The Effect of Slavery on the American People (1858)

AUTHOR: Parker, Theodore

Parker proposes comparisons between human and animal welfare, drawing an analogy between taming animals and enslaving humans.

KEYWORDS: animals, slavery, Abolition

Parker, Theodore. "The Chief Sins of the People"
 

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

This anti-slavery sermon, delivered on the occasion of the 4th of July, Theodore Parker shows how slavery degrades and dehumanizes. He draws on an analogy with domestic animals according to which, while the “kind and honest” use of animals might not directly be opposed to their welfare, they are still degraded and deprived of their original natural essence compared to their wild counterparts:

Man subdues other animals, transfigures their nature by the process, and makes a new creature. The dray-horse, the house-dog, the domestic sheep, arc the works of man, almost as much as the printing press, or these roses, which have departed so slowly from their primitive parent. He does them no wrong, for they are his natural servants; his natural food when a wild man, and his property when civilized — not for abuse and cruelty, but for kind and honest use; he does them no damage; their welfare is not thereby necessarily injured in bulk or in kind; the farmer’s horse is as happy as the horse of the wilderness. But yet all these wild animals repudiate this alteration of nature, counting it as high treason. Turn a domestic bull into a herd of wild cattle, or a tame crow among bis savage kinsfolk, and they tear him to pieces forthwith; even their brutal instinct repudiates this transformation. (7-8)

For Parker the case is much worse in relation to enslaved humans, for chattel slavery goes against both human nature and human welfare. It is both a “Wrong” and does “Damage”: “The obedient slave, content to be property, differs from the natural man, civilized or savage, more than the lap-dog or the turnspit differs from the wild dog of the Siberian or Canadian woods. […] In its mildest form, from its very nature, slavery makes dwarfs of what would be men, and might be giants” (8).

Since 1776, Parker notes, the pro-slavery argument has changed from acknowledging the unjust nature of human chattel slavery but defending it as the provisional subjection of inferior to superior persons, so that bondage actually benefits the inferior party: “his gain of welfare greater than his loss of freedom,” as Parker puts it. Now, slavery is defended via an argument that reduces the enslaved person to nothing but an animal that cannot be civilized – that perhaps even has no soul, and is incapable of dealing with liberty – so  “the white man has the same natural right to enslave an African as to tame a horse” (8).

While “the exports of New England […] are books, manufactured articles,” those of Virginia “her sons and daughters, bred as slaves, to be sold as cattle” (13). Accordingly, there is just one option: “Slavery must go down” (14). And go down it will, Parker insists, using another analogy drawn from the realm of animals. Just as the wild animal in the wilderness will be made redundant by the spreading of civilization, so slavery will not survive the forward march of civilization: “[n]o more than a convention of grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains can protect the savage woods from the axe, or stay the tide of civilized man, which will sweep across the continent, and fill the howling wilderness with farms and villages and cities of Christian men instead of grizzly bears” (14).

 

Last updated on March 10th, 2024

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