Highly unlikely, given he was a moderate who wanted to let the South up easy, and proposed stuff like the Ten Percent Plan. Plus most of the Unionists just wanted the South to agree to give up secession and reintegrate peacefully, and wouldn't have been keen on anything that might mess with that.
AHC: make at least one country pay reperations for slavery upon abolishing it
- Thread starter connacht4096
- Start date
He never even committed himself to giving them the vote. On April 11 1865 hehe expressed the view that "the very intelligent" and those who had served in the Union Army should be enfranchised,but even that was only a suggestion.
Als, in the EP he called upn freed Blacks to "labour faithfully for reasonable wages" when able to do so. He clearly saw the as farm workers, not as landowners.
IMO, part of the reason Lincoln has such a high reputation is that he was killed (and thus became a martyr) just as the war ended, before he could become associated with Reconstruction and its failures.
I’m picturing some of my friends whose ancestors were recently both slaves and slave owners being forced to pay reparations to themselves.
Ditto for FDR. And Washington was also lucky in dying while his Federalist Party was still at the peak of its success.
The converse applies to Benedict Arnold. If killed at Saratoga he would now be an American hero. Similarly, Marshal Petain would be a French hero had he died in1936. There's a lot to be said for leaving the stage at the right moment.
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Crazy Boris
Banned
Huh... that’s a good point, statistically pretty much everyone on earth is descended from at least a few slaves. BRB gonna go demand money from random foreign governments.
My great x27 grandfather was probably a slave owned by another one of my great x27 grandfathers therefore the government of...let’s say Portugal, owes me a million billion Euros.
If anyone from Lisbon is reading, I only take cash.
On a more serious and relevant note, ex-slaves becoming slave owners is also a big knot in the idea, Toussaint Louvertre actually owned Jean-Jacques Dessalines at one point, so how a situation like that would fit into this scenario is a puzzle to say the least. Would the ex-slave slaver lose their own right to compensation and have it transferred to their own slaves?
Maybe it only applies to Slaves who were held in bondage at the time Slavery was abolished and theirs some sort of cut off date imposed?
I mean, I think he would still be popular - Churchill is still pretty highly rated despite having a fairly lacklustre postwar premiership - it just wouldn’t quite be the godlike status he enjoys now (it probably also helped that his successor Andrew Johnson was such a shitshow).
so what if they bought their freedom during that time, aside from that add in to the fact that they became to be like a huge plantation and probably thousands if not only hundreds of slaves, which was the case at Haiti and in some parts of the Dixie south. Are they like still eligible for reparations?
The idea of reparations is obliviously not to right an individual ancient wrong.... but to alleviate current Systemic inequalities
the question is let's say the USA, to whom? To whom would these reparations go.
because probably there are some white settlers likely were captured and enslaved by the Indians.
What about the former slaves and freedmen and their descendants who became slave owners themselves, do they deserve it? They had ancestors or were slaves. Should they receive such reparations?
Meanwhile who should pay?
What about the people who did not participate in the practice. Should they pay too?
I mean like it would look like basically look like is confusion on who is like eligible for reparations and who is not
Best way in the US would be to make freedmen eligible for homesteading.
We didn't have the liquidity to offer fiat money and we didn't have anywhere near the specie at Fort Knox to properly compensate the freedmen for unpaid labor.
We didn't have the liquidity to offer fiat money and we didn't have anywhere near the specie at Fort Knox to properly compensate the freedmen for unpaid labor.
I have the impression that the current line of thought was that, the US at that time being largely an immigrant country, the best way to 'repair' slavery would be to just give the freedmen the same rights as regular immigrants had and let them start 'fresh' alongside them. Seeing how well most of the immigrant families did, just after one generation, the idea was that freedmen would work their way up from the bottom of the ladder just as quickly, or even faster since they had some advantages such as already speaking the language and knowing that land.
The backside of this was off course that just like with immigrants, it quickly became perceived that the people that did not advance socially, did so because some character flaw of theirs. In the popular mind that mostly came down to drinking, whoring or oyerwise 'giving in to their basest instincts'... This idea worked particularly well in the 'gilded age' as a way to explaining away why even the most disgusting immigrant was still better off than most African-Americans: it wasn't the color of their skin. It was all because of their 'lack of self control'. No fault on our behalf.... Reparations? Our fathers fought and died to free them. That's reparation enough.
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In one of those interminable debates about apologising for the sins of the ancestors the circumstance were that I would have to be apologising to myself.