12 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
The extent to which slave secretaries and agents acted for their masters is shown very clearly in the receipts found in the house of Caecillius Jucundus at Pompei [1] .
That the State should possess slaves is not surprising; war, after all, was the affair of the State and the captive might well be Stateproperty. What is surprising is the remarkable use made of public slaves under the Empire and the extraordinary social position occupied by them....
“ ‘Public slave’ came to mean before the Empire a slave of the State employed in its many offices, and the term implied a given occupation and often social position. The work of slaves of the State, slaves of the townships, and slaves of Caesar comprises much of what would now fall to parts of the higher and the whole of the lower branches of the civil services and of the servants of Municipal Corporations, working both with head and hands.... In the subordinate levels (of the Treasury) there worked numbers of clerks and financial officers, all freedmen and slaves. The business dealt with must have been of vast range.... The Mint.... the immediate head was a knight, in charge of the minting processes.... a freedman was placed; under him served freedmen and slaves.... From one branch of State service, at any rate, slaves were rigorously excluded, except on one or two occasions of exceptional stress. They were not allowed to fight in the Army because not thought worthy of honour. Doubtless other motives were present also; it would be dangerous experiment to train too many slaves systematically in the use of Arms. If, however, slaves served rarely in the fighting line, they are regularly to be found in great numbers behind it employed as servants, and in the commissariat and transport. In the fleet slaves were common enough [2] .”
II
Let us turn to the de facto position of the Negro in the United States during the period in which he was slave in the eye of the law. Here are some facts [3] which shed a good deal of light on his position:
“Lafayette himself had observed that white and black seamen and soldiers had fought and messed together in the Revolution without bitter difference. Down in Granville County, North Carolina, a full blooded Negro, John Chavis, educated in Princeton University, was conducting a private school for white students and was a licentiate
1 Slavery in the Roman Empire, p. 106.
2 Ibid., pp. 130-147.
3 Charles C. Johnson’s ‘The Negro in American Civilization’.