Theodore Parker loved parish ministry, but he was a dedicated scholar, both of American history and of antiquity: on July 30, 1845, Parker took the time to interview the last surviving veteran of the battle of Lexington. Parker also served as a grader of Harvard’s Greek exams in addition to his ministry work for a number of years.
Parker’s interest in the past greatly influenced how he talked about slavery and abolition. In his biography of Parker, Paul Teed notes that Parker frequently evokes the Revolutionary War in his speeches to justify militant, even armed, struggles for freedom. Teed also notes that Parker combines history with geography to frame particular locations, most especially Boston, but also Lexington and Concord, as spaces with close connections of freedom. This geographical aspect of Parker’s rhetoric takes on a whole different dimension when he begins his opposition to the fugitive slave law of 1850. For example, when Thomas Sims, a runaway slave, was ultimately captured and returned to the south, Parker exclaimed that Sims left by being carried “over the spot where, eighty-one years before, the ground had drunk the blood of Crispus Attucks.” (Teed 2012: 144).
Similar to American history and geography, Greek and Roman antiquity were also sources of authority for Parker’s abolitionist arguments. The challenge was for Parker, as for all abolitionists who turned to antiquity, to figure out how to use the literature, philosophy and history of two societies in which slave-ownership was accepted. One solution was to focus on ancient slave revolts. Unsurprisingly, Parker, like other abolitionists, turned to Spartacus.
However, in an 1843 work, Parker offered up a very unusual answer to how slave-holding antiquity could be useful in creating an abolitionist future: Parker summoned Socrates to Boston.
In this piece, “Socrates in Boston”, Parker imagines Socrates interrogating a certain Jonathan of Boston. Jonathan is both an ardent Christian and a defender of slavery, even though he does not own any slaves himself. However, Jonathan does know enough about slavery to speak about it with confidence, similar to Socrates himself. For Parker brings to the forefront how Socrates’ Athens also had slaves:
“So I suppose slavery does not encourage indolence, wastefulness, deception and fraud, in the slaves, any more than it did at Athens.”
This quote comes from a passage in which Socrates is asking Jonathan about the effect of slavery on slaves, since Jonathan had claimed that slavery was beneficial to slaves, a claim that Parker’s Socrates investigates with typical Platonic fervor.
And Plato was important to Parker, as evidenced by the lectures that Parker gave on Plato. Parker’s interest was guided by two lines: first, Plato offered a vision of God that suited Parker’s Unitarian needs. Plato was also simply in the air of Massachusetts: Emerson was attracted to Plato’s thought, as were other transcendentalists such as Margaret Fuller.
However, Parker was not content with the Socrates that he found in Plato’s dialogues. Parker instead transforms Socrates into a Christian. Parker ends the dialogue with Socrates speaking, as Parker writes it, solus:
“Have two thousand years and more gone by, since my time? I heard of Christianity when Paul came to Mars Hill, and blessed his manly heart – as I lay in my grave. This cannot be real. Slavery in a free land; defended in a Christian land; by men what do not own slaves! This must be all a dream!”
Parker turns to antiquity for authority for his abolitionist arguments. He takes from antiquity his character, Socrates, genre, the dialogue, as well as a number of rhetorical flourishes; Socrates also mentions the Cynic philosopher Menippus and the tyrranicides Harmodius and Aristogiton. However, by the end of his dialogue, Parker discards authority of antiquity for the authority of Christianity: Parker bends history to transform Socrates into a Christian so that Socrates will be a more influential abolitionist.

Lydia Marie Childs was one of the most influential abolitionists in the 19th century. Like Parker, she came from a Calvinist style Christian home in Massachusetts. Unlike Parker, Childs wandered away from the church before rejoining the Unitarians in 1867 when they had founded the Religious Free Association. That such an association was a spiritual home for Childs is evident from her book Aspirations of the World, which is a collection of wisdom sayings from various religions from around the world.
Childs’ first book was An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, published in 1833. While this book was a piece of abolitionist propaganda, it was very well researched propaganda. Childs was a serious thinker, being both a regular attendee at Margaret Fuller’s circles and a serious reader. In her book The Mirror of Classicism, Caroline Winterer (2006: 170 n.6) lists the books on classical topics that informed Childs’ research.
In the Appeal, Childs explicitly contrasts the slavery of America with that of Greece and Rome.
 
Modern slavery, indeed, in all its particulars, is more odious than the ancient; and it is worthy of remark that the condition of slaves has always been worse just in proportion to the freedom enjoyed by their masters. In Greece, none were so proud of liberty as the Spartans; and they were a proverb among the neighboring States for their severity to slaves. The slave code of the Roman republic was rigid and tyrannical in the extreme; and cruelties became so common and excessive, that the emperors, in the latter days of Roman power, were obliged to enact laws to restrain them. In the modern world, England and America are the most conspicuous for enlightened views of freedom, and bold vindication of the equal rights of man; yet in these two countries slave laws have been framed as bad as they were in Pagan, iron-hearted Rome; and the customs are in some respects more oppressive;--modern slavery unquestionably wears its very worst aspect in the Colonies of England and the United States of North America. (From Gutenberg).
 
