Slave Reparations

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Opposition to Slave Reparations

Congressman John Conyers (D, Michigan) and the City Councils of Chicago and Washington agree, the descendants of slaves in the United States should not receive money to compensate them for the work their ancestors did as slaves. The Congressman and the City Councils are not alone apparently, an assortment of black activists, politicians and lobbying groups support the same cause. There are a number of reasons why no one should take this demand seriously.
First and most important, the debt, whatever it may have been, has
already been repaid. Abraham Lincoln made this clear in his Second Inaugural. There he argued that it would be just if the Civil War consumed all the wealth piled up by the slaves and if every drop of slave blood drawn by the slaveholder's whip was paid for by a drop
drawn by a sword. It took the South decades, perhaps almost a century, to recover the wealth lost in the war. The lives lost on both sides of course were never recovered. It was the sacrifices of those who fought and died in the war, Lincoln announced at Gettysburg, that would make possible a new birth of freedom in the United States. Every American, regardless of color, has benefited from that sacrifice.
If Lincoln's principled moral accounting does not suffice, we might
offer a more political argument against reparations. When those arguing for these payments ask the descendants of the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans and then sold them to European slave traders to make them, then Americans might consider listening to arguments about reparations. And if the descendants of Africans still in Africa involved in the slave trade paid reparations, then the U.S. government might consider doing the same. But in fact, we are already paying reparations in a way.
Affirmative action programs have been in place for over 30 years. They are very
expensive. Federal, state...