Blacks Rally for Slave Reparations

[Azeron]

End welfare, end the reperations movement

[MKSheppard]

My point is, that most (atleast 75%) were destroyed and does that were left, well if they're money didn't evaporate with the Confederacy, had very little and were just a poor as the freed black. Ironic, yes?

And even in the areas not touched by the fighting, the owners took a SEVERE
financial loss.

Let's take a look at Brazoria County, Texas which got through the
war pretty much untouched.



Emancipation represented an average loss to each slave
holder in the county of nearly $12,000.

Since over one-half of the county's heads of household were
slave owners, these losses represented a serious setback to the
local economy. Furthermore, falling land prices also severely affected
the county. Before the war the ten wealthiest citizens held fortunes
totaling $4,211,788; by 1870 their wealth had declined 60 percent!

And this was in a area that was barely touched by the fighting!

[TALCE]

I think that Wong, in his hasty generalization that because there are plantaion houses still in the South, is forgetting that much of the south WAS devastated during the Civil War. (Just like there are still Castles and Mansions in Europe despite its numerous devastating wars.) He seems to be forgetting Sherman's March to the Sea where he destroyed almost everything in a 50 mile wide path through Georgia. In addition to this, desvastation does not nessecarily mean desvastation by enemy action. The economy and resources of the South were destroyed by a vain attempt to keep up with the Northern war effort and to support the large and deep campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia.

[MKSheppard]

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/ ... ntrill.htm


William Clarke Quantrill

(1837-1865)

Leader of perhaps the most savage fighting unit in the Civil War, William Quantrill developed a style of guerrilla warfare that terrorized civilians and soldiers alike. Quantrill was born in 1837 in Ohio, but little is known of his early life. It appears that after being a schoolteacher for several years, he travelled to Utah in 1858 with an army wagon train and there made his living as a gambler, using the alias of Charles Hart. After a year, he moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he was again a schoolteacher from 1859 to 1860. But his past and predisposition soon caught up with him and, wanted for murder and horse theft, Quantrill fled to Missouri in late 1860.

Quantrill entered the Civil War on the Confederate side with enthusiasm. By late 1861, he was the leader of Quantrill's Raiders, a small force of no more than a dozen men who harassed Union soldiers and sympathizers along the Kansas-Missouri border and often clashed with Jayhawkers, the pro-Union guerrilla bands that reversed Quantrill's tactics by staging raids from Kansas into Missouri. Union forces soon declared him an outlaw, and the Confederacy officially made him a captain. To his supporters in Missouri, he was a dashing, free-spirited hero.

The climax of Quantrill's guerilla career came on August 21, 1863, when he led a force of 450 raiders into Lawrence, Kansas, a stronghold of pro-Union support and the home of Senator James H. Lane, whose leading role in the struggle for free-soil in Kansas had made him a public enemy to pro-slavery forces in Missouri. Lane managed to escape, racing through a cornfield in his nightshirt, but Quantrill and his men killed 183 men and boys, dragging some from their homes to murder them in front of their families, and set the torch to much of the city.

The Lawrence Massacre led to swift retribution, as Union troops forced the residents of four Missouri border counties onto the open prairie while Jayhawkers looted and burned everything they left behind. Quantrill and his raiders took part in the Confederate retaliation for this atrocity, but when Union forces drove the Confederates back, Quantrill fled to Texas. His guerrilla band broke up into several smaller units, including one headed by his vicious lieutenant, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, known for wearing a necklace of Yankee scalps into battle. Quantrill himself was eventually killed on a raid into Kentucky in 1865.

Even after his death, Quantrill and his followers remained almost folk heroes to their supporters in Missouri, and something of this celebrity later rubbed off on several ex-Raiders -- the James brothers, Frank and Jesse, and the Younger brothers, Cole and Jim -- who went on in the late 1860's to apply Quantrill's hit-and-run tactics to bank and train robbery, building on his legacy of bloodshed a mythology of the Western outlaw that remains fixed in the popular imagination.

[Darth Wong]

Oooh, filthy rich slave-owners lost a big chunk of their dirty money; did they lose all of it? Was there none left to give to their descendants?

Who cares anyway? For the second time, if there's no money left, fine. Litigants can't get what doesn't exist, and justice has been served because no one's inherited any dirty slave-money. However, if there is money left, that's even better; litigants get some dirty money back. Either way, the basic idea is sound, so your "rebuttals" are red herrings. They fail to poke a hole in the basic concept, which is that dirty money should be returned if at all possible.