Childs does some interesting things with her description of Rome. First, she treats the Republic and the Empire as opposites viz. slavery. She insists that under the Republic, slave-owners had near unlimited authority, which they then abused. When Rome was later ruled by emperors, they enacted laws to check these abuses. What Childs ends up doing is constructing a narrative of moral progress in Rome. This idea of moral progress connects to her other idea that the spread of Christianity was essential to the overthrow of Roman slavery. In the following passage, she quotes from an unnamed source (that is, a source I haven’t had the time to identify yet):
 
In Rome, the introduction of "Christianity abolished slavery; the idea of exclusive property in our fellow-men was too obviously at variance with its holy precepts; and its professors, in the sincerity of their hearts, made a formal surrender of such claims. In various ancient instruments of emancipation, the masters begin by declaring, that, 'for the love of God and Jesus Christ, for the easing of their consciences, and the safety of their souls,' they set their bondmen free." (From Gutenberg).
 
The connection of Christianity to the dissolution of Roman slavery was a powerful idea in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, however, it has fallen out of favor.

aOn 4/6/1848 Theodore Parker addressed the American Anti-Slavery society, giving a speech entitled “The Abolition of Slavery in the French Republic”. He begins by explicitly remarking on the previous speaker’s thoughts on Rome, showing how antiquity was a common reference for Americans; a bridge that connected different speakers.
 
“The gentleman before me has made an allusion to Rome. Let me also turn to that same city. Underneath the Rome of the emperors, there was another Rome; not seen by the sun, known only to a few men. Above, in the sunlight, stood Rome of the Caesars, with her markets and her armies, her theaters, her temples, and her palaces, glorious and of marble. A million men went through her brazen gates. The imperial city, she stood there, beautiful and admired, the queen of nations. But underneath all that, in caverns of the earth, in the tombs of dead men, in quarries whence the upper city had been slowly hewn, there was another population, another Rome, with other thoughts; yes, a devout body of men who swore not by the public altars; men whose prayers were forbidden; their worship disallowed, their ideas prohibited, their very lives illegal. Time passed on; and gradually Rome of the pagans disappeared, and Rome of the Christians sat there in her place, on the Seven Hills, and stretched out her scepter over the nations.”
(In The Slave Power, 1969: 165).
 
For Parker, Rome is impossible to separate from Christian theology. As a theological locus, Rome has didactic worth. Parker constructs a parallel between ancient Rome and modern France: just as in ancient Rome Christians were initially few in number and oppressed by the government, so too were true republicans in France. What Parker leaves unsaid is a further parallel between these Christians and abolitionists in the US.
What I see as important in this passage of Parker is his emphasis on progress: the Christians start off as prosecuted, but eventually they become emperors. Parker does not think that simply being oppressed makes one like the Christians, but rather that the goal is to become hegemonic.
Furthermore, in his other writings it is clear that Parker does not think that early Christians are inherently worthy of imitation. How could he, when he does not even think that the bible is in an of itself authoritative on morality?
Indeed, Parker argues that the New Testament’s silence on the evil of slavery reflects badly on the bible, rather than the bible giving imprimatur to slavery. Not only does Parker decry this method, but he also attacks Moses Stuart, a professor at Andover Newton Theological School who argued that the New Testament condones slavery.
“there is a “short and easy method” with Professor Stuart, and all other men who defend slavery out of the Bible. If the Bible defends slavery, it is not so much the better for slavery, but so much the worse for the Bible. If Mr. Stuart and Mr. Webster do not see that, there are plenty of obscurer men that do. Of all the attacks ever made on the Bible, by “deists” and “infidels”, none would do so much to bring it into disrepute, as to show that it sanctioned American slavery.”
(“The Slave Power” in the Slave Power 1969: 272)

On May 29, 1850, Theodore Parker addressed the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston. While in this speech Parker has some good things to say about the Free Soil party, for the most part the speech condemns American complicity with the evils of slavery. Parker was especially disappointed by how the American Senate debated slavery, as there men spoke of the costs and benefits of slavery, rather than viewing it through a moral lens like he does. Indeed, Parker is so disappointed in the American Senate’s discussion of slavery, that he makes the following comparison:
 
Some of the discussions remind one of the spirit which prevailed in the Roman Senate, A.D. 62, when about four hundred slaves were crucified, because their master, Pedanius Secundus, a man of consular dignity, was found murdered in his bed. I mean to say, the same disregard of the welfare of the slaves, the same willingness to sacrifice them – if not their lives, which are not now in peril, at least their welfare, to the convenience of their masters. Anybody can read the story in Tacitus [Annales 14.42], and it is worth reading, and instructive, too, at these times. (In Slave Power 1969: 252)
 
Below is what Tacitus has to say about the murder of Pedanius Secundus. Even though Yardley’s translation came out in 2008, he nonetheless uses the archaic, and in this situation anachronistic, term ‘catamite’ for the Latin word exoletus, which means “grown man”. Unsurprisingly, Parker makes no mention of what Tacitus terms amore exoleti; in other writings Parker expresses disgust at Greek and Roman sexuality.
 
Not much later the city praefect Pedanius Secundus was murdered by his own slave. Either Secundus had refused him his freedom, after negotiating the price for it, or the man, fired with passion for a catamite, could not bear having his master as a rival. In any case, in accordance with long-standing custom, all the household slaves that had been lodged under the same roof were required to face execution; but the plebs gathered together in their to safeguard so many innocents, and matters reached the point of a riot. The Senate then came under siege, and in the house support came from some who opposed such extreme severity, though most were for not breaking with tradition. Annales 14.42. trans. J.C. Yardley

Theodore Parker and Roman slavery
 
While this blog is on the intersection of Roman slavery and American abolition generally, at the moment much of my energy is dedicated to examining how a particular American abolitionist used Roman slavery, the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. Parker makes for a good case study for a number of reasons:
1) Although a full time parish minister, Parker was also a commited scholar of the bible and antiquity
2) As a minister, Parker participated in the debates on the biblical justifications of slavery and abolition
3) Parker’s abolitionism was not limited to the pulpit: he raised money for John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry
4) Parker’s abolitionism was of his time: all though he believed that slaves needed to be freed immediately, he nonetheless considered peoples from Africa inferior to whites
 
Today I’m going to look at how Parker uses Roman slavery in his piece, “A Letter on Slavery to the Fellow-Citizens of the United States”. This is an open letter, in which Parker presents himself as a humble man with no particular station or learning. In other words, he is interested in convincing his readers of the evils of slavery, noticeably he chooses to downplay, or even hide, his own thoughts on religion and Christianity for the sake of advancing his argument.
 
Nonetheless, in this letter Parker takes full advantage of his knowledge of antiquity. One of his key points is that even though the Romans were pagans, or as he labels them, heathens, nonetheless they were kinder to their slaves than American Christians are. Consider these two passages:
 
“Girls, the children of mulattoes, are sold at great price, as food for private licentiousness, or public furniture in houses of ill-fame. Under the worst of the Roman emperors this outrage was forbidden, and the prefect of the city gave such slaves their freedom. But Republican [i.e. Americans] parents not rarely sell their own children for that abuse.” (in Slave Power, 1969: 55-6)
 
“Yet, more than fifteen hundred years ago, a Roman emperor forbade the separation of families of slaves, and ordered all which had been separated to be reunited. “Who can bear,” said the Emperor to his heathen subjects, “who can bear that children should be separated from their parents, sisters from their brothers, wives from their husbands?” (in Slave Power, 1969: 59)
 
Parker’s thoughts on Roman slavery are also directed connected to his belief that the bible is fallible and not absolute. While the precise placement of the bible in Parker’s theology is a complex question, this following quote is a good demonstration of Parker’s overall approach:
 
“Now some tell us that Paul said, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers,” meaning “law of the land”- “for the powers that be are ordained by God.” Did Paul do so? Not at all; he resisted the very religion established by the powers that were. But it will be said that, he did not war directly with slavery, yet lived in the midst of slaveholders. Paul had work enough to do, no doubt, without that of abolishing slavery; perhaps he had not his eyes open to this great sin, - not seeing it as a sin. This is certain, that he thought the world was to end in his own lifetime, and therefore if he did see the wickedness of the “institution,” he may have thought it not worth while to attempt to remove what would so soon perish, at the “coming of the Lord.”

Parker is quoting from Romans 13.1: πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξοθσία ὑπερεχούσιαις ὑποτασσέσθω, οὐ γάρ ἐστιν ἐξουσία εἰ μὴ ὑπὸ θεοῦ, αἱ δὲ οὖσαι ἐξοθσίαι ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ τεταγμένι εἰσίν.
 
 
 
 

Americans turned to antiquity to make sense of American slavery, just as they turned to Rome to make sense of republican politics.
My background photo for this blog is titled "The Modern Medea". Harper's Weekly printed it on May 18, 1867. It depicts Margaret Garner, a woman who, with her four children, ran away from slavery in January 1856. Slave-catchers pursued her. Rather than suffer her children returning to slavery, Garner killed them.
Americans turned to antiquity to make sense of Garner's filicide. The illustrator from Harper's makes the connection in his choice of title: according to Greek mythology, in order to avenge herself on her disloyal husband Jason, Medea kills their children.
Roman antiquity also provided parallels, which Winterer collects in her book The Mirror of Antiquity. The Black poet (and Unitarian) Francis Ellen Watkins Harper compared Garner to politicians of the Roman republic, whose dedication to liberty made them prefer death to political servitude. Harper writes:
Then, said the mournful mother,
If Ohio cannot save,
I will do a deed for freedom,
She shall find each child a grave.
"The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio"
Proslavery writers also turned to Rome, comparing Garner unfavorably to Verginius, a man who preferred to kill his daughter rather than see her sold into slavery (Winterer 2007: 187). I recount the story of Verginius and his daughter Verginia in my other blog.