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Reparations

I had forgotten this bit of history. Lincoln gave slaveowners reparations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/opinion/when-slaveowners-got-reparations.html

Abraham Lincoln, however, was anxious to preserve his fragile alliance with loyal slaveholders. He had advocated abolition of slavery in Washington in 1849 as a congressman, to no avail. As president, he encouraged the border states to voluntarily end slavery. He chose Delaware as an ideal place to take the lead in late 1861. But it became clear that Union slaveowners could not be so easily persuaded. This reinforced the need to make congressional emancipation conditioned on compensating them, which put abolitionists in a bind.


They welcomed the end of slavery in the capital, but chafed at payments that validated the right to own property in the form of human beings. “If compensation is to be given at all,” the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said at the National Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia in 1833, “it should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who have plundered and abused them.”

Hard to believe people would disagree with this statement in 2019.

Lincoln appointed a board of commissioners to oversee the process of compensation, headed by the North Carolina abolitionist and New York Times reporter Daniel Reaves Goodloe. The board reviewed more than 1,000 slaveholders’ petitions to claim more than 3,000 enslaved people, close to the entirety of the dwindling population. Most of the petitioners received the full amount allowed. The largest individual payout was $18,000 for 69 slaves.


Although the District of Columbia Emancipation Act marked the only time the federal government would compensate slaveowners, there is a longer history of slaveowners requesting and receiving indemnification for the loss of their chattel.

$18,000 is about $450,000 in today's dollars.

To be sure, the major benefactors of slaveowner reparations within the Atlantic slave system were Europeans. When England abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies, it offered compensation to 46,000 slaveowners at the cost of around $26.2 million.


France went further by penalizing Haiti for the revolution that abolished slavery in its former colony St. Domingue. It levied a huge sum on the island, which crippled it in decades of debt. Former slaves were forced to pay indemnities to former slaveowners in exchange for official recognition as the first black independent nation-state in the Western Hemisphere.

The long and insistent coupling of compensation for slaveowners with emancipation is useful for consideration in current debates about reparations for the descendants of the enslaved. Critics and skeptics are fond of saying that enslaved people should have asked for recompense back then. African-Americans did precisely that, going back to the colonial era. They petitioned for “freedom dues,” they sued the estates of former masters for their unrequited toil, and they asked for land to restart their lives as free men and women. Relatively few of those efforts were successful.


An overwhelming majority of white people believed that slaveowners, not enslaved African-Americans, deserved recompense for the benevolence of manumission. The only “reward” that was widely supported was colonization: a trip “back to Africa.” The act allocated $100,000 for the voluntary removal of the newly freed people (at $100 per person) to go to Liberia or Haiti, which rarely happened.
 
https://www.newsweek.com/reparations-bill-oreilly-slavery-history-1445623

"Slavery reparations is a far-left favorite because it does a number of things," O'Reilly tweeted Monday. "It reinforces the radical belief that the United States was founded by racist white men who installed a system whereby white guys would run everything and blacks, women and others would be exploited ... it also defines poverty among minorities as not the fault of the individuals but of an unjust society that exists to this day."
 
The blinded to history because America fuck yeah! Is incredible. There’s a reason why slavery lasted as long as it did in this country, entire economies were built on it. It’s like the nostalgia of returning to the 1950s because manufacturing and the economy were killing it, just don’t peel back the curtain and see that the rest of the world had just be decimated by war.
 
https://www.newsweek.com/reparations-bill-oreilly-slavery-history-1445623

"Slavery reparations is a far-left favorite because it does a number of things," O'Reilly tweeted Monday. "It reinforces the radical belief that the United States was founded by racist white men who installed a system whereby white guys would run everything and blacks, women and others would be exploited ... it also defines poverty among minorities as not the fault of the individuals but of an unjust society that exists to this day."

"radical belief" is a funny way to describe incontrovertible, historical truth.
 
The blinded to history because America fuck yeah! Is incredible. There’s a reason why slavery lasted as long as it did in this country, entire economies were built on it. It’s like the nostalgia of returning to the 1950s because manufacturing and the economy were killing it, just don’t peel back the curtain and see that the rest of the world had just be decimated by war.

Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Also Thomas Jefferson: "Imma go rape my girl Sally real quick. I call her "my girl" because she's 15 and I own her."

Somehow this makes sense to some people.
 
https://www.newsweek.com/reparations-bill-oreilly-slavery-history-1445623

"Slavery reparations is a far-left favorite because it does a number of things," O'Reilly tweeted Monday. "It reinforces the radical belief that the United States was founded by racist white men who installed a system whereby white guys would run everything and blacks, women and others would be exploited ... it also defines poverty among minorities as not the fault of the individuals but of an unjust society that exists to this day."

He just did a better job explaining why they are necessary than anyone else probably could
 
He just did a better job explaining why they are necessary than anyone else probably could

Yea, and isn’t O’Reilley a self proclaimed expert historian? Writing all his books and whatnot? He should put as much effort into researching slavery as he has Lincoln, the Japanese empires, Jesus, Patton, and Kennedy.

Or, more likely, he’s pandering to his believers to make a buck and stay relevant.
 
Yea, and isn’t O’Reilley a self proclaimed expert historian? Writing all his books and whatnot? He should put as much effort into researching slavery as he has Lincoln, the Japanese empires, Jesus, Patton, and Kennedy.

Or, more likely, he’s pandering to his believers to make a buck and stay relevant.

I seriously doubt that O'Reilly actually wrote all of those books. Nearly all of them have Martin Dugard listed as co-author, and my guess is that Dugard is actually the ghostwriter of nearly all of those Killing ----- books. It's been a pretty common practice among celebrities and politicians for a long, long time - hire somebody to research and write a book for you, you write a foreword, put your name on the cover, and split the profits with the ghostwriter (with usually the celebrity taking the biggest chunk of the profits). Bill O'Reilly's name and promotion on his old Fox News show sells far more copies than Martin Dugard's name ever would, so both men profit. As for O'Reilly's historical "expertise" it's a joke. It is rather amusing that he perfectly described American history and government, and yet was either clueless enough to think that's simply leftist propaganda instead of the obvious way it really was, or as you suggested he's just saying some outrageous stuff to try and get back into the news. In this case it worked, although he is being roasted on twitter and elsewhere in social media.
 
Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Also Thomas Jefferson: "Imma go rape my girl Sally real quick. I call her "my girl" because she's 15 and I own her."

Somehow this makes sense to some people.

Makes sense to the "I'm a member of the party of Lincoln and don't you dare take down the Confederate flag!" crowd.
 
How to repair the damage. I don't think you understand what's going on here. When people get "fucked" by government policy, government often takes steps to repair it.

Buttermilk, I'm for studying potential solutions. The first step would be to stop monumentally fucking people.

Here's an example of the bigger problem from a seemingly unrelated article on farmers impacted by Trump's trade policy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...a32c65-c385-4052-8cd7-5cb4ef2119cc_story.html



So here is a man who has a family farm because the government allowed his ancestors to take over that land due the Homestead Act that de facto excluded former slaves. Yet this guy thinks the government owes him because he got screwed.

So we fast forward to 2019 and blame individuals for not inheriting multigenerational wealth.

So, you have no specific plan for reparations but favor studying the issue further. Fair enough.
 
So, you have no specific plan for reparations but favor studying the issue further. Fair enough.

That's what the hearing was about. Should we study the issue further? Yes or no.

Do you think we should study it further?
 
That's what the hearing was about. Should we study the issue further? Yes or no.

Do you think we should study it further?

I don't advocate studying it further, but I don't oppose doing so. I am skeptical that any proposal coming out of such a study will be realistic.
 
https://www.newsweek.com/reparations-bill-oreilly-slavery-history-1445623

"Slavery reparations is a far-left favorite because it does a number of things," O'Reilly tweeted Monday. "It reinforces the radical belief that the United States was founded by racist white men who installed a system whereby white guys would run everything and blacks, women and others would be exploited ... it also defines poverty among minorities as not the fault of the individuals but of an unjust society that exists to this day."

You switch radical for factual and that statement is spot on.
 
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