Obama, Reparations and 40 Acres and a Mule

The New Georgia Encyclopedia ^ | 9/2005 | Barton Myers

[trek]

From The History of the State of Georgia, by I. W. Avery

On January 16, 1865, Union general William T. Sherman issued his Special Field Order No. 15, which confiscated as Federal property a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John's River in Florida, including Georgia's Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast. The order redistributed the roughly 400,000 acres of land to newly freed black families in forty-acre segments....

Although Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 had no tangible benefit for blacks after President Johnson's revocation, the present-day movement supporting slave reparations has pointed to it as the U.S. government's promise to make restitution to African Americans for enslavement. The order is also the likely origin of the phrase "forty acres and a mule," which spread throughout the South in the weeks and months following Sherman's march.

[Non-Sequitur]

bump

[trek]

To make matters worse, the Constitutional Convention failed to resolve the question of slavery. Punting this issue turned out to be a real blunder. And the Founders have to be held to accounts. I suspect that if the Founders could take a mulligan on that one, knowing what transpired "four score and seven years" later they would do it differently.

If you will permit me to elaborate on my own post let me cast this argument in a somewhat more palatable form.

Imagine that the history of the United States was just one long episode of the Simpsons. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention from places like South Carolina who insisted that the question of slavery be deferred (e.g. folks like Pierce Butler, Charles Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Rutledge, etc.) would be seen in heaven in 1863 pounding their heads against the wall going:

DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! ....