User:Ttocserp/Slave-owning slaves

Fortunata, slave of a slave of a slave. Contract for her purchase, Roman London, c. 90 AD, dug up at No 1 Poultry in 1994, as deciphered by Roger Tomlin.

In some human societies there were slaves who owned slaves. Mostly, a slave of a slave arose in one of two ways, as part of a wealthy slave's private fortune, or as the entourage of politically powerful

In ancient Rome slaves were routinely used as business administrators, or allowed to go into business themselves, the master taking a share of the proceeds. To incentivise them. masters allowed their slaves to accumulate a capital, called a peculium. Hence astute slaves might grow quite rich, acquiring sub-slaves of their own, who were called servi vicarii. By extension, there could even be sub-sub-slaves. The slave-owning slave was a slave in every respect; if suspected of embezzlement he could be examined under torture. Hence rich men actually preferred slaves as managers. It seems Jewish law had a concept similar to peculium, including slaves of slaves. In slave-era Brazil there was a practice similar to peculium, where slaves could acquire slaves of their own, and even use them to pay for their manumission. There are cases, though few, of slave-owning slaves in North America.

In some polities rulers trusted their slaves before free men. The slave had been separated from his parents while young and brought up in the royal household, knowing no other loyalty. Accordingly, talented slaves were gradually promoted to positions of great trust, including military command, management of palace affairs, and even high political office. Hence some grew rich and powerful, having slaves of their own. Nevertheless, unless manumitted, the head slave remained a slave in every respect, and could be degraded at the whim of the ruler. Societies of this kind have included Ottoman Turkey, Mamluk Egypt, Safavid Iran, Malaya, the Delhi Sultanate and parts of West Africa. Imperial Rome itself had a similar institution, since some slaves of the Emperor became powerful civil servants, owning slaves of their own.

As part of a slave's fortune

Rome

Contradiction

Rich ex-slaves arriving at their colleague Trimalchio's extravagant banquet (drawing by Norman Lindsay)

The legal status of slaves was abysmal. Yet it was a standing joke in Rome that some managed to buy their freedom and retire as rich men. There was even a law that said what was supposed to happen if an ex-slave died worth more than 100,000 sesterces. Some retired slaves bought their way into the upper ranks of society; it has been estimated that "about one fifth of the local aristocracy of Italy was descended from slaves". Since slaves were not supposed to be capable of owning property at all, the seeming contradiction should be explained.

Status

Slaves were not persons in the traditional law of Rome (ius civile): they were things. They could not own property, contract a valid marriage, sue or be sued in a court of law nor give evidence (except under torture). In criminal cases slaves could not testify against their owners at all. According to Jennifer Glancy,

An inscription from Puteoli details the job description of a manceps, a public official whose duties included torturing and even executing slaves on demand. Private citizens could hire the manceps to conduct the desired torture of their slaves; the manceps would supply the necessary equipment.

Slaves could be sold, sexually abused or accidentally beaten to death with impunity, or exposed to die when too old and worn out to serve.

Ordinary human decency, or enlightened self-interest, might well produce humane treatment; but there were practically no effective laws that could enforce it. If there were laws that said a master could not deliberately kill or disable his own slave without cause, it was not out of pity for the slave: what was objected to was the wanton damage to property.

Slaves as business administrators

Large numbers of slaves were employed in a vast array of economic activities, including managing a business.

Marble bust, thought to be of Cato the Elder, who multiplied his fortune by employing slave businessmen

In Rome it was unseemly for the upper classes of society to engage in commerce. Yet some had enormous fortunes they meant to increase. Often they invested in agriculture and, as they acquired more farms, put in confidential slaves to manage them; or they invested in town houses and employed slaves as rent-collectors and property managers, or even set up slave physicians or theatrical performers. "In Rome, clerks, accountants, commercial agents, teachers, doctors, rhetoricians, and even superintendents, were predominantly slaves". Still other slaves were put to manage shops or factories, or supervise a moneylending business. "As a general rule, supervision of the master's holdings was entrusted to an entire hierarchy of financial agents working in both city and country, who carried out the wishes of their dominus and whom we know from inscriptions".

