The Anti-Slavery Examiner, OmnibusAmerican Anti-Slavery Society
Religion
The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus
American Anti-Slavery Society
Antislavery movements -- United States -- Periodicals; Slavery -- United States -- Periodicals
You argue from the fifth and sixth verses of the twenty-first chapter of
Exodus, that God authorized the enslavement of the Jews: but, on the
same page, on which you do so, you also show the contrary. It may,
nevertheless, be well for me to request you to read and read again
Leviticus 25:39-42, until your remaining doubts, on this point, shall
all be put to flight. I am free to admit the probability, that under
some of the forms of servitude, in which Jews were held, the servant was
subjected to a control so extensive as to expose him to suffer great
cruelties. These forms corresponded with the spirit and usages of the
age, in which they existed; entirely unsuited, as they are, to a period
and portion of the world, blessed with the refining and softening
influences of civilization and the gospel. Numerous as were the
statutory regulations for the treatment of the servant, they could not
preclude the large discretion of the master. The apprentice, in our
country, is subjected to an authority, equaling a parent's authority,
but not always tempered in its exercise, with a parent's love. His
condition is, therefore, not unfrequently marked with severity and
suffering. Now, imagine what this condition would be, under the harsh
features of a more barbarous age, and you will have in it, as I
conjecture, no distant resemblance to that of some of the Jewish
servants. But how different is this condition from that of the slave!
I am reminded in this connexion, of the polished, but pernicious,
article on slavery in a late number of the Biblical Repertory. In that
article Professor Hodge says, that the claim of the slaveholder "is
found to be nothing more than a transferable claim of service either for
life, or for a term of years." Will he allow me to ask him, where he
discovered that the pretensions of the slaveholder are all resolvable
into this modest claim? He certainly did not discover it in any slave
code; nor in any practical slavery. Where then? No where, but in that
undisclosed system of servitude, which is the creation of his own fancy.
To this system I raise no objection whatever. On the contrary, I am
willing to admit its beauty and its worthiness of the mint in which it
was coined. But I protest against his right to bestow upon it the name
of another and totally different thing. He must not call it slavery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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