Proper and Justified Reparations Have Yet to be Acknowledged and/or Discussed

By Sidney Secular

October 21, 2023

We hopelessly – and helplessly – keep trying to prop up the Blacks in this country. They won’t help themselves except in ways that are criminal and destructive. Socially and culturally, we’ve held them in our laps and spoon fed them in an attempt to bring them from barbarism to refinement but these great efforts have only resulted in unspeakable levels – and types – of crime coupled with a descent of our once great culture into something more appropriate to a Third World enclave! Our efforts have resulted in the descent of the many rather than the rise of the few!

On top of that, and to further bankrupt us, the program has metastasized into a new proposal to offer to the descendants of White Union soldiers who died allegedly “fighting to emancipate Black slaves,” reparations as well. Considering that the death count in that war was the highest in any American war, the thought of even attempting such a thing is patent insanity! Furthermore, as we who have a passable knowledge of history know, the “Civil War” was not fought for that purpose! President Lincoln – among many others – said so on the record. The immediate cause of the war at least on the part of the Cotton States was to repel an invasion by the Federal Government upon those States’ secession from the Union. The upper South including Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina, only joined the Confederacy in response to the fate of their sister States and the illegality – actually treason – of a federal invasion and other unconstitutional “war measures” the federal government – identifying itself as “the Union” – was taking, measures that these States knew could soon be applied to themselves.

Most White soldiers didn’t give a farthing for Blacks and remember, many so-called “Union” (non-Southern) States had black codes forbidding entrance by Blacks into those States. Lincoln himself had made it clear that the new territories and States were for the White man, not the Black. As a result, many Northern states had a policy of preventing Blacks from entering, never mind settling, in their states. One of the proofs of this is the fact that the famous underground railroad had its terminus in Canada, thus bypassing the Northern tier of our states. Those promoting the emancipation of Black slaves fully expected them to remain in the south upon emancipation so they wouldn’t have to deal with them. Indeed, Black movement north did not occur until the labor shortages produced by World War I, a full half century after Appomattox.

It must be remembered that slavery was a matter of guaranteeing a supply of labor to farmers and planters in the South. The northern states were receiving increasing numbers of foreign immigrants at that point in time, immigrants who could support the advancing industrialization of the North. The South, on the other hand was an agrarian society and the heavy laborious work in farming, especially in the heat of those states, was performed most successfully by black slaves. Northern businessmen considered slavery unprofitable because the slave, as property, was required by law to be cared for, something not required of the poor wage slave in the North. If a slave sickened, his master was required by law to have him treated. If a mine or mill worker sickened, there were many more starving whites to take his place. Nonetheless, the produce of the South provided money for the Federal Government to spend that the products of the North did not. This matter was addressed in 1828, three decades before the Cotton States seceded. Missouri Senator Thomas H. Benton speaking on the floor of the Senate stated:

“Before the (American) revolution [the South] was the seat of wealth … Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in regions north of the Potomac: and this in the face of the fact, that the South, … has exported produce, since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact? … Under Federal legislation, the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue …Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of Government expenditures. That expenditure flows…northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this!”

Of course, the so-called “Civil War” (it wasn’t!) was won by the more powerful and numerous Union and the condition of the former slaves became a great burden mostly to the South, but surely to the entire nation up until today. For a time in the beginning of the 20^th century, the matter seemed to be getting less problematic as Black entertainers and businessmen started to carve a place for those for whom slavery had been a history. However, when the Communists in Europe decided that race relations was an Achille’s heel for America, the way was paved for our current racial extravaganza including the concept of reparations for the descendants of slaves. Providing such reparations can only be presented as a moral obligation, because there is no legal or constitutional justification for any such act. But before we get into the overwhelming impracticality, unfairness and cost of attempting to carry out such a project, let us look at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in which the issue of slavery was considered.

First, let us acknowledge that the issue was considered, not as a moral matter but as a matter of representation in the coming new Republic. The Southern States (and remember, all the States at that time had slavery and not just the South) were far less populated than the Middle and Northern States – and the head count was essential to maintain any power in a government of all the States. The rural South needed to count its slaves in order to keep pace with the more heavily populated middle and northern States. As a result, the issue of slavery became a matter of “politics” rather than morality. Eventually, a compromise was reached in which slaves were considered, for the sake of population as three-fifths of a person. However, they were mentioned as persons and not property in the Constitution, a fact that led to that document being able to end slavery itself with the second 13^th Amendment (the first 13^th Amendment being the Corwin Amendment considered just prior to the War, that put slavery into the Constitution in perpetuity).

Yet in our debauched state of giving in to whomever screams the loudest and where those with standards will not take a stand or will wimp out against those who have none, a matter characteristic of the blue jurisdictions, it naturally was the state of California and its most debauched city (San Francisco) that produced the most headstrong of the far-left lefties willing to dive headlong into financial and social waters 6 inches deep. They are prone to give consideration to anything fanciful that promotes their foolish fancies. Thus, they are serious about enacting a senseless scheme of undeserved reparations for Blacks that can only further bankrupt public entities to the point at which any hope of fiscal recovery or financial salvation is lost. Furthermore, it will give other non-White groups ideas following the same script of trying to beat an already dead horse into a semblance of life. Another article in this newsletter goes into the details of this ridiculously impossible and truly racist scheme, but in this article we are proposing for consideration of our readers an alternative to this massive idiocy.