If a master suspected his slave was cheating him, he had the right to interrogate him under torture; he did not need a court order. Hence rich men increasingly turned to slaves to administer their affairs: "slaves even became the absolute rule when it came to the administration of money". It has been pointed out that most of the unjust servants mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew were managerial slaves of this class; the author takes it for granted they will be tortured with "weeping and gnashing of teeth". Yvon Thébert thought that, nevertheless, there were a few free men who deliberately sold themselves into slavery in order to get lucrative jobs as business managers. An American economist could not believe managers were appointed from the enslaved classes and argued that they were all free men who had volunteered for slave status.

A slave who was good at business management was much more valuable; hence some bright slave children were educated as skilled administrators, being taught to keep accounts and so forth.

There were slaves who were allowed to go into business for themselves, see next section, the master getting a cut of the profits. In this way masters indirectly benefited from activities which they could not, or would not, perform themselves. For example, Cato the Elder, being a senator, was legally forbidden to be a shipowner, so he appointed confidential slaves to do it for him, making a lot of money that way. According to the historian Plutarch, Cato

used to lend money also to those of his slaves who wished it, and they would buy boys with it, and after training and teaching them for a year, at Cato’s expense, would sell them again. Many of these boys Cato would retain for himself, reckoning to the credit of the slave the highest price bid for his boy.

Slaves' informal property: the peculium

Already in the Roman Republic slaves were allowed to earn a peculium, which at first was just an informal fund, like a child's allowance. A peculium was whatever surplus a master allowed his slave to accumulate on the side, and could be inferred from his keeping a separate account with his master's permission. The fund could consist of any kind of wealth, including sub-slaves, who were called vicarii.. (The head slave was called ordinarius.)

Peculia were to the advantage of masters too, who appreciated that slaves would work harder in order to increase them. Also, slaves might be allowed to purchase their freedom one day; and those with large peculia could afford to pay more. Still further, and as noted, some masters allowed their slaves to go into business on their own, taking a share of the proceeds. A 2nd century text mentions venaliciarii: slaves who were in the business of buying and selling enslaved persons as merchandise. But a slave was unlikely to work hard and take business risks in order to increase his peculium, if he thought his master might confiscate it in the end. Masters could see this. Accordingly, in order to uphold their mutual expectations the peculium must become more than an informal concession, it must harden into a legal right. Yet slaves had no rights. To reconcile the contradiction was part of the subtlety of Roman law.

The peculium recognised in praetorial law

Sale of a slave girl (fresco, House of Julia Felix, Pompeii)

The starting point was that if a master allowed his slave to go into business for himself he was not liable for the slave's defaults. For example, the slave's creditors had no recourse against the master. But since they could not sue the slave either (he was a non-person) this was deeply unattractive to third parties and discouraged commerce. The law had to be practical. Accordingly, the praetor evolved new legal remedies. One of these, called the actio de peculio, allowed creditors to sue the master himself, but only up to the value of the slave's peculium. Therefore, although there was nothing resembling modern company law in Rome, a similar advantage - trading with limited liability - could be achieved by using a slave to do the trading. It was possible for the slave to be owned jointly by a group of investors, making him even more like a modern corporate vehicle.

No wonder, therefore, that many Roman business enterprises - banks, factories, shops and even schools - were run by slaves acting as grantees of a peculium.

Be that as it may, the law had now formally recognised the existence of the slave's peculium. It has been said that the law created a fictitious person with legal identity: not the slave himself, but his peculium, which took on a life of its own. Nevertheless the peculium was attached to the slave. That said, only a small fraction of Roman legal literature has survived, and the law of peculium is still poorly understood.

What sort of master would allow his slave a large peculium - thus exposing himself to large liability? "Probably only a man of means, used to dealing with well-tested, trustworthy servants, and looking for business opportunities allowing for little - if any - supervision": men like Cato.

