Do Black people owe White people reparations for slavery? When it comes to reparations, the argument goes both ways.

NOQ Report ^ | 03/30/2021 | Jim Stroud

[x]

They did not die to free slaves.

They died in the war that freed the slaves or made freedom for slaves possible. That means that in effect they did die to free slaves.

They died to make more people slaves of Washington DC.

The usual B.S.

When the Union armies invaded the South for the first time, they had no intention of doing anything at all about slavery. They intended to keep it in place exactly as it was.

They weren't trying to get rid of slavery, but that doesn't meant that "they intended to keep it in place exactly as it was."

The soldiers weren't thinking about it one way or the other. Not being abolitionists, though, didn't mean they wanted to keep slavery going.

It was a time of change for the country and what would come out in the end wasn't clear, but not having a plan to get rid of slavery didn't mean that they would have liked to see it continue or would exert themselves to keep it in place exactly as it was. That was what the other side wanted.

[SkyDancer]

This whole War of Secession has been bandied about here for years. I’m not going to go into that.

[DiogenesLamp]

They died in the war that freed the slaves or made freedom for slaves possible.

And too often does that get substituted for the real reason they invaded and killed people. Let us not forget that the real reason they invaded other people and killed them was to reestablish despotic Washington DC control over those people's lives.

The Southern states were paying by far the bulk of all the taxes to fund Washington DC. They were getting precious little in return for that money, but it was making people in New York and Washington DC fabulously wealthy.

This was a precursor of the exact same corrupt structure we have in Washington DC today.

And if anyone is being honest, freedom for slaves was completely impossible without violating the actual constitutional laws of that era. Declaring the Southern states "Insurrectionists" gave them the extra-legal powers to violate real constitutional law.

They weren't trying to get rid of slavery, but that doesn't meant that "they intended to keep it in place exactly as it was."

By "They", you mean Lincoln, and yes, Lincoln was intent on keeping everything exactly the way it was. He not only said so on numerous occasions, he supported the passage of the Corwin Amendment, which explicitly stated that everything regarding the slaves would be kept exactly as it was.

The soldiers weren't thinking about it one way or the other. Not being abolitionists, though, didn't mean they wanted to keep slavery going.

And I think this is probably accurate. Except for the nutburgers out of Massachusetts, most people didn't give a sh*t about slavery in the Southern states.

Probably the majority of northern soldiers had a dim view of it, but stamping it out was certainly not their motivation.

It was a time of change for the country and what would come out in the end wasn't clear, but not having a plan to get rid of slavery didn't mean that they would have liked to see it continue or would exert themselves to keep it in place exactly as it was.

I think this is correct.

That was what the other side wanted.

I'm pretty sure the other side simply want to continue living their lives as they had always done without other people telling them how to live, or capturing most of their money through their control of the Congress making laws which favored the Northern states.

And by "Other Side" I meant the non slaves. The slaves of course wanted to be free, but when the war began, neither side recognized their right to be free, and neither side hand any intention of doing so for the foreseeable future.

[Carry me back]

What about reparations for tax slaves,while the corporations and politicians become wealthy.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "And too often does that get substituted for the real reason they invaded and killed people.
Let us not forget that the real reason they invaded other people and killed them was to reestablish despotic Washington DC control over those people's lives."

Rubbish.
First of all, in the Civil War's first year more battles were fought in Union states & territories than in the Confederacy, and more Confederate soldiers died in the Union than in the Confederacy.
It was a war of declared Confederate aggression against the United States.

Second, the only "despotic control" from Washington came from that established by Southern Democrats who effectively ruled over DC from 1801 until secession in 1861.
Of course, being Democrats they would not wish to suffer under the rules they had for 60 years imposed, but any normal person would think: what's good enough for the goose must be good for the Democrat gander.

DiogenesLamp: "The Southern states were paying by far the bulk of all the taxes to fund Washington DC.
They were getting precious little in return for that money, but it was making people in New York and Washington DC fabulously wealthy."

That's still a total lie, regardless of how often you repeat it.
The truth is that tariff revenues from Confederate ports in 1860 represented roughly 5% of total Federal revenues.
So our Lost Causers like to claim that "Southern Products" represented the vast majority of US exports and that's how (magically) they "paid for" import tariffs.
Well, first, cotton was the only export of any major value produced in Confederate states and it did represent about 50% of total US exports, including specie.
But for every dollar of cotton exported, the South also "imported" a dollar's worth of manufactured goods from the North.
And that's how Northerners earned the money to keep well over 90% of raw material imports coming through Norther ports.

