An Empire of Slaves
“We went to sleep last night an Empire of Trade and woke up this morning to find ourselves stark staring mad in an Empire of Slaves.” – Friedrich Hochner, 1744, after the Trial of Hans Lindemann.
It is impossible to omit from any history of Bremen the institution that – to foreign eyes - so uniquely characterized her culture, that of penal servitude. The debate has raged for generations as to exactly how closely this institution resembled slavery, and this debate has so far resulted in a great deal of heat generated for a very little light. We can go no further in our examination of this Empire of Trade without taking a good, hard look at the laborers and institutions that built it.
Once the Hanseatic League had been brought to heel and Bremen’s dominance of Baltic markets established, a critical shortage of a heretofore plentiful commodity arose: unskilled labor became scarce. Partly this is because the doubling and redoubling of trade and manufacture wrecked the once-stable labor markets. Men left their rural fields and villages to flock to the cities, giving up an idealized liberty to work for wages but thereby securing prosperity for themselves and their families. And these laborers, instead of remaining mere wage-slaves, then invested their earnings and improved their lot, becoming owners and entrepreneurs. This labor shortage, as with all shortages, had the effect of raising wages in real terms and assisting in the creation of a true ‘middling’ class.
The increasing birthrate, decreasing mortality rate and steady incorporation of new territories were somewhat offset by the overseas emigration fostered by the Colonial Corporation. But the single greatest factor in the establishment of penal servitude was the uncontrolled urbanization of the Baltic provinces.
Within a single lifetime, populations in Bremen, Lubeck, Hamburg and the other great cities doubled and doubled again. Enormous shanty-towns sprang up along the banks of the Weser and the Elbe, converted almost overnight into respectable homes, taverns, churches and shops. But where so many people, strangers to one another, are packed into such a small area, crime is the inevitable result.
This explosive growth in crime can only be inferred; in the absence of any institution such as a police force there are no statistics on crime. Still, the newspapers and correspondence – even the plays – of the period are full of references to the wild and lawless times. Those cities must have been terrifying places to live, but the invisible hand of economics drove men from the fields to the cities in increasing numbers. That same invisible hand impelled the more able of those men into ever-better jobs or into ownership of their own shops and factories. And gently but firmly, that hand rewarded every effort at increasing production, since the cost of machinery and improvements was cheaper than the cost of wages.
Faced with a rising middle class, rampant crime, a labor shortage and a government that was weak and divided, evolutionary pressure caused the chartering of the first private security companies. These were a logical extension of the retinues of armsmen maintained by the nobles and wealthy merchants of the period, made available for a fee to a middle class that could now afford their services and that was rich enough to have become a target.
Popular history attributes the first work-gangs to Franz Drucker of the city of Hamburg, and there is no evidence to disprove this claim. What is a certainty is that by the middle of the sixteenth century private security forces were routinely bringing alleged criminals before magistrates or even private judges. Those convicted were routinely sentenced to pay fines and, if unable to pay immediately and in full, to serve at hard labor and a fixed wage until the fine was paid.
On the plus side, this did have the very real effect of reducing crime and mayhem in the Customs Union to more tolerable levels without requiring any expenditure from the public purse. Fines paid went directly into the treasury and were available as restitution for the victims. As an institution, it was therefore very attractive to the wealthy and most of the middle-class, who had the money to pay any fines and escape servitude. On the other hand, there were numerous and outrageous abuses of the system. Political dissidents were routinely sentenced, as were enemies of the powerful and those unlucky enough to be available when labor was needed. Fines were capriciously set and, especially for the powerful, sometimes not collected at all. Private security ‘gangs’ roamed the streets collecting vagrants, drunks and sometimes just scooping up random passers-by off the streets. A friendly judge could always be found to bend the laws a bit if needed.
At first, wages paid for work done – less an allowance for food, shelter and clothing – were applied to the assessed fines. Unscrupulous manipulators quickly saw the profits in rotten food, ragged clothing and shelter unfit for man or beast. Men who could not work were not paid, and either sank deeper into debt or died of hunger or disease. Interest applied to debts literally converted sentences of a few months into lifetime servitude – however long that life might be. Records were altered, or lost. Men vanished into servitude and were literally never seen or heard from again.