It seems that masters and promising slaves took to making bargains. They agreed how much the slave would have to pay to be freed, and the slave proceeded to accumulate his peculium accordingly. Any surplus would represent the slave's retirement fund. "The Romans made a business out of the granting of freedom". But since in law the peculium belonged to the master anyway, theoretically there was nothing to stop him from confiscating the peculium and refusing to liberate the slave. In reality, though, such a breach of faith would be deeply damaging to the master's business credit, since it was to his interest that his slaves' peculia were known to be scrupulously honoured. Apparently, there is no record of such a confiscation. According to Tacitus an outraged slave killed his owner when he refused to free him at the agreed price.

Sub-slaves as part of a slave's peculium

As noted, slaves could themselves acquire slaves (servi vicarii), who might conceivably be put out to trade and earn a peculium of their own, perhaps acquiring sub-sub-slaves.

The future Pope Callixtus I started as a sub-sub-slave. While young, he was given a sum of money by his enslaved owner and told to "bring him profits from banking deals", which he did. He became Pope in 217 CE.

To be owned by an enslaved person by no means guaranteed kind treatment. "Pomponius, a second-century jurist, mentions a slave who prostituted the ancillae (women-servants) who were part of his peculium".

In 1994 there was dug up in the City of London the remains of a Roman writing tablet. It proved to contain a fragment of a legal contract for the sale of a Gaulish girl called Fortunata. The buyer, who could afford to pay 600 denarii - two years' salary for a Roman soldier - was not only a slave himself, but the slave of a slave. The vendor warranted that she was healthy and not "liable to wander or run away". The contract was dated to about AD 81-96.

The Swiss scholar Erman wrote a book called Servus Vicarius. L'Esclave de L'Esclave Romain (The Roman Slave's Slave) (Lausanne, 1896), still the only monograph on the subject. He thought a similar institution existed amongst the Egyptians, the Persians and the Greeks.

Jewish law

According to Talmud scholar Boaz Cohen, Jewish law had a concept somewhat similar to peculium, called segullah. Thus the slave Ziba of King Saul had an estate of his own including 20 sub-slaves. (2 Samuel 19:17.) In ancient Hebrew society a slave counted in some respects as a member of the family. When Jerome came to translate the Hebrew Bible into Latin he rendered the word segullah as peculium, probably on the advice of Jewish scholars.

Brazil

Brazil abolished slavery in 1888; in the accompanying euphoria many slave records were destroyed. It is only fairly recently that scholars have begun to recover the surviving documents. An important source is letters of manumission. Crucial proof of liberation, freed people were careful to file these in public registries. They have been investigated most for the state of Bahia, one of the major slaveholding regions of the Americas.

In Brazil it was "not rare" for slaves to own slaves as part of an informal peculium. However, the institution was not inherited from Roman law nor was it mentioned in Brazil's vague and anachronistic slave laws. It was a custom that had evolved independently, seemingly amongst the slaves themselves, though they considered it specially demeaning to be the slave of a slave.

CERTIFICATE.

"I solemnly baptise with the Holy Chrism Joaquim, a Nagô man, apparently 22 years old, slave of Benedicto, a Hausa man, himself a slave of Dona Ponciana Isabel de Freitas, white, widow, domiciled in Cais da Loiça; the godfather is Domingos Lopes de Oliveira, a Benguela man, ex-slave, single, domiciled in the parish of Santo Antonio Além do Campo."

Investing in enslaved persons was the main road to prosperity and prestige. In this society negotiation — albeit between highly unequal beings — was a favoured strategy, more effective than whipping, though that was resorted to too.

Slaves who owned sub-slaves used various tactics to achieve recognition for their property. One method was to have their sub-slaves baptised. It was a pious Catholic custom for white owners to take their slaves to church to be baptised, and when this was done the priest would issue a certificate. Slave-owning slaves did the same, relying on the certificate as informal proof of ownership.

How sub-slavery was enforced e.g. if the sub-slave refused to obey or ran away, research has not yet revealed.

Salvador de Bahia

Colonial Salvador, hub of one of the world's major slaveholding regions

Nishida studied 3,516 letters of manumission registered at Salvador de Bahia between 1808 and 1884. In this port city whites were in a minority, being perhaps 30% of the population. Of the slaves, although most had been born in Brazil, many had been born in Africa. The Africans were not a homogenous people; they associated according to their various African ethnicities. Thus each nação (nation, ethnic group) met at its favourite street corner, conversed in its own language and had a mutual aid association.

