Reparations now!

[Perd Hapley]

Reparations were paid in full at Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg and a thousand other places.

If that's true, why the promise of 40 acres and a mule? Men gave their lives, and that should be appreciated, but even right after the war, it was still understood that those sacrifices couldn't actually repay the slaves for years, or generations, of mistreatment and stolen labor.

Of course, we can't do it now, either, since those generations are long gone.

In any case, can people please quit trotting out that flippant answer about the dead soldiers? Please? That's not reparations.

[zahc]

Not to mention the over fixation on the institution of slavery while disregarding other institutions that enslave in other ways. Abolitionists failed to check the marginal analysis... slavery was horrible, but little was done to consider what would replace slavery and whether or how much the lot of the enslaved would improve. And that's because for many abolitionists, the enslaved weren't actually their main concern. Their concern was wages and the influence thereon by the existence of slavery.

[Pb]

Slavery was unfortunately legal in the early USA and the CSA.  No repartitions are owed for that reason.

I do remember something interesting local.  My family toured a very old plantation home (1820's era I think- not a mansion, just a medium small house) some years ago.  It was still in the original family, and we met the current owner... and a black man who was a descendant of some of the slaves from the plantation.  The owner mentioned that when the slaves were freed after the war, their former master gave them a plot of land... where many of their descendants still live. I guess that was repartitions of a sort.