[Shadow WarChief]

Legally: Not a cent should paid. Ex post facto and all that...

Morally: The sins of the father die with the father. I will be dead before I pay for the transgressions of my ancestors...oh wait. Screw that. I will be dead before I pay for the transgressions of OTHER people's ancestors. My earliest ancestor (paternal grandfather) didn't even come to the united states until the 1920's. And because he was Irish, he had as hard a time in finding a job as a black-man did.


And as for slavery reparations, let's do some all-enlightening math.

British slavery

1650-1830's

Total: 180 years of slavery

In 1776, the african slave trade made up more than 1/4 of all British trade.


French Slavery

1650-1783

Total: 133 years of slavery



Portuguese and Spanish Slavery

Comparitively as long.



Now then, let's look at American Slavery


1776-1865

Total: 89 years of slavery





So as you can see, the British had slavery more than twice as long as the United States, yet unless my ear pointing east has gone deaf, there's no one in the UK whining about reparations.

Am I the only here that thinks this kind of convinient forgetfullness blows?

[Darth Wong]

Morally: The sins of the father die with the father. I will be dead before I pay for the transgressions of my ancestors...oh wait. Screw that. I will be dead before I pay for the transgressions of OTHER people's ancestors. My earliest ancestor (paternal grandfather) didn't even come to the united states until the 1920's. And because he was Irish, he had as hard a time in finding a job as a black-man did.

Strawman. No one is asking anyone to pay for the sins of their fathers. They are only asking them to return dirty money that their fathers gave them.

If your father was a drug dealer and gave you 10 million dollars before he died, would you react with moral indignation if someone suggested you didn't deserve to have it? No one's putting you in jail for his crimes; just pointing out that the money isn't really yours, and maybe you should go and get a fucking job like everyone else, so you don't have to cry poverty if you don't get your dirty-money inheritance.

As for the bit about how Americans weren't the only slavers, congratulations for trying to change the subject yet again. What makes you think that I would think any differently if any proceeds from slavery could be directly traced to individual inheritants in Britain?

[Shadow WarChief]

Strawman. No one is asking anyone to pay for the sins of their fathers. They are only asking them to return dirty money that their fathers gave them.

It would be a strawman if I was replying to your version of reparations: Descendants of slave owners giving the amount of slave money earned back to slaves.





I was not.





I'd composed the post you replied to during your 21 hour gap between your post before the one before my first and your last Admiral Kanos post.



I thought that considering the thread had turned from reparations to damage the south sustained I didn't think that my post would be associated in the exchanges between you, MKSheppard, Azeron etc.

Apparently, I was wrong.



The quote in the first post is what I intended for my post to be a reply to

"It seems that America owes black people"

Not descendants of slave owners owing slave descendants, but all american non-blacks owing blacks

I suppose I should have been a bit more explicit as to which post I was replying to..

[Smiling Bandit]

Look, Wong, I know one poster didn't act very maturely, but honestly, you are just being stubborn and refusing to see the point. We have supplied historical record, graphs, and anecdotes descrbing the extent of the damage. You refuse to understand that:

THERE IS NO MONEY!

Buildings were left. Land was left (both often with every improvement and thing of value stripped from them), but by and large all wealth evaporated. You could search for years and not find a single penny that went through the Civil war. Additionally, the South was much less of a cash economy - most of the big plantation owners, who lost their fortunes anyway, didn't have money, but rather crops, land, and slaves. The first couldn't be sold, the second was often ruined or rendered moot, and last was freed. So yes, they pretty much paid. And just to ice the cake, southern cash was largely in the form of paper currency. This had lost its value during the conflict and simply vanished thereafter. Gold lost much of its value, more or less because the Union won (its complicated economics, and I don't really get it, but apparently Union defeats raised the price of Gold). Specie was drained out of society to pay for foriegn war meterials and ships.

The practicality factor is another flaw. Inheritance doesn't simply go to one person. Plus, trying to seperate exactly what prperties went to whom and when, whether it was before or after the war, and so forth... well, its just not possible. Try auditing 50% (or more) or Americans. Now include an audit f all their ancestors. Its just not possible.And then you have to decide what your gonna do with the money anyway. The explicit purpose of the taking of it is to give, in some way, shape, or form, to blacks. This runs into all sorts of problems anyway.

Aside from which, your idea would be illegal and against the Constitution. Expost Facto laws and all that. Besides, I'm sure you have an ancestor somewhere that was a bandit or a theif or a slaveowner. Should you have to search your family tree and give some cash to someone? Who gets it? It may seem odd, yet this is still but a miniature version of your point.

