As for apologies, when Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural Address, called the Civil War God's judgement for slavery (and said we deserved even worse!) I took that as a pretty frank admission by the U.S. Government that slavery was wrong. If saying, "This thing we did was so bad we deserved millions of deaths as our punishment" is not an apology, what the heck is?
Thanks for this post. The greatest apology came in the form of the Civil War, the white American bloodbath that ended slavery forever. The permanent seal of this great amends to the Black race was stamped onto our Constitution with the addition of the 13th Amendment. The 20th Century further cemented the great apology with Civil Rights laws, Affirmative Action programs, Black History Month, the granting of "minority status" to African-Americans, and the opening up of Major League sports, universities, job opportunities and ten thousand other forms of apologies. I think the President's speech was unbalanced, lacking in historical perspective and factual completeness, and totally PC. I like President Bush, but I thought he was above this political grandstanding that so sadly marked the Clinton Presidency. Every generation of Americans has had its own moral blindness; ours is the slaughter of 1.5 million babies a year. As this present generation was raised with legalized abortion and is therefore blind to its moral evil, our earliest generation of Americans were also born into the universally accepted practice of slavery and were similarly blinded to the evil of its own day.
However, I would have liked to have heard the President state that the U.S. abolished the slave trade in 1807, and that soon after, the Northern States abolished slavery entirely. The majority of early Americans found slavery to be repulsive and outlawed it, (North of the Mason/Dixon line), while many of the Founding Fathers were still alive.