This past August, the New York Times launched the 1619 Project, an ongoing initiative to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slave ship on the shores of Virginia. Revising traditional accounts of American history as beginning with the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the Times positions this fateful 1619 landing as our nation’s true origin. “Out of slavery—” the Times writes, “and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.” We may be a democracy, they remind us, but we are a democracy born of the brutal enslavement of millions of black Americans. This might seem a paradox, but the system of democracy itself emerged from a slave society: the ancient Greek city-state of Athens. Commonly invoked as America’s ancestor in the great democratic experiment—we need not look further than the colonnades of our federal building to see this classical ideal manifest—Athens had a slave population almost three times that of its citizens during the sixth and fifth centuries, when democracy was at its peak. Most historians agree that Athenian democracy arose in 508 BCE out of a collective and leaderless uprising by the citizens. This narrative, like conventional origin stories for American democracy as a revolution carried forth by a ragtag collection of citizens fighting for sheer love of country, offers an optimistic view on the ability of citizens to rally around a common cause. But on its own, it doesn’t account for the social, economic, and political circumstances that enabled this cohesion amongst the enfranchised class—and some have pointed to the rise of slavery during the decades preceding this revolution as a key factor. The slave market in Athens boomed after the early sixth-century reforms of the lawgiver Solon outlawed the exploitation of peasant farmers by wealthy Athenians. Foreign slaves, whose rights were not protected under any such legislation, became a much more attractive source of labor. Although disparity of wealth prevailed, disparity of status lessened, as rich and poor Athenians were united by at least one crucial characteristic: not being slaves.
"You must each of you consider what slave he left at home, and then imagine that you have suffered from him the same treatment that I have suffered from Phormio. Do not take into consideration that they are severally Syrus or Manes or what not, while this fellow is Phormio. The thing is the same—they are slaves, and he was a slave; you are masters, and I was master."
Apollodorus establishes rapport with the jurymen on the basis of their common status of “master.” In fact, although all jurymen were citizens, not all owned slaves—poorer citizens usually couldn’t afford to do so. Yet this reality didn’t impede the power of Apollodorus’ rhetoric; his appeal suggests that to understand oneself as a citizen of Athens was to understand oneself as a member of the slave-owning class.
In 1765, John Adams published a letter in the Boston Gazette (under the pseudonym “Humphrey Ploughjogger.”) It reads:
“Our fore fathers came over here for liberty of conscience, and we have been nothing better than servants to 'em all along this 100 years, and got just enough to keep soul and body together, and buy their goods to keep us from freezing to death, and we won't be their negroes. Providence never designed us for negroes, I know, for if it had it wou'd have given us black hides, and thick lips, and flat noses, and short woolly hair, which it han't done, and therefore never intended us for slaves… I say we are as handsome as old England folks, and so should be as free.”
Although Adams himself held abolitionist views, it is telling that his chosen metaphor for the relationship of Britain to the American colonies is that of the master to the slave. A decade before the Declaration of Independence would officially usher America into its democratic age, men like Adams were stoking resentment amongst the enfranchised at having been reduced to a state of servitude. We tend to speak of American slavery as a kind of deep hypocrisy, a flaw in the logic of our free democratic society. Our basic moral intuition tells us this is so, and it is indeed our duty to speak out against this hypocrisy as it continues to this day. Yet we must also reckon with the reality that democratic freedom, at its origins both Athenian and American, found no contradiction in slavery. When undersood as the condition of non-servitude, “freedom” actually relies upon the presence of an enslaved class—a foil against which the democratic citizen actualizes himself.
In grappling with the violence of this conception, I am reminded of a different understanding of freedom, articulated by the poet Emma Lazarus a century after the emergence of democracy in America. Her words point, for me, towards genuine liberation, towards making the rhetoric of our democratic ideals come true: