AUTHORITIES:
Tacitus, Codex Legum Antiquorum Barbarorum, Jacob Grimm, Mentzel, Wirth, Puetter, Zimmerman, etc.
The Germans, in all probability, were the last of the Aryan stock who immigrated into Europe. History first discovers them finally settled in central Europe; and for how long a time they had previously roamed in the primitive forests of these regions it is impossible to conjecture. With the exception of the left bank of the Rhine, Switzerland, and the northern slopes of the Tyrolean Alps—which regions, in the course of centuries were conquered from various Keltic tribes—the Germany proper of to-day is about the same as when C?sar met the barbarians on the Rhine. Then the Germans were rude savages, with but little agriculture; living on milk, cheese, and flesh; and their condition was in many respects similar, perhaps even inferior, to that of the Tartars, Kalmucks, and Bashkirs, who still rove over northern and central Asia.
Neither clanship nor patriarchate existed among the Germans, but the rule of individual will strengthened by the family ties. Divided into numerous tribes, the Germans seem to have spent many centuries in hunting the wild beasts of their primitive forests, and in[Pg 184] making war upon each other. Most probably these almost uninterrupted domestic wars created and developed aristocracy and slavery, both of which were firmly established among the Germans when they first appear on the record of history. Among the European descendants of the Aryas, the primitive Germans reflect most strikingly the Euphratic story of Nimrod, "the strong," "the hunter," subduing the feeble and preying on his person and labor. A bitter hatred between the tribes prevailed from time immemorial; and consequently feuds and wars were perpetual. The conquered was compelled to labor for the conqueror; and thus originated, very probably, bondage and domestic slavery, as well as the aristocratic contempt which the fighting part of the population had for the subdued and enslaved laborers of a tribe. When one German tribe subdued another, the victors either seized on the lands of the conquered and settled thereon, transforming the former occupants into bondmen; or, if they did not settle among the subdued, they made them tributaries, carrying away a certain portion of the population as slaves. Thus the Germans, in their wild forests, were mainly divided into two great social elements—the freemen, or nobles, possessed of all rights, and the bondmen possessed of none. But all, free and slave, were of kindred race and lineage.
All the German dialects have a specific denomination for the chattel. Schalch, scalch, schalk, is the word for slave, and seneschalk for the overseer. Af[Pg 185]terward, in medi?val times, seneschalk was an office, dignity, or title.
Besides wars and conquests, there were other sources which fed and sustained slavery: thus certain crimes were punished with slavery, and even freemen gambled away their liberty—a custom found among no other race or nation; a freeman, likewise, could at any time sell himself into slavery. Any one condemned to compound in money for murder or any other offence, if he had no money, gave himself as a slave into the hands of the family or individual whom he had offended, or to the man who loaned him money to pay the composition. The schalks were more absolutely in the power of their master than were the Roman slaves under the empire, or even, if possible, than the chattels of the American slave states. Although Tacitus says that masters killed their slaves only when intoxicated or otherwise maddened with passion, the barbarian codes and other historic evidence show that the schalks were treated with the utmost cruelty, and even subject to be maimed in various ways. Some historians who hold up the Germans as models of social and civic virtue, attribute this cruelty to their contact with the Romans, whose example they followed. But the influence of Roman polity on Germany began only toward the end of the fourth century; and many of the northern tribes, as the Saxons, Frisians, etc., did not come under the influence of Roman, Christian, or any foreign civilization till about the eighth century. Some of these barbarian codes[Pg 186] were written when the barbarians had settled on the Roman ruins; then, undoubtedly, they incorporated some Roman ideas, and contained laws bearing on existing relations; but still they were principally the embodiment of their own immemorial usages. The Visigothic code, for instance, was written very soon after they settled in Gaul and Spain, long before the destruction of the Western empire, and consequently could not have been seriously influenced by the legal conceptions or customs of Rome.
Tacitus says that little difference existed between the mode of life of masters and slaves: Inter eadem pecora in eadem humo degunt. At the time of Diodorus Siculus, youthful male and female schalks served at the tables of masters, who were always willing to sell them for a jug of wine.