In 1861, when Civil War eliminated those trade patterns, the Northern economy was disrupted, somewhat, but then quickly recovered and continued to prosper without Confederate cotton exports.

DiogenesLamp: "And if anyone is being honest, freedom for slaves was completely impossible without violating the actual constitutional laws of that era.
Declaring the Southern states "Insurrectionists" gave them the extra-legal powers to violate real constitutional law."

No, despite DiogenesLamp's alliance with Crazy Roger Taney to declare abolition "unconstitutional", it was totally constitutional for Union states which wanted it.
"Contraband of war" was also well understood & accepted by both Union & Confederate armies.
Confederate armies in Union states seized horses, livestock & slaves as "contraband of war".
The Union army in Confederate states freed slaves under the same rules of warfare -- from Day One of war in 1861.

And so DiogenesLamp tries to maintain the ludicrous position that the North only fought to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves, except when they were freeing the slaves as "Contraband of War" from the very beginning.

DiogenesLamp: "By "They", you mean Lincoln, and yes, Lincoln was intent on keeping everything exactly the way it was.
He not only said so on numerous occasions, he supported the passage of the Corwin Amendment, which explicitly stated that everything regarding the slaves would be kept exactly as it was."

Corwin was primarily a Democrat amendment, passed with unanimous Democrat support by Democrat President Buchanan, joined by a minority of 1861 Romney/Cheney-type Republicans.
Lincoln himself did not oppose it because he didn't think it actually changed anything.

Beginning in 1863 Lincoln strongly supported passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.

DiogenesLamp: "And I think this is probably accurate.
Except for the nutburgers out of Massachusetts, most people didn't give a sh*t about slavery in the Southern states.
Probably the majority of northern soldiers had a dim view of it, but stamping it out was certainly not their motivation."

Fair to say, in 1861 most Northern farm-boys had never seen a slave and rarely, if ever, a freed-black.
But they did know slavery was part of the US Constitution, and were satisfied to let it remain -- outside their own states.
They also understood that slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy, and to defeat the rebellion permanently would require slavery's destruction.

And so they did.

DiogenesLamp: "I'm pretty sure the other side simply want to continue living their lives as they had always done without other people telling them how to live, or capturing most of their money through their control of the Congress making laws which favored the Northern states."

Even Southern farm-boys understood that slavery needed to be preserved & protected by strict laws, but also needed to be constantly expanded, westward & southward, to maintain its economic viability.

But many Southern farm-boys also understood that slavery was wrong, should be abolished and so supported the Union side.
They were treated very poorly by Confederates.

[poinq]

It’s possible that someone alive today could be the child of someone who was a slave in the US, if his or her father was a child in 1865 and fathered children late in life. Men can father children in their 70s or even 80s. But there are probably not many children of slaves alive. Grandchildren of slaves or grandchildren of slave owners are even more possible, but again they probably are not very numerous.

---

Find me one. I will grant you the possibility that one exists. But not the likelihood. We like to think of generations. The greatest generation, the depression generation, Boomers, X, millennials and Z. All these are twenty years. There have been 9 and a half generations since the last legal slave in America. In the same time, We have had refugees from all over the world come here with no money or education, not even speaking the language. But nobody has languished in poverty like the African American population. Not all, certainly many have left poverty for many generations and stayed out of poverty. But major cities and the south have large communities where blacks have stayed poor indefinitely with no hint of upward mobility. If you give these people reparations, 5 years later they will have nothing. But they will demand more.

[jmacusa]

I second that! Let’s hear it for “The Great I Am!’’.

[Verginius Rufus]

My Revolutionary War ancestor died at the age of 78. His youngest child was then 4 or 5 years old (she lived until 1881). I remember reading a newspaper story once about an 89-year-old man who had a two-year-old son (his wife, maybe the fourth or fifth of his life, was obviously much younger).

One or two grandchildren of President John Tyler (d. 1862) are still alive. (President Tyler's father was one of the Anti-Federalists at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788.)

My grandfather died in 1977. His grandfather was born in 1780. That's a span of 197 years.

C-SPAN recently showed a film from 1942 about black people on one of the islands off the coast of South Carolina. An elderly man shown in the film had been born a slave. I could imagine that one of his grandchildren could still be alive.