[Master of Ossus]

Mike, at the risk of an Imperial Smack Down (TM), don't you think that this is essentially demanding payment from the Western world for taking the lead in attempting to ban slavery globally? Mike, the fact is that every single culture in the world has had slavery in one form or another, until these last few generations when Europe and America have taken to the warpath against slavery. Granted, slavery is terrible (understatement). But I think it is enought that the Americans and Europeans recognized their mistakes and took steps to try and prevent it from recurring. Now, slavery does still exist in the world, but the fact is that the last 200-300 years' Western civilizations were the first cultures in history to make any effort to attempt to remove slavery from the world.

I think you are over-simplifying the issue. I cannot really disagree with either side on this, because I think they are both right to a large extent. This is really too complicated for me to decide, as both sides obviously bring up relevent points, but I also find it difficult to agree completely with either side.

[Darth Wong]

Mike, at the risk of an Imperial Smack Down (TM), don't you think that this is essentially demanding payment from the Western world for taking the lead in attempting to ban slavery globally?

No. Nobody in the Western World is being asked to pay a red cent, unless they have assets which can be traced directly to slavery proceeds. If (as many keep insisting), there is nobody in America who can trace any such assets, then I guess there's no money to be had and the issue is moot. What is so damned offensive or unfair about that?

[Master of Ossus]

Mike, at the risk of an Imperial Smack Down (TM), don't you think that this is essentially demanding payment from the Western world for taking the lead in attempting to ban slavery globally?

No. Nobody in the Western World is being asked to pay a red cent, unless they have assets which can be traced directly to slavery proceeds. If (as many keep insisting), there is nobody in America who can trace any such assets, then I guess there's no money to be had and the issue is moot. What is so damned offensive or unfair about that?

Not alot. It is interesting. This settlement would be very analogous for American Indian, or Palestinian people. When I was living in Israel, I met a Palestinian who showed me a house he had once lived in. It had been occupied for 30+years by an Israeli couple, who had then sold it to another Israeli family, who had sold it to a third family. He told me that it was his house, which brings up the question of whose house it actually is.

[Raptor 597]

Oooh, filthy rich slave-owners lost a big chunk of their dirty money; did they lose all of it? Was there none left to give to their descendants?

Who cares anyway? For the second time, if there's no money left, fine. Litigants can't get what doesn't exist, and justice has been served because no one's inherited any dirty slave-money. However, if there is money left, that's even better; litigants get some dirty money back. Either way, the basic idea is sound, so your "rebuttals" are red herrings. They fail to poke a hole in the basic concept, which is that dirty money should be returned if at all possible.

Mr. Wong, not just filthly rich slave owners, but hard working people that didn't own slaves. The nonslave owners took a hit too, juust indirectly, such their crops going down, losing money, etc. not just some slaveowners.

[beyond hope]

Has anyone pointed out to this bunch that by petitioning for government reparations they (as taxpayers) are basically picking their own pockets?

Nevermind... that's going to work about as well as reasoning with a Pentehostiles.

[Martin Blank]

Has anyone pointed out to this bunch that by petitioning for government reparations they (as taxpayers) are basically picking their own pockets?

Actually, I've seen mention by some that government reparations should include tax breaks so that those receiving money wouldn't have to pay it back, paving the way for tax hikes to those not receiving money. I really don't think this would stand the test of even the most liberal of Supreme Courts. Even lawsuits based on inherited monies probably would be dismissed by the courts as being too burdensome to both the defendants and to the court system.

I heard someone call up on a talk radio show a few weeks ago, and it let me know to what extremes ignorance pervades America over this issue. He was black, and seemed to have at least a basic grasp of the issue, until he stated a demand that part of the United States be blocked off as a "black nation", and demanded a payment of $999 trillion in gold and $999 trillion in silver so that this nation could set up a proper society. He refused to listen to the host when told that the sheer quantities don't even exist on the planet, blaming it on a coverup by the white man. He may have been pulling the host's leg, but he sounded damned serious to me.

[Smiling Bandit]

No. Nobody in the Western World is being asked to pay a red cent, unless they have assets which can be traced directly to slavery proceeds. If (as many keep insisting), there is nobody in America who can trace any such assets, then I guess there's no money to be had and the issue is moot. What is so damned offensive or unfair about that?

BUT leaving aside the morality of the issue (which i don't agree with) the sheer impracticality of your idea boggles my mind. One does not simply walk into Mordor... I mean look up some old tax returns. Nobody knows the intimate financial details of millions of branching families over the past 200 years. Records are lost, if they ever existed or were written down. Families break up, move, and combine into one.

