SLAVER Y 209others, slavery was seen as a necessary consequence of man's fall from grace,
a deserved punishment for sinfulness. After the church was recognized and legit-
imated by Constantine, it became part of the property and slaveholding estab-
lishment. The material interests of the church as well as the Christian slaveowners
made it all the more difficult for Christians to translate Christ's message of mercy
into an uncompromising attack on slavery. And Aquinas justified slavery as part
of his theory of ascending stages, accepting slavery almost as part of a natural
hierarchy of human types.^4
The Reformation may have played an important role in transforming Christ-
ian attitudes toward slavery, but the results were a long time coming. The prin-
ciple of predetermined salvation eliminated the efficacy of such good deeds as
the manumission of slaves, but a change occurred within Protestant Christian-
ity itself when the role of free will began to take precedence over determinism.
The stress on man's individual choice in his quest for salvation and the work-
ings of the human conscience in the practice of manumission, even as merely a
demonstration of one's elect status, led some among the Quakers, and later oth-
ers of other Protestant denominations and Catholics as well, to condemn slav-
ery as a moral evil, define slaveownership and trade as sinful, and demand total
abolition.s
It used to be thought that the credit for the disappearance of slavery in the
Roman Empire as well as the anti-slave trade movement in Great Britain and
the abolitionist movement in the United States in the nineteenth century should
be given to the humanitarian spirit of New Testament Christianity, but while Chris-
tian belief may have ameliorated some aspects of slavery, it took eighteen hun-
dred years before slavery became intolerable to the Christian religious conscience.
Furthermore, it was not necessary for religious and philosophical antislavery
positions to be developed for slavery to die out in some Western societies. Nor
did the rise of antislavery sentiment necessarily lead to the abolition of slavery;
in the American South and Haiti, for example, it took a civil war and a rebel-
lion to settle the issue. Slavery disappeared gradually in the West from the late
Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, not as a result of any contradiction with
religious and philosophical standards, but as part of a complex economic and
social process by which the mass of the free peasantry was reduced to serfdom
while the servile class was escaping from chattel slavery.6
In fact, an antislavery position in Christianity emerged only with the modern
version of slavery that came with the African slave trade, a development closely
related to the economic and imperialistic expansion of the West. By the nine-
teenth century, slavery in the Americas was part of a world capitalist environ-
ment, an egregious contradiction to the freedom, individualism, and laissez-faire
usually associated with a market economy.7 Although those of the Fogel and
Engerman school have described ante bellum slavery in the southern United States
as a profitable enterprise fully compatible with capitalist rationality and profit-
seeking, the anachronism of slave labor became fully apparent as industrial cap-
italism underwent rapid growth and the institution was destroyed by force or