A Cloud of Witnesses

In 1853, British Quaker and abolitionist Wilson Armistead (1819–1868) published a brief work entitled A “Cloud of Witnesses” Against Slavery and Oppression, which, as its title suggested, was less a treatise than a sourcebook intended for use by his fellow abolitionists in their campaign against slavery. Marshalling quotations from authorities ranging from Christ to Homer to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Armistead's source-book included passages from two early medi eval hagio graphies: the vitae of two early sixth-century Gallo-Roman contemporaries, Bishops Caesarius of Arles and Remigius of Rheims. As early medi eval historians are well aware, neither of these important texts is a straightforward, purely factual bio graphy of its dedicatee. Moreover, while the Vita Caesarii was written by the subject's ecclesiastical colleagues within a decade of his death, the Vita Remigii was written centuries after Remigius's death by Bishop Hincmar of Rheims. But as is the case with his quotations from other “witnesses,” Armistead himself provided no introduction or contextualization, let alone critical analysis, for either vita excerpt. Their authority as “witnesses” is taken for granted. Both quoted passages deal with a common theme: the Church's redemption of captives destined for unfreedom. In the case of the Vita Caesarii, the passage describes the saint's nour-ishment of prisoners in the aftermath of the siege of Arles (507–508), and his use of the wealth of his church to pay their ransom. The Vita Remigii passage, in turn, relates Remigius's (successful) intervention with Clovis I to request of the king that he help to facilitate the redemption of captives, even using his personal wealth to do so.

Armistead's hope that other abolitionists might be able to profit from his research was soon realized. Only two years after the publication of A Cloud of Witnesses, Massachusetts abolitionist Edward Coit Rogers published Letters On Slavery: Addressed to the Pro-Slavery Men of America (1855), which quotes the same hagiographical passages excerpted by Armistead. Unlike Armistead, however, Rogers subsumed this cited evidence within a broader discussion of “the common right of all men” that he argued was “universal, equal, opposed to the assumed right of the few.” This common right, Rogers asserted, had once been enshrined in Roman law, but was allowed to decay, and when the empire “had become rotten with this sin [of slavery], the barbarians came forth and dragged her carcase [sic] to the pit.”