And people aren't just going to roll over and die for your initiative (and I'd think less of them if they did). You thik this will A) Get past the Constitution, B) Get past the Courts, C) Get past Congress, D) Get past the Pres., E) Get past the American People, and F) Produce any actual benefit to anyone, ever, aside from some petty beurocrats? If so, then your optimism stretches my imagination.

Now getting back to the issue of morality and fairness, one must consider that while ideas of morality and virtue can change somewhat over time, legal ideals must also be taken into account. And no one can be punished, legally, in the United States, without having commited a crime or civil error. Since slavery was legal, whatever its moral virtue or lack thereof, no one can legally (and, dare I say it, morally) take from anyone's descendants in America for slavery reparations from their personal monies. "From public monies" is a slightly different matter, but not one I am considereing in this section. The idea that people can be punished by your vision of ex-post-facto guilt is a dangerous and disgusting one. Should (by some freakish anomaly not too different than the idea that all of America would be free of slavery by 1866) society decide that going to college was punishable by a huge fine, I could not be legally, Constitutionally guilty in a court of law - no matter what any one judge or jury or Congress said - of breaking such a law PRIOR to its enactment.

And if I may continue with this line of thought, your idea in this is not only disgustingly offensive to my basic understanding of law, morality, and society, that I simply cannot comprehend how you live in a society based on Rule of Law. I just don't get it.

[GREAHSIAM]

Gee, isn"t it a shame that working for a living is sooo demeaning???. I never owned slaves and I'm pretty sure that none of my family ever owned any. Should I sue all Italians because the Romans had occupied England 1700 years ago?. I no doubt have some Roman ancestory. Shall I sue England because they controlled Ireland and Wales??. Shall I sue the British Royal Family becase my ancestors were not members of the aristocracy?.
I have black friends. Most are hard-working members of society. Some just park on their butt, live on welfare, pump out a baby every nine months and collect money from the people who work for a living. then they scream "YOU HATE ME BECAUSE I'M BLACK". Fine. Dandy. If it's so bad here in horrible racist America, then what's keeping you here?. Why don't you move to "Mother Africa"?.
I am certainly not rolling in money. I have a job I hate at a company I have little but comptent for. But I am studing and learning for a career in financial services. Meanwhile I am working hard at my present employment and paying all my bills without any taxpayer hand-outs.
Time for me to sign-out and haul my carcass to work (heavy sigh).
Be most excellent to each other.

[THEHOOLIGANJEDI]

AS a black american I just laughed. Nothing can make up for what happened all those years ago, Sure it should have never happend, but what will a pay check do now? I don't hear INstanbul wanting Mongolia to pay up for Ghangis Khan kicking their asses 1000 years ago. The best thing to do is to remember all the events that happened and never forget what it did to America and all ots people.

I'll agree totally, as a Black man myself, I think that we shouldn't be demanding and expecting reparations, but trying to get ourselves out of this rut that the majority of us have been. While I'm mixed on the subject, the Black community must come together and fight for thing that are far more important than reparations, their still plenty of fight for black that have to be fought but no one is fighting them. Some of them are just too worried about lining their pockets with money.

[beyond hope]

Okay, let's look at the problem of some form of public reparations. There are two problems with it: the first is "who pays?" If the answer is "everyone except the descendants of slaves" then you have the problem of millions of americans who either immigrated after slavery was abolished or else are descended from those who immigrated after abolition. Are they to be held accountable for something that was abolished before their ancestors (or they personally) moved here? If not, then you have the tricky problem of trying to identify who immigrated after abolition and who didn't. You'd also have the problem of what to do with people where one side of the family was here before abolition and the other half was not.

The other half of the equation is who gets paid. Is the only criterion skin color? In that case, would a black immigrant who just arrived last year in this country get reparations? Also, what would you do with individuals who are mixed-race? How "black" would you have to be to collect reparations, and how would a fair percentage be determined?

I see this issue as being more of a rallying point for extremists than a serious cause. There is no way you can come up with a workable plan for government reparations: the lawsuits would start flying before the ink was dry and tie it up for years, maybe even decades. This is why every time the issue has been raised in Congress, it never makes it out of committee. In fact, as a political football it's perfect: if you're a black extremist, you can milk the issue for the rest of your life because it'll never happen. Likewise, as a sheet-draped bigot you can point to it and claim it's just one more way that the "poor persecuted white christian" is under attack.