In this primitive epoch of German historical existence, the pride of blood and descent seems to have been deeply ingrained in the German mind; and there was a strong aversion against corrupting the lineage by intermarriage with a schalk man or woman, even although they were of the same race and family. Among the Saxons immemorial custom even punished a mesalliance with death. Thus the very ancestors of many American slaveholders, now so proud of their Saxon blood, were considered unworthy of marriage with their masters. But concubinage with slave women was then common (as it now is in the South), whatever Tacitus may say concerning German conjugal fidelity. The bastards of parents one free the[Pg 187] other slave, became serfs to the soil. If a freeman married a slave woman, their children were schalks, and sometimes the father even was reduced to slavery. A free woman marrying a slave, might be killed by her parents or became a slave of the king—when the Germans had kings in their new, post-Roman monarchies. Most of these cruel legal customs, and many others found in the codes, belong to the heathen epoch, to the period of pure Germanic existence unadulterated by contact with the corruptions of civilized life. They prove how deep was the Germanic contempt for the ignoble or unfortunate among their own brethren; they show also the very ancient appearance of slavery among them, and its violent and criminal origin, like that of slavery always and everywhere.
Ancient usages and laws regulating inheritance perpetuate themselves remarkably among peoples and nations. From their forests the Germans transplanted the right of primogeniture over Europe. The land was given to the males, while the daughters received the movables, mancipia, and the schalks—a conclusive evidence that not alone bondage to the soil, but positive chattelhood, prevailed in the primitive forests of Germany.
Cities and organized industry had then no existence. Freemen, i.e., masters, had but a few crude wants, and these were supplied by the work of the schalks in the dwelling or in the hof (court) of the master. In primitive prehistoric times, as in the time of Tacitus and afterward, all the male and[Pg 188] female household menials, peasants and workmen, were schalks.
Manumissions were common, but depended wholly on the will of the master. They could be obtained in various ways—might be bought with labor, produce, money, etc. The manumitted did not, however, enter at once into full enjoyment of the rights of freeman or master; indeed, only his descendants of the third generation became fully purified and capable of entering into the noble class. They then constituted, probably, the inferior nobility or freemen, who were followers and companions of the first class; and perhaps from them sprang the free yeomanry, who originally possessed but small property and a small number of schalks and serfs.
The fighting-men, or warriors, who subdued and enslaved other tribes, or transformed into schalks the weaker members of their own tribe, frequently located some of them on lands or homesteads which they permitted them to cultivate for their own use, on condition of paying a rent, generally in kind, and performing various other acts of servitude. Such was the origin of the German liti, who afterward constituted the common people.
The free, that is originally the strong, the subduer, was at the summit of the whole German social structure. He was free because he was absolute master over the weak, who had no power or strength in himself or family, and therefore was rightless. The genuine meaning of the word frow (from which is[Pg 189] derived fri, free, freedom,) is "the right to own" land, liti and schalks. From frow comes the frowen "freemen," "rulers," "masters,"—the caste for which all others existed. Land and schalks constituted the wealth of frowen or nobleman, and to acquire them the German tribes exerted all their warlike energies. All the remote Teutonic invasions, as well as those of the medi?val times, were made principally for the acquisition of land and slaves. The lands, conquered by the swords of the frowen, were worked by the schalks.
The slave traffic existed and was highly developed among the primitive Germans. It was carried on at the time of Tacitus, and some investigators maintain that for long centuries it was the only traffic known among the barbarous Germans; and slavery in its worst form was in full blast in Germany when her tribes dashed themselves against the Western empire. The slaves constituted more than half of the whole Germanic population. Wirth, the most conscientious investigator of the primitive social condition of the Germanic race, estimates the proportion of freemen to slaves as one to twenty-four. All of them—frowen, adelings, nobles of all degrees, followers, vassals, liti and schalks, lived the same simple, agrestic life. Rude in mind and of vigorous bodies, in comparatively small numbers they shattered in pieces the rotting Roman empire.
First the incursions, then the definite invasions and conquests—Attila's forays from one end of Europe to[Pg 190] the other—gave a vigorous impulse to slavery, both abroad and at home. Abroad, the invaders enslaved all that they reached—destroying, burning, devastating, impoverishing the population, and increasing the number of those forced to seek in chattelhood a remedy against starvation. At home, immense tracts of land were depopulated and abandoned, and old and new frowen, masters, seized upon them. Of course schalks were in demand, and were supplied by traffic and kidnapping.
The wars among the Germanic tribes, which were continued more or less vigorously, and the wars with neighboring populations, increased the number of slaves thrown upon the market.
The transition of a great part of Europe from the Roman to what may be called the German world, was so terrible that for several centuries the most unparalleled destruction, desolation, and slavery constituted the principal characteristics of the first medi?val epoch.
But Europe, the Christian world, and humanity were not to be submerged in the foul mire of chattelism. The awful crisis lasted through many generations, and bloodshed and superhuman suffering were their lot. But finally, the turning-point of the disease was reached: the disorder began to yield. Often after such a crisis the malignant symptoms do not abate at once, nay, they sometimes reappear with renewed force, and a long period is needed for a complete recovery. So in the evolution of Europe, overflowed by[Pg 191] the German tribes, the most malignant symptoms of chattelhood continued and reappeared for a long time in their worst characteristics, before the social body entered the stage of convalescence.