It is important to recognize that until the eve of the “Civil War,” slaves were viewed as chattel (property) and thus legally held in the states where slavery existed including some Northern states. That being the case, the Lincoln administration recognized the federal government’s constitutional and moral obligation to compensate owners for the emancipation of their slaves by that government. Legislative proposals at the time also supported this understanding. In April of 1862, after the start of the War, both houses of Congress passed a resolution to that effect, but the state legislatures at the time, who had the power to implement or act upon such a resolution, failed to respond. The District of Columbia actually did respond by compensating slaveholders $300 for the manumission of each of the slaves therein. Lincoln, looking far ahead, proposed providing federal funds to slaveholders who remained loyal to the Union and who would agree to free their slaves by the end of the 19th Century.

When Lincoln was assassinated, this concept was abandoned by the “reconstructionists” who had gained power as their primary concern and motivation was vindictiveness and the desire to completely destroy the South and thereby destroy its competing civilization in the process. These politicians got the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments* to the Constitution passed illegitimately with a variety of underhanded tactics and with the intent of precluding any payment or compensation to slaveholders for freeing enslaved people according to a presidential or any other decree. Of course, the South had already been impoverished by the war, so such compensation was a last hope of any kind of fiscal recovery at least to the upper classes. (*The Southern States had been restored to the Union and were legally represented in the Federal Government at the time of the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery. It wasn’t until they Southern States refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment – along with a number of Northern States! – that the Federal Government declared the military occupation of the former Confederate States under the name “Reconstruction.” To date, the 14^th Amendment has not been legally ratified.)

The average price for a slave in 1860 was $800, which would be $4.2 million in today’s money. The total would thus come to $3 billion for the 3.9 million enslaved people of 1860. The Southern planter class and the legal slave system, largely responsible for the South’s impressive GNP and wealth which far exceeded that of the North, was devastated by the loss of compensation for the freed slaves. That, together with the wanton physical devastation of the South’s physical property, industrial base and agricultural wherewithal and ability to feed itself and sustain a productive economy, resulted in the South’s inability to begin to catch up with the rest of the country until the mobilization engendered by the nation’s involvement in World War II re-energized the South’s economy. The descendants of the Southern planters are the ones who should be rightfully receiving financial reparations now vice being yet further ripped off undeservedly by the Yankee regimes in the blue states.

Slave and Free States in the Antebellum Period

It must also be remembered that the North did not “end slavery” per se. Lincoln himself declared that the slaves in New Jersey might be emancipated by 1900! New Jersey had solved the slave problem by declaring slaves not chattel but apprentices for life without pay! In her article in the Boston Globe, reporter Francie Latour wrote a piece entitled New England’s Hidden History that revealed just how involved the North was in the matter. Slaves were just as enslaved north as south of the Mason-Dixon line and when a Northern State ended the institution, the slaves that remained were sold South or sent to plantations in the Indies to continue to work for their Yankee “masters.” In other words, the “evils” of slavery were an equal opportunity situation among the nation’s states no matter where they existed on the continent and much can be (morally) made of the fact that no slave ship ever sailed from the South during the years of the “Middle Passage.” They all came from New England and New York. It is said that the Quakers were heavily involved in the so-called Triangle Trade so the moral censure of the South was a means of making the attack against these “American” States acceptable to those who might wonder what right the Federal (Central) Government had to force States to remain in the Union when they had legitimately voted to leave.

As for the Constitutional (legal) right of secession, that is without question and requires another article for a closer study. Suffice it to say, as the Cotton States and later the Upper South were legally and constitutionally able to secede, any action taken against them for doing so was, perforce, illegal and unconstitutional. This further strengthens any argument for reparations to be given to those whose homes and lives were destroyed by an illegal and treasonous war. But, frankly, it would be as difficult, if not impossible, to identify those people who could legally demand reparations as it would be to identify those who have no claim whatsoever for financial restitution from those who were not responsible for a way of life that began before the country itself.

There is a book out entitled The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History. It, I suppose, places Lee against George Washington in that Washington supported a strong federal government against the will of the individual States – including Washington’s beloved Virginia – while Lee would not raise his hand against his State even though he rejected secession. But I believe that this is simplistic at best and a bad comparison at worst. The two situations cannot be compared. Washington was involved in the very founding of the nation itself. He had seen the tyrannies of the various States make an actually “bloody hash” out of his efforts to lead an army against the greatest and most powerful nation in the world, the British Empire. If there was going to actually be a United States after the victory in that revolution, there had to be a binding force able to actually govern and hence, the will of the States, while also of great importance, could not be permitted to stop that new nation from coming into being.

On the other hand, by the time Lee was offered the army to be used against Virginia and the South to prevent what was completely constitutional – and therefore represented treason at the highest level of that government that Washington had helped establish – he could not participate in that treason however much he, personally, was against secession. Both men acted out of principle and their judgment based upon their understanding of the issues of the day – and both men were right. But one cannot equate Washington’s “world” with Lee’s! By 1860, the government Washington did his best to help establish had rejected everything he represented personally and embraced just about everything he had warned against! Therefore, I do not believe that Washington would have led Lincoln’s army against the South any more than would Lee. He would have seen it as a betrayal of all that he had fought and suffered for during his life. It was.

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