During the years Slaves were shipped across the Atlantic to the new world, approximately 10.7 million enslaved people made it to the New World. About 388,000 of those came to the US. So the US colonies nor the Nation was the major user of slaves trade. In fact, it was the first nation to join with Great Britain in outlawing the slave trade. However, this does not mean the US did not have some Slave traders. AT the start of the US Civil war, about 3.5 million slaves existed in the US, about 2.5 million in the Confederacy and another million in the US. AT that time the market value of a slave was around $300 on average. The population of the United States in 1860 was 35 million. That would put the total value of all the slave at about $30 per person in the United state. While the War was not begun over slavery, it appears that is all we can remember, but it was actually the 13th amendment to put and end to Slavery. This amendment past in Congress very quickly and was Ratified quick by 27 of the 36 states. Oregon did not join in to ratify, hanging back until it voted yes post ratification. Now what if the Nation had been lead by a deal maker? $30 bucks per person to free the slaves seems like a hell of a deal! The US government ended up spending $178 per person pursuing the War and the South probably more than that. Plus they killed damn near a million people to boot. I can find no references in history where a deal to buy the Slaves freedom was every attempted. I don't think Lincoln thought that way, he did not even want to admit he had taken the Nation to war, referring to it as an insurrection.
I don't think it was that simple. I've read a bunch on Henry Clay, and it seems that his plans as a leading member of Congress to gradually emancipate the slaves (even working on the American Colonization Society to send them as freemen elsewhere) were continually rebuffed by southerners due in large part to the perceived loss of property value and the need for slave labor on the southern plantations to maintain the economy. It wasn't until after industrialization post-reconstruction that the South started to come back at all economically, and some might say it never did, by-and-large, until the Depression and the TVA and expansion of military bases in the south. Long story short, I think that the southern caucus would've rejected a payment of $30 a head to abolish slavery. The intelligent ones were already expanded into other businesses, and those entrenched in slavery as an economic model likely weren't going to relent for $30/head.
You are correct, in that many wanted slavery not just to be ended but the slaves move else where. Liberia was the most often target. But There were no deal makers, no one facing reality of what war would mean. Lincoln was one of those that favored Liberia. Had he not been killed, I suppose the effort would have begun. The people were screwed with such brilliant minds in charge. Oh, not $30 a head, $300. costing $30/ person in the general population.
Slavery in the Americas was primarily a British atrocity (90% of all slaves), a continuance and expansion of British barbarism into the New World. The first Africans forced to work in the New World left from Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not from Africa. The first slave voyage direct from Africa to the Americas probably sailed in 1526. The volume of slaves carried off from Africa reached thirty thousand per year in the 1690s and eighty-five thousand per year a century later. More than eight out of ten Africans forced into the slave trade made their journeys in the century and a half after 1700. By 1820, nearly four Africans for every one European had crossed the Atlantic. About four out of every five females that traversed the Atlantic were from Africa. The majority of enslaved Africans were brought to British North America between 1720 and 1780. The decade 1821 to 1830 still saw over 80,000 people a year leaving Africa in slave ships. Well over a million more – one tenth of the volume carried off in the slave trade era – followed within the next twenty years. Africans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola. Africans carried to North America, including the Caribbean, left from mainly West Africa. Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. After The USA was born, Americans weaned themselves of the British African slave trade with Congress banning it in 1808, and America started a domestic slave trade simply by treating slaves better so they didn't die off, and by balancing the sexes so they would breed new generations of slaves. US SLAVERY COMPARED TO SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS American plantations were dwarfed by those in the West Indies. In the Caribbean, slaves were held on much larger units, with many plantations holding 150 slaves or more. In the American South, in contrast, only one slaveholder held as many as a thousand slaves, and just 125 had over 250 slaves. In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of US slaves was about the same as that of Jamaican slaves, the fertility rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States. US slaves were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of slaves in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US slaves were third-, fourth-, or fifth generation Americans. Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other slave society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the slave population for a more than a century and a half. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/historical-context-facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery
Yes, the proposals of the day always left the owner with the loss. Where as $300/head probably fixes the deal. Much much cheaper than the cost of war.
I don’t think this is the reparations that are warranted. Why don’t we just buy off ISIS? North Korea?
We did buy off ISIS in the W Bush years. We probably could (and maybe should?) buy off North Korea, too. We bought off Iran in the Obama years, no?
The reparations that need to be paid are to the slaves and descendants of those slaves (since the actual slaves are now long dead). For 1/5th of what Obama borrowed, a more than fair reparations settlement could have been paid, and EVERYONE would be better off for it from that day forward. Of course there would be a lot of push back from the expected sources, but fuck 'em.
Reparations is just hush money. Here’s some cash, now stop whining about your lot in life. It is money given as a lie, accepted by liars.
Well you can explain it to me, but I can't see a comparable deal with ISIS nor North Korea. But back when there were slaves owned as property, buying them seems like a preferable deal to war. You can say they should not have be owned, but, they were. Spreading the cost over 35 million people vs placing the burden on 300,000 slave owners by warfare seems like a no brainer. But the Lincoln and the Nation did it. Spending 6 times as much money and killing 2.8 percent of the population to free 2.5 million slave in the South. Lincoln free another million in the North with his proclamation, but it only became legal with the 13th amendment.
I think this view would need much more clarification. Who get paid and by who? It has been over 150 years now since the Slaves were freed by the 13th amendment. While warfare, the civil war, may not have been the only way to get there, it was the road taken, and costly it was. The people paid dearly for this to happen, in treasure and lives. The most costly war in terms of lives in US history. At the time, the most costly in the world in money. The US was the first Nation in the world where the government spent over one billion dollars in a year while fighting this war. Since then, some 75 million people have immigrated to the US, probably half of them in the last 60 years from countries to the south of the US. Some, if not many of these people are decedents of former slaves in other countries. This total, is over twice the total population of the country at the close of the Slavery years. So who gets paid? Then when you pick the payers, you know you are just spreading the cost, you have no way of placing the burden on those that actually owe. There were only 300,000 of them at the close of this period. And more than a few owners were black people. One of the largest in terms of slave owned was a black person in Louisiana. While it does seem enticing to do it anyway, just to make peace and create a loving environment for us all to live in harmony, I think it would fail to do any of this hope. I see noway the complaints ever stop. The agitators would churn for more, the whiners never count their blessings, and the greedy always want more. Buying off Iran has no hope either.
20 acres and a mule. Equal pay for each descendant. In a weak sense, it is "hush" money. After reparations are paid, there's no amount of complaining that carries much weight.
The concept is great. The problem is that some would want your 20 acres, and demand that you no longer have the right to twenty acres. Then factor in the lefts politicization of that situation? Doomed, my friend.
Well, I suppose we do have enough federal lands about to go ahead with the plan. God it will be squabble over where they start carving out those twenty acre plots though! But... Make it so!
20 acres and a mule is what they were promised in the 1860s, but was never delivered. Compounded inflation over 150 years adds up to a lot more than 20 acres and a mule. Just pay them cash and move on. We paid the Japanese who were illegally imprisoned by FDR during the war. Only by being made whole can any of you complain about them speaking up or out.
