an insurgent leader, were now near obtaining a liberator. The aristocracy was satisfied with its triumphs; the impoverished majority, now accustomed to their abjectness, made only the additional demand of amusements at the public expense; and were also ignobly satisfied. The slaves alone murmured, and in Spartacus, one of their number, they found a man of genius and courage, capable of becoming their leader. Roman legislation had done nothing for them; the legislation of their masters had not assuaged one pain, nor interposed the shield of the law against cruelty. The slaves determined upon a general insurrection, to be followed by emigration. The ery went forth from the plains of Lombardy, and reached the rich fields of Campania, and was echoed through every valley among the Appennines. The gladiators burst the prisons of their keepers; the field-servant threw down his manurebasket; Syrian and Scythian, the thrall from Macedonia and from Carthage, the wretches from South Gaul, the Spaniard, the African, awoke to resistance. The barbarian, who had been purchased to shed his blood in the arena, remembered his hut on the Danube; the Greek, not yet indifferent to freedom, panted for release. It was an insurrection, as solemn in its object, as it was fearful in its extent. Rome was on the brink of ruin. Spartacus pointed to the Alps; beyond their heights were fields, where the fugitives might plant their colony; there they might revive the practice of freedom; there the oppressed might found a new state on the basis of benevolence, and in the spirit of justice. A common interest would unite the bondmen of the most remote lineage, the most various color, in a firm and happy republic. Already the armies of four Roman generals had been defeated; already the immense emigration was on its way to the Alps.

If the mass of slaves could, at any moment, on breaking their fetters, find themselves capable of establishing a liberal government, if they could at once, on being emancipated or on emancipating themselves, appear possessed of civic virtue, slavery would be deprived of more than half its horrors. But the circumstance which more than any other renders the institution execrable, is this: that while it binds the body, it corrupts the mind. The outrages which men commit, when they first regain their freedom, furnish the strongest argument against the system of bondage. The horrible inhumanity of civil war, and slave insurrection, are the topics of the loudest appeal against the condition, which can render human nature capable of committing such crimes. Idleness and treachery and theft, are the vices of slavery. The followers of Spartacus, when the pinnacles of the Alps were almost within their sight, turned aside to plunder; and the Roman army, which could not conquer in open battle the defenders of their personal freedom, was able to gain the advantage, where the fugitive slave was changed from a defender of liberty into a plunderer.

The struggle took place pricisely at a moment when the Roman State was most endangered by foreign enemies. But for the difficulties in the way of communication, which rendered a close coalition between remote armies impossible, the Roman State would have sunk beneath the storm; and from the shattered planks of its noble ruins the slaves alone would have been able to build themselves a little bark of hope, to escape from the desolation. Ślaves would have occupied by right of conquest the heritage of the Cæsars. They finally became lords; but it was in a surer, and to human nature and Roman pride, in a more humiliating manner.

The suppression of the great insurrection of Spartacus brings us to the age of the

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