[DiogenesLamp]

First of all, in the Civil War's first year more battles were fought in Union states & territories than in the Confederacy, and more Confederate soldiers died in the Union than in the Confederacy.

Where was the first major battle fought? Who invaded who?

Sure, after someone invades you, it's only fair play to invade them back.

This is what you do. You spin everything and deliberately leave out details that clarify what happened.

[MayflowerMadam]

Will those of us whose ancestors were rabid abolitionists get a break on paying the demanded extortion?

[poinq]

There is not one living American soldier from WW1. There is a small handful of solders left from WW2. The average life span of an American in 1900 was 47. And the US population at the time of the civil war was less than 50 million (less than 4 million slaves.) I am not doubting any of your facts. But if there is one or two people who have slave grandparents its a very rare anomaly. And certainly not worth reparations for the 99.999% of the black population which does not fall into that category. Of that 99.999 there are far more who have ancestors who were white, or slave owners, or who were foreigners. Basically slavery did not effect the African Americans of today.

And by the way, when it comes to 80 year olds having children, often a women or even a man will lie about who the actual father is, to change inheritance, provide an heir or to quash rumors of homosexuality.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Where was the first major battle fought? Who invaded who?"

Well... according to a silly theory by somebody screen-named DiogenesLamp, the first battle was on a piece of paper written by President Lincoln in ordering his "war fleet" to "attack Confederates" in Charleston -- that piece of paper was the beginning of Civil War, right?
But any more reasonable person would say the decisive beginning battle was the Confederates' attack on Union troops in Union Fort Sumter.
And that came after dozens of Confederate seizures of Federal properties, leading Lincoln to call up 75,000 militia (April 15) and declare insurrection (April 19).

By the end of 1861, 35 battles were fought, 25 of them in the Union states & territories of Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia.
Seven battles were fought in Confederate Virginia, plus one each in North Carolina and Florida.
In 1861 more Confederate soldiers died invading the Union than in defending the Confederacy.

DiogenesLamp: "Sure, after someone invades you, it's only fair play to invade them back.
This is what you do.
You spin everything and deliberately leave out details that clarify what happened."

So here, yet again, you complain about not seeing enough "details" and yet, and yet, most of my posts you ignore because, you say, they are too detailed.

The real truth here is that Confederate battles against Union forces in Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma & West Virginia had nothing to with "invade them back" and everything to do with Confederates attempting to militarily take over Union states or territory which did not want to secede.

That's the important "detail" you keep leaving out, FRiend.

[DiogenesLamp]

If you don’t want to answer the question, just say so. It takes less time than reading your deflections and obfuscations.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "If you don’t want to answer the question, just say so.
It takes less time than reading your deflections and obfuscations."

I answered your question, directly and in full context, including your complaint about not enough details.
But you don't like my answers, so you pretend they are just "deflections and obfuscations".

Sorry, FRiend, but that is just your typically trained Democrat mind at work.
You need a better way of thinking.

[DiogenesLamp]

You know very well the first invasion was the battle of Bull Run, or the Battle of Manassas, depending on what you want to call it.

Who invaded who?

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "You know very well the first invasion was the battle of Bull Run, or the Battle of Manassas, depending on what you want to call it.
Who invaded who?"

See? That's your problem -- you only know those pieces of history you wish to know and ignore or just deny the rest.

In fact, Bull Run was far from the first battle, or "invasion", it was the eleventh.
Before Bull Run there were ten other battles producing a total of over 1,000 casualties, but you don't know about them because you don't wish to know.

Of those ten prior battles, one was the Confederate assault on Union troops in Fort Sumter, two were in Missouri, three in West Virginia and four in Virginia.
Of those 10 battles, Confederates won four and suffered about 700 casualties, the Union won six and suffered 360 casualties.

In all, 1861 saw 35 named battles, 25 in Union states & territories, 10 in Confederate states.
Those 35 battles produced over 15,500 casualties of which Bull Run represented about 30%.
Winners & losers: in 1861 the Union won 11 battles in the Union and 3 in Confederate states, Confederates won 10 battles in the Union and 5 in Confederate states.
Six of those 35 battles in 1861 are classified as "inconclusive".

Bottom line: 1861 was not "all about" Bull Run, rather it was "all about" the Confederate invasion of the United States, where 25 of 35 battles were fought and where Confederates suffered 1,000 more casualties than they did in Confederate states, even including Bull Run.

[central_va]

Are you push the meme that the CSA intended on invading, holding and occupying the ENTIRE north? I see you are still stuck on stupid.