Why Political Emancipation Without Economic Independence Is Incomplete Freedom

I recently had the pleasure of being invited by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to speak at a breakfast gathering honoring D.C. Emancipation Day. We would be celebrating the 157th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's formal emancipation of over 3,000 enslaved individuals in the district (on April 16, 1862). Several months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln would go on to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which legally emancipated the nation's estimated 4 million slaves. In this year's commemoration, the district's political leadership and distinguished citizens pushed for what they consider the last frontier in the quest for emancipation -- the establishment of statehood for the district.

In one sense, I was somewhat surprised to be invited to the event because I am not a supporter of statehood for the district. I believe the founders of our nation had wise and practical reasons for leaving the district out of the American federation of states. They rightly reasoned that including the district within any state's boundaries -- as had been originally done -- would reduce the district's role as neutral ground where state representatives could come together to hash out the nation's business. They did not want the district's laws and taxes to impact representatives of the other states, thereby creating political pressure on one state to do another state's bidding. I believe the soundness of this decision has stood the test of time.

However, that does not mean that many of the district's residents have yet to experience full "emancipation." I do not mean emancipation in the political and legal sense but rather emancipation in the form of economic independence.

As I prepared my remarks for the breakfast, I realized that I might be marching into somewhat hostile territory, as most in attendance were supporters of D.C. statehood. However, I did feel that I had something important to contribute to the discussion of emancipation and what it truly means. I thought back to my own family. My earliest known ancestor, my great-great-grandfather Luke Howard, had been born a slave on a plantation in Marion County, South Carolina, in 1805. During his lifetime, he witnessed not only the height of the cotton aristocracy in the American South but also Lincoln's election, the founding of the Republican Party, the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, most of my slave ancestors stayed at the plantations where they had been formerly enslaved. Some, who fought as Union soldiers in the Civil War, believed that Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, would award them land taken from the plantations of their former owners. This was not to transpire. Several black Civil War veterans wrote to General Oliver Otis Howard (after whom D.C.'s famed historically black university is named) to complain that the federal government in Washington had betrayed them.

One of them wrote to General Howard in 1865: "If the government Having concluded to befriend its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between Its self and us Its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon saving such as they can get by again working for your late and their all time enemies. If the government does so we are left In a more unpleasant condition than our former (condition of slavery)."

In other words, the returning veterans knew that without the ability to build an economic foundation, the emancipated would be reduced to a condition that was in many ways worse than their former condition. The federal government did not respond to their requests and essentially abandoned them. Then-President Andrew Jackson, who wanted to heal the deep wounds of the war, restored the lands to their original owners, the very people against whom the federal government had just waged a bitter internecine war.

This was a painstakingly slow progress that would take several generations to produce fruit. There was very little in the way of redemption. Shortly after the war, the Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilante groups began terrorizing blacks. Laws were passed, including the Jim Crow laws, that denied blacks the basic rights of citizenship: They were restricted from voting, participating on juries and even bringing lawsuits in state courts. When you have stolen from someone, it is not enough to merely stop the theft. Justice requires that you redeem the value of what was taken. In many cases, this was not done, and the lasting effects of slavery and de jure segregation continue to this day in the form of entrenched poverty and social stigma.

The former slaves found themselves nominally "free" but abandoned by the government and practically still enslaved. They did own, at least nominally, the fruits of their own labor, though. And so they started from nothing, working harder than they had ever worked to establish some form of economic foundation. Not only did they continue to toil in the fields of their former enslavers -- albeit now for wages -- but many even developed sharecropper and other forms of land-lease arrangements, where they did extra work to secure their own land and capital.

This legacy lasted up until my own generation. My father was eventually able to save up enough money from laboring and sharecropping to purchase his own farm, which eventually became self-sufficient and produced wealth for our family. It took almost five generations from when Lincoln formally emancipated the slaves for my family to finally discover true freedom.

The painstaking work it took over successive generations to bring forth a viable black middle class should not be taken for granted. It is not enough to merely be proclaimed "emancipated" without also providing some method of redress. That is why, in the absence of some sort of redemption, it is very difficult -- if not impossible -- to achieve true freedom.

When you have stolen from someone, it is not enough to merely stop the theft.

The slaves were not stolen. They were generally conquered in war and legally sold. Slavery was an institution as old as civilization and before.

The former slaves were given their political freedom, an unprecedented act in history.

Only Western Civilization and Christians eliminated slavery.

For this act of unprecedented kindness and generosity, Western Civilization, and particularly, the United States is vilified and demonized.

Throughout most of human existence in the paleolithic period, male prisoners of war were *not* made into slaves. They were killed, and often eaten.

Female prisoners of war were almost always enslaved. Captured male children were often adopted into the tribe to increase the numbers of warriors, as the tribes were in nearly constant warfare with their neighbors.

The vast majority of slaves went to the middle east, South America (Brazil) and the Caribbean. Most of those were worked so hard and treated so badly, they died without progeny.

In the United States, the slaves were treated so much better that they formed families and reproduced.

Peter Drucker wrote about this in his book “The end of economic man” during the rise of Nazi Germany.
He recognized that the slow encroachment of the state into business as into every other organization eroded freedom and turned everything into an extension of the state.
And the excuses you use to micromanage business decisions are used to monitor and micromanage churches and families.
Once you move the boundary between public and private, it will be punished until it no longer exists.

He says Andrew Jackson when he meant Andrew Johnson.

Andrew Johnson wasn't a bad man but it was unfortunate that he was President after Lincoln's death--he lacked vision. But the country as a whole lacked vision as to how to enable the freedmen best to become independent and productive citizens.

I don't think there should have been widespread confiscation of property--the white men in the South believed that it was their duty to support their state in the war and before the war it was an unresolved question whether a state could secede. But the government should have bought a lot of the land and made it possible for the freedmen to acquire it as small farms, by homesteading or something similar. I don't think anyone wanted to spend that kind of money and the Northerners were just as prejudiced against black people as Southern whites generally were.

Pity NONE of the northerners knew what to do when they won.

Lincoln likely had the best idea with his “Send them all back” thought. Just look what Johnson turned their freedom into...

Slavery was already on its way out. It was an economic dead end, and those enslaved at the time of the war of Northern Aggression would likely have been freed WITHOUT the war within 20 or 30 years.

Yes, that’s a long time, but considering slavery exists TODAY in some lands, what’s a few years, really?

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