Slavery in American history has come into vogue among those of much political enthusiasm but the intelligence of box turtles and little knowledge of the matter. I sometimes think that America should institute a system of public education, but apparently this is not going to happen. Anyway, a few thoughts of possible interest:
Whites didn’t enslave blacks. These were captured by black slave traders or bought as prisoners of war, and kept in slave pens on the African coast until slave ships bought them. This may seem a cheap debating point but is how the slave business actually worked.
The slave trade from point of sale on the African coast to the fields of Alabama and thereafter was hideous, very, very documentedly so. This should not need saying but apparently does. A competent overview of the commerce can be found in The Atlantic Slave Trade, by . A contemporary account is American Slavery As It Is,1839. Warning: it is nauseating. A well known and readable account, also contemporary, can be found in A Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, by Fanny Kemble. Hundreds of others exist.
The current adolescent drumbeat for reparations to blacks for slavery is nonsensical since, as many have noted, it requires whites who never owned slaves to pay reparations to blacks who never were slaves. This is just stupid. I think the Africans who originally captured the slaves should pay reparations to American blacks, and to residents of cities burned by these. People whose forebears arrived in America after 1865 can’t possibly be blamed as neither, presumably, Yankee troops who are (absurdly, but never mind) thought to have fought to free the slaves.