It was the discovery that female servitors were being employed in houses of prostitution that sparked the first great reforms. Archbishop Johann Friedrich (served 1596-1634) was incensed at conditions he found in the poor-houses and stews of Bremen, and he vowed to clean up the appalling horrors he saw there. In a celebrated series of fiery sermons he literally hurled down the gauntlet, beginning with the Biblical roots of slavery and going on to compare Bremen’s lawmen unfavorably with the slavers of Rome.
In the wake of the Archbishop’s crusade, some reforms were instituted. Many municipalities and provinces launched their own police services, and the remaining private firms were brought under the scrutiny of the Eye, Hand and Heart. Prisoners were entitled to a certain sum for their maintenance and allowed a fixed sum per day toward their debt. This led, however, to two great abuses in turn.
Firstly, prisoners who did not work cost money to feed and keep and earned nothing toward those expenses. Despite the first stirrings of public indignation and the sporadic investigations by officials, servitors were callously and routinely worked to death.
Secondly, a booming business opened up in the buying and selling of labor contracts. Convicts were transported across the globe, some as far as the nascent colonies of Australia. And needless to say, whether man or woman, married or unmarried, endowed with children or childless, they went alone.
Archbishop Johann Friedrich’s passing and a tightening labor market led to increasing fines and longer sentences for ever-more minor crimes. With little exaggeration, Ernst Muller could write in 1703 that, “I saw today the most hideous of scenes, a man condemned for spitting on the sidewalk. He was dragged from the courtroom to the square outside, his contract openly bartered while the supervisors inspected him as though he were swine or cattle. Poor fellow! He is sold to a plantation-owner in Java. And there he was, calling to his wife and children as they put the shackles upon him and dragged him away… I am ashamed to live in such a country. I am ashamed of what we have become. I am ashamed I did nothing.”
The growing Reform movement polarized not just Proconsular elections but politics on all levels. The south German provinces, being newer to the Customs Union, were particularly repulsed by the institution, some going so far as to enact legislation preventing servitors from being brought into their territory. These laws were routinely overruled by the Proconsuls and Senate, most of whose members hailed from the older, northern parts of the Customs Union.
All of this was brought to a head by the celebrated escape and trial of Hans Lindemann in 1744.
With the conclusion of the Prussian War* (1742-1743), Austrian troops withdrew to their borders and the jobs of cleanup, repair and harvest could begin. The war had been of short duration but intense activity, and the damage was extensive. Huge numbers of laborers were therefore moved up the Elbe, and among them was Hans Lindemann.
Born in Denmark he emigrated to Bremen as a young man and started on a career as a clerk in a banking firm in Hamburg. Accused of embezzlement – and actually guilty of romancing the daughter of a senior partner – he was tried, convicted, sentenced and shipped off up the Elbe.
He managed to escape north of Dresden, and sympathetic people took him into the city and hid him. Not well enough, as it turns out, for he was discovered and dragged out of the house to the city jail. Before he could be taken away to rejoin his work detail, sympathetic citizens retained an attorney and forced a hearing, on the grounds that since Saxon law did not support servitude for debt, Lindemann became a free man when he crossed the border.
The argument failed; Senatorial statutes were found to apply and Lindemann was condemned. A popular subscription was raised to pay his fines and fees and he returned, quite shaken by his experience, to Denmark.
It is not coincidental that the rising resistance to penal servitude coincided with a great Protestant resurgence. Church attendance rose, missionaries were dispatched across the globe and every aspect of life came under increasing scrutiny. Some issues, like gambling and prostitution, were dispatched in the usual way – licensed, inspected, taxed, regulated – but penal servitude provoked a moral outrage.
The rise of Volhard Mindemann to the Chancellor’s office in 1749 gave the Reformers the political muscle to tackle the institution at its roots. But in typical fashion for Bremen politics, the question of penal servitude was referred to an independent commission and then the institution was so vigorously regulated and reformed that it lost all profitability and faded from view.
Was penal servitude, in fact, slavery? No less a historian than Abraham Lincoln (first Chancellor, Confederate Provinces of America, 1861-1869) had this to say in his landmark ‘History of the German Peoples’: “How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.”
And in his first inaugural address, he observed: "To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself, that 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,' and to preach therefrom that, 'In the sweat of other mans faces shalt thou eat bread,' to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity."
* Prussia broke away from Poland in June of 1742 and then allied with Austria. Courland (allied with Bremen) declared war on Prussia in November of 1742. After fierce battles in Erz, Sudeten, and Silesia, Bremen forces invaded Bohemia and Austria paid 300g for peace in July of 1743.