Once again, since I’ve not been addressing the question of legal codes, your “response” is decidedly beside the point. That slavery as represented in Biblical and Classical traditions had a strong (but hardly the only) influence upon literate British colonists’ traditions concerning slave holding and slave-trading is true to the point of being trivial. Just because the first British colonists hadn’t engaged in slave-holding and slave trading before arriving in the Americas does not mean that they did not arrive possessing British traditions — albeit ones that had not been put into practice for centuries — that soon afterwards told them exactly what to do when persons whom they could profitably use as slaves became available. Or am I to assume that the British, aside from their legal codes, are a “people without history”?

Do you really think that your Chestertonian glibness adds to the seriousness of this discussion? Indentured labour, penal servitude and chattel slavery are all forms of unfree labor. In practice, penal servitude is especially close to chattel slavery; for the American context, cf. Douglas A. Blackmon’s recent Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Your bald assertion that “American slavery was sui generis” is simply not true. As David Brion Davis points out towards the beginning of his _The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture_:

“…a comparative analysis of historical forms of servitude reveals precedents for most of the striking traits of American slavery. As we have already suggested, this does not mean that American Negro slavery was the same as earlier varieties of servitude. But although American slavery was shaped into a distinctive pattern, few of its features were unique to the New World. Previous forms of servitude bore enough resemblance to the South’s peculiar institution to warrant the main criticisms of the abolitionists.”

Of course they could have drawn on biblical or classical models – but they didn’t. There is no evidence that Jewish law, any more than Roman law, influenced their slave codes, no more than the leges barbarorum or the servile institutions of Poland or Russia

Indentured labour and penal servitude are as remote from chattel slavery as chalk from cheese.

American slavery was sui generis.

The problem lies with Mr Swenson’s ambiguous use of the word “tradition” in his first sentence coupled with his later use of the word “innovation”:

“When British colonists first settled the New World, they did not bring with them a long tradition of slavery, in which the enslaved had absolutely no rights. It was instead an innovation which was adopted out of a perceived economic need. ”

This statement might be true only if we accept an absurdly limited concept of tradition, as I tried to point out in response to David Nickol’s blunt criticism of Mike Melendez. When, for example, the first African slaves arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638 — only eight years after the founding of Boston — their social status as slaves was not an “innovation.” Nor were the contemporaneous British colonists who owned or traded in slaves participants in a “naive” culture. Contrast this with a real innovation, like in vitro fertilization back in the early 80s.

Thus, my point is that Mr Swensen’s statements about slavery and British colonists are, barring some clarification on his part, false, and thus that his attempt to extend Douthat’s argument by analogy is a failure.

Please re-read my original post. Nowhere did I claim that there existed a living tradition of chattel slavery in England at the time of the British colonization of the Americas. My understanding is that such slavery began to disappear in England at the the time of the Norman Conquest. Nor did I discuss legal codes, which are often written long after the fact of the appeaance — or reappearance — of some social phenomenon. Who were you attempting to rebut?

What I did and do claim is that British colonists were aware of traditions of chattel slavery through their familiarity with Holy Scripture, Classical literature, and the history of chattel and other forms of involuntray servitude (Mediterranean galley slavery, for example) as traditions (living or moribund) in Portugal, Spain, France and elsewhere.

At the time our Pilgrim Fathers found their way to Plymouth Rock, Spain and Portugal (in particular) were quite adept at the enslavement, use and selling of Moors, Guinea-coast Africans, Asians and Native Americans… and had been for centuries. British colonists who wanted to re-establish slave economies in the Caribbean and on the North American continent had no dearth of examples to choose from. They also had home-grown models to help add to their slave-driver’s “tool-kit”: indentured servitude, prison labor, the apprentice system. Nor, unfortunately, did they lack accesss to persons they could enslave and purchase as slaves: non-Englishmen such as Native Americans and Africans.

Having established slavery, some of those who owned slaves managed to see God’s blessing in it, which agrees with Douthat’s thesis.

The difficulty with Swenson’s brief statement was its limited selection of facts (note facts) and the ambiguity that could be read into it. Hence, we wind up with non-arguments and people defending statements that were never challenged. Though one wonders why they resist broader context, i.e. more facts.

Does Swenson intend to suggest that Southern British colonists were more religious than Northern British colonists? I don’t know.

Does Swenson intend to suggest that Southern slavery originated in the stated interpretation of the Bible? I don’t know.

Did Swenson intend his choices to be a tu quoque? I don’t know.

Do those broadening the context suggest that the South had no other choices? I know I do not. Now if those defending Swenson’s unchallenged facts would stop “reading” our minds and start reading our words, we might make some progress. Even better, perhaps they could tell us what is on their minds that differs from the expanded context. That would further the conversation. Who knows, perhaps Swenson might expand on what he was trying to say, though with all this strum und drang I wouldn’t be surprised if he chose discretion.

It is certainly not true that chattel slavery, as a living institution existed in Britain, since the end of the 12th century at the latest. There is no mention of it in Bracton’s reports and he lived from about 1210 to 1268. In France, it disappeared around the time of Charles the Bald’s Edict of Pistes [L'Édit de Pîtres] in 864. Everywhere, the “adscriptus glebae” or unfree tenantis treated as a new thing, quite separate from slavery, both in theory and practice.

In fact, it is remarkable how little the slave codes of the European colonial powers drew on the Corpus Juris, even though, except for England, the Civil Law formed the basis of their jurisprudence.

“That does not describe indentured servitude. He is absolutely correct. The British colonists did not arrive in America with a tradition of chattel slavery.”

You’re quibbling. British colonists were aware of traditions of chattel slavery through their familiarity with the Holy Bible and with Latin and Greek literature. That there had existed traditions of chattel slavery was not a novelty to them on the level of ideas. They brought these ideas with them in their heads and in their books.

Second, Britain never existed in a vacuum in relation to other “European” nations where traditions of chattel slavery never died out — especially in regards to the very profitable slave trade. Portugal, Spain, France, and (earlier on) Italian city-states such as Genoa and Venice would have provided “exemplary” traditions that men of letters amongst the British colonists would hardly have been unaware of.

Once again, traditions of chattel slavery — embedded in a social context where other forms of involuntary servitude had a very strong presence — arrived with the British colonists. To put them into practice merely required the combination of moral depravity, economic necessity, and the availability of suitable candidates for chattel slavery who were not Englishmen — i.e., Africans and American Indians.

Raymond Takashi Swenson specified slavery “in which the enslaved had absolutely no rights.” That does not describe indentured servitude. He is absolutely correct. The British colonists did not arrive in America with a tradition of chattel slavery.