In Salvador, slavery was characterised by the hiring out system:

Wage-earning slaves called escravos de ganho were hired out on either a full-time or part-time basis. They were obliged to return to their owners a mutually agreed portion of their daily or weekly wages. Some even lived outside their owners' houses. The most visible examples of escravos de ganho were peddlers of both sexes, male porters working in gangs, male artisans, and female market-stall keepers called quitandeiras. The city also permitted domestic slaves to hire themselves out as peddlers or prostitutes at night and on Sundays and holidays.

From their earnings enterprising slaves saved up to buy their freedom. Most paid cash, but Nishida found 35 cases of self-purchase through slave substitution. For example, Francisco, an African-born Nagô slave, paid for his freedom by substituting his slave Joǎo, another Nagô man.

It has been noticed that freedmen and substitute-slaves in this era tended to belong to the same nação. The reason was that the least expensive slaves were negros novos (newly arrived Africans), since they neither spoke Portuguese nor were acculturated to the slave society in any way; they had to be broken in. "With the owner's consent, a slave purchased the substitute, acculturated and trained the newcomer in special occupational skills, and finally 'traded in' the substitute for the slave's own freedom". Owners willingly accepted these trade-ins. In place of an ageing slave, they got a young one. One shopkeeper agreed to liberate his slave Gertrudes on condition that she found and trained a replacement, also to be called Gertrudes, as nearly as possible to the same standard.

Reis suggested that some slaves may have been crewmen on Brazilian slaving-ships, hence were able to purchase Africans on favourable terms.

Schwartz studied 1,015 manumission letters for a much earlier period (1684-1745). He found that, of those set at liberty, nearly half had to pay for it. A significant proportion of these slaves paid not in cash but in substitute slaves. It struck him that females were far more likely to be manumitted than males, a finding echoed by other scholars ("Every recent study of manumission in Latin America has found that a sizeable majority of those freed were females".) Schwartz offered no explanation; but in 1735 one Brazilian council did: it claimed that manumissions were paid for by prostitution and crime.

Schwartz found a legal record that suggested that some slaves, in order to purchase sub-slaves cheaply, by-passed the regular system and imported direct from Africa.

A [Brazilian-born] slave, Lucianna Maria da Conceição, wished to purchase a slave as a dowry for her granddaughter. She gave money to a friend to be sent to Africa for this purpose, and a Nagô woman named Jeronima was purchased and delivered to her. The newly acquired slave was conducted to the [sugar mill] where Lucianna resided but was eventually sent to the city to be "hired out" (por ao ganho). Jeronima then sent her earnings to her mistress, who continued to labor as a slave on the plantation.

Pernambuco

A Pernambuco sugar mill according to English traveller Henry Koster

The Benedictine Order owned several sugar plantations in Pernambuco with many slaves, but their numbers gradually fell and few monks were left to supervise them. The monks evolved a strategy of encouraging slaves to buy their freedom by offering to take “one slave for another” (a substitute), which may have contributed to the formation of a group of slave-owning slaves.

At the Jaguaribe plantation the overseer was one Nicolau de Souza. As had been commonplace for generations, he was a slave himself. Rarely supervised by the absentee monks, he was in charge of perhaps a hundred labourers. In 1812 the English traveller Henry Koster lived nearby and he wrote about Nicolau, whose efficient administration he admired. According to Koster, Nicolau had a wife and children, slaves like himself, and he was able to buy their freedom. He was unable to buy his own freedom, however, despite offering "two Africans" in exchange, since the monks thought he was irreplaceable. Nicolau otherwise enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, rode about like a rich planter, was allowed to remain seated in their presence, and owned at least nine slaves of his own. Few free Brazilian men owned that many. Koster made it quite clear that Nicolau longed to be a free man, however.