The bloody throes of the German world redounded to the benefit of the nobles abroad and at home. Liti and schalks increased, and land rapidly accumulated in the hands of the few during the first centuries of the German Christian era. Thus Saxony belonged to twenty, some say to twelve nobles, who kept thereon half-free vassals, liti, and schalks.
As the oligarchs of Greece and Rome and Gaul, so the German frowen, the powerful, the rich, in all possible ways, per fas et nefas, seized upon the homesteads of the poor; and the impoverished freemen or ahrimen, smaller nobles, and vassals, became liti and schalks. Analogous conditions produce analogous results in usages as in institutions and laws; and often that which appears to have been borrowed by one nation or people from another, is only a domestic outgrowth germinating from similar circumstances.
When the German lay and clerical founders of the feudal system possessed more land than they could cultivate, and when the iron hand of Charlemagne prevented domestic feuds and the supply of slaves from that source, then they kidnapped right and left, heathen and Christian, poor freeman or schalk. Some of the feudal barons of the time of Charlemagne owned as many as twenty thousand liti and schalks.
Karl, Karle (the correct name), or Charlemagne[Pg 192] (the more common one), in one of his numerous edicts or capitularies, prescribes as follows to those who received lands, baronies, abbeys, etc., as fiefs or grants: "Et qui nostrum habet beneficium diligentissime prevideat quantum potest Deo donante, ut nullus ex mancipiis (chattels) ad illum pertinentes beneficium fame moriatur, quod superest ultra illius famili? necessitatem, hoc libere rendat jure prescripto."
Manumissions were promoted, in various ways, by the civil and clerical authorities. Many free yeomen were created from manumitted slaves, as well as from poor vassals or followers. But such were soon impoverished by wars and devastations, and were, from various causes, reduced to the condition of liti and chattels.
Serfdom and slavery were generally more severe in the northern portion of Germany, as Saxony, etc., than in the southern; but in both, the peasantry were crushed, oppressed, and, when it was feasible, enslaved. When Lothair I., grandson of Charlemagne, revolted against his father, Louis the Pious, he appealed for help to the oppressed peasantry, tenants, and chattels.
The centuries of the faustrecht—"right of the fist," that is of the sword, of brute force—soon succeeding all over Germany to Charlemagne's orderly rule, the strongholds of dynasts, barons, nobles and robbers, shot out everywhere like mushrooms; and from them radiated oppressions and exactions of every kind. The ancient practice of ruining the poor freemen and tenants, then transforming them into serfs,[Pg 193] and then the serfs into chattels, went on as of old. In proportion as the forests were cleared, however, the baron found he could not profitably work the extensive estates with schalks alone, and that it would be more economical to transform these chattels into serfs, tenants, etc., and establish them on small parcels of his property. This was the first feeble sign of amelioration. Villages formed in this way by dynasts, or princes, and by barons, then received some rudiments of communal, rural organization.
A more powerful engine of emancipation, however, were the cities. In the course of the tenth century, dynasts, princes and emperors began everywhere to found cities, endowing them with various franchises and privileges. The legitimate flow of events, the necessities created by a settled organic existence which could only be supplied by the regular movements of industry and commerce, together with the influence of Gaul, and above all, of Italy, stimulated the German rulers. To the emperor Henry I., of the house of Saxony, belongs the glory of having given the first impulse to commerce, and thus the first blow to chattelhood and serfdom.
The population of the newly-founded cities consisted of inferior people of all kinds—laborers, operatives, small traders, poor freemen, and persons manumitted on condition of residing in the cities—the founders of the cities originally peopling them with their own retainers and with vagabonds of all kinds. Of course no nobles even of the lowest kind became[Pg 194] burghers, and thus the first municipal patricians were of very inferior birth. Thus antagonism to barons and feudal nobles generally formed the very cornerstone of the cities.
Among the privileges granted to the first cities was that a serf, schalk, or, in a word, any bondman, seeking refuge in the precincts of a city, became free if not claimed within a year. This respite to the fugitive soon became a common law all over Germany, even between nobles in relation to their fugitive serfs; and the hunter of a fugitive lost caste even among the free masters—freiherrn. When a legal prosecution was attempted, every difficulty, legal and illegal, was thrown in the way of the claimant—the cities willingly resorting to arms for the defence of their right of refuge.