North America

The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, Agostino Brunias, Barbados Museum & Historical Society

Low-country landscape (William Armstrong)

Elite plantation slaves

In eighteenth-century Barbados some plantations had elite slaves who enjoyed far better living standards than the mass of field labourers, including the right to accumulate property and the use of slaves for their own purposes. At Newton Plantation the family of Old Doll, "a retired housekeeper matriarch" was given preferential treatment for many years. Upwardly mobile, disdaining menial tasks, if sent to work in the fields they stirred up trouble; otherwise, they co-operated in the smooth running of the estate. "Not only did Doll's family have access to slave attendants, they also 'possessed' their own slaves who waited on them". Mary Ann, a member of Doll's family, had a white companion who willed her a slave called Esther; in time Esther had five children, all of whom slaved for Doll's family. Whatever their standing in law, effectively these were slave-owning slaves.

The low country task system

Most plantations in the American South used the gang system, in which slaves were worked in groups from sunrise to sunset and had no leisure to acquire property. In the low country rice lands of South Carolina and Georgia, however, the task system prevailed. Slaves were required to perform certain specific tasks; once completed, the rest of the day was theirs. Thus incentivised, slaves finished their tasks quickly, perhaps by early afternoon. They proceeded to farm fields of their own, which were customarily allowed them for the purpose. Hence slaves acquired livestock and other property. Morgan reviewed the records of the Southern Claims Commission, from which it was apparent that by the Civil War field hands in some counties owned horses, cows, buggies, wagons, hogs, sheep and trading commodities; these they bought, sold, hired out, or bequeathed to kinfolks. Despite their servile status, their right to own those things was unquestioned in the slave society. However, few cases have been found of slaves owning slaves in North America.

Slaves buying slaves

An exception is Guardian of Sally, a Negro v. Beaty (1792), Supreme Court of South Carolina. The defendant Beaty owned "a negro wench slave", not otherwise identified, whom he hired out for wages, part of which she was allowed to keep for herself. She gradually saved up "a considerable sum of money". Out of this fund she paid Beaty to purchase another of his female slaves, named Sally (who may have been her own daughter). She then set Sally at liberty. Beaty tried to repudiate the transaction, arguing that a slave could not acquire property — he cited Roman law — so Sally must be his still. The court, which obviously thought Beaty had behaved despicably, recognised the purchase and held Sally was free. But for Beaty's unusual behaviour the instance (of a slave owning a slave) would have gone unrecorded. It is likely there were others, if only because "some African American slaveholders owned relatives and friends not to exploit them but because manumission either was too difficult to obtain or would not bring much benefit".

Belonging to politically powerful slaves

In some societies slaves had slaves of their own, not necessarily because they because they were rich, but because they were powerful.

Roman imperial slaves

The slaves and freedmen of the Emperor were called the Familia Caesaris. The historical records for these are very abundant and are found all over the empire. Some imperial slaves were appointed to high administrative posts and were exceptionally powerful. There were two reasons.

"No Roman of standing would have demeaned himself by becoming the Emperor's personal servant". Further, when it came to the administration of public monies, the Emperor preferred slaves anyway since, if he suspected them of peculation, he could have them investigated under torture. Hence elite slaves were appointed to high administrative posts. A head slave (ordinarius)

Africa

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Russia

In early Muscovy a substantial part of the population were designated kholoptsvo. Although the legal status of these people is a matter of definition, Richard Hellie had no doubt they were slaves according to most. Thus they could be beaten by their owners and their children could be sold. The vast majority were ethnic Russians and were owned by the landed service classes.

A few of these slaves were skilled managers. Some were government administrators, running palace offices or assisting provincial governors. Others managed country estates, and were in fact crucial, because their owners were obliged to be absent on government service.

The Muscovite records are full of the activities of these people, who purchased other slaves for their owners, negotiated tax and postal levies with governmental officials, defended their owners' peasants and ordinary slaves from other landholders and official depredations, collected the rent due from the peasants, represented their owners (and others) in court, and fulfilled many other duties.

This class of slave could and did own slaves of their own. They were sometimes called dokladnoe, or registered, slaves. By the 1630s, however, discrimination had set in, and they were forbidden to own slaves or land, a privilege now reserved for the middle and upper service classes and townsmen.

Rhetorical

The expression "slave of a slave" has been used with reference to those who were neither slaves nor owned by slaves, as a metaphor for their downtrodden way of life, or as a form of Oriental politeness (akin to English "your humble servant"). Such rhetorical usages are outside the scope of this article.

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