The first Crusades emancipated large numbers of persons, as the taking of the cross was the sign of liberty for serf and for slave. But in Germany as in France, the great and permanent influence of the Crusades on emancipation consisted in their strengthening the cities and impoverishing the nobles, and thus producing a salutary change in internal economic relations.
The wars of the Germans with their neighbors, and above all with the Slavonians, Maghyars, etc., in the tenth and eleventh centuries, again gave vitality to the slave traffic; and war prisoners and captives, not now of their own kindred, but of foreign birth, were brought to the markets for sale.
Nevertheless, chattelhood was slowly dying out,[Pg 195] and about the twelfth century but few traces of it remained: prisoners of war began to be ransomed or exchanged, and villeinage, with various services attached, altogether superseded domestic slavery.
The villein possessed the rights of family, of village, and partially of communal organization. But many of the galling characteristics of chattelhood were transfused into serfdom and villeinage. The nobles became, if possible, more insolent, exacting and oppressive. But the villeins and peasants began to feel their power, and to combine and act in common in the villages, and afterward in the communes.
Partial insurrections followed each other in various parts of Germany; here against one baron or master, there against another. Every insurrection, even if suppressed, nevertheless gave an impulse, though sometimes imperceptible, to amelioration and emancipation. Insurrections of the down-trodden and oppressed classes are like feverish efforts of diseased physiology to resist the disorder, to throw out the virus, and restore the normal condition in the economy of life. The whole world admires the glorious insurrection of the Swiss-German peasantry against their insolent masters. Then the bondmen, villeins, etc., individually or in small bodies, by the axe, by fire, and in every possible manner, protested their imprescriptible right to liberty. So also did the celebrated Münzer when the reformation dawned over Germany and Europe. He firmly believed that religious reform, to be beneficial to the poor, must go hand in hand[Pg 196] with social ameliorations. The most notable insurrection, however, was the great uprising of the German peasantry in the sixteenth century. From the Vosgese mountains, from the Alps to the Baltic, numerous isolated forces rose in arms, each inspired by the same great idea. They had no centres, no possibility of a combination of effort, but all of them recognized the same covenant: 1. The gospel to be preached in truth, but not in the interest of their masters—nobles and clergy. 2. Not to pay any kind of tithes. 3. The interest or rent from landed property to be reduced to five per cent. 4. Forests to be communal property. 5. All waters free. 6. Game free. 7. Serfdom to be abolished. 8. Election of communal authorities by the respective communes. 9. Lands robbed from the peasantry to be restored to the original owners.
This great war of the peasants was terrible, pitiless, bloody. More than one thousand strongholds, burghs, and monasteries were destroyed; but the peasants were finally overpowered, the nobility being aided by the forces of the empire. Luther, too, thundered against the poor peasants.[17] But not in vain did they shed their blood. The oppression by the old frowen, strengthened by feudality, was finally broken at the roots. The imperial German diet declared to the nobles, that if they did not cease their cruelties, at the next revolt they should be abandoned to their fate.
[Pg 197]
Serfdom was not yet abolished, but was moderated in various ways. The direct and indirect influence of the Reformation on the condition of the peasantry has been already mentioned. Mild reforms were introduced in the dominions of various German sovereigns. Certain liberties were granted to rural communes, and the number of free tenants slowly but uninterruptedly increased. The conditions of villeinage on private estates began to be regulated by the respective governments; and absolute serfdom was slowly dying out. The prosperity of Germany increased proportionally with the emancipation, though but partial, of rural labor, and the freedom of the soil. On an average, those regions were most prosperous which contained the greatest number of emancipated rural communities, or where the villeinage was reduced, systematized, and made more and more free from the arbitrary exactions of the master.
The peculiar political organization of Germany prevented any unity of action in the extinction of rural servitude. Many of its features—some relating to the person, but principally to the soil—survived even to the present century in certain parts of the smaller German states; and in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, there is still room for infinite improvement in the condition of the peasantry. But the mortal disorder exists no more: the fundamental rights of man are recognized. Governmental maladministration, injustice, oppressive taxation, exactions by officials and landlords, are unhappily common; but all these[Pg 198] are in flagrant violation of established laws. And, bad though they are, they cannot for a moment compare with the blighting influences of chattel slavery.
For long centuries, and with persistent pertinacity, have slavery and the oppression of man and his labor gnawed at the German vitals; and centuries must elapse before the recovery of a normal condition. But the Germans of the present day—moralists, statesmen, savants and professional men, as well as artisans, mechanics and agriculturists—are unanimous in condemning human bondage, whatever may be the race enslaved. Few, indeed, are there of the great German race whose minds are inaccessible to the nobler promptings of freedom and humanity.