Tea at Trianon: More on Reparations

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, July 1, 2019

More on Reparations

From Larry Elder:

Just 26% of Americans support reparations. In fact, according to conservative Michael Medved, since so many of today's non-black Americans are descendants of post-Civil War immigrants, as few as 5% of today's whites have a "generational" connection to slavery. University of North Carolina historian Joseph T. Glatthaar, author of "Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee," estimates that 4.9% of the population, or 24.9% of households in slave states, owned slaves. Of the free blacks living in the South, some were slave owners. Famed historian Carter G. Woodson found that in 1830, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves. Historian Roger McGrath notes: "Every one of the 13 states and most of the major cities that would become part of the Confederacy had substantial numbers of black slaveowners. New Orleans by both numbers and by proportion had the most. A staggering 28 percent of free blacks in the Crescent City owned slaves."

Those we call "Native Americans" also owned black slaves. McGrath writes: "Accompanying the Cherokee on their 'Trail of Tears' were some 2,000 black slaves. They were put to work on Cherokee farms in the new tribal home, raising cotton, corn, and garden crops, and tending hogs and cattle. ... During the antebellum decade, slavery reached its peak among the Five Civilized Tribes. The Cherokee, numbering only about 20,000 themselves, owned nearly 5,000 black slaves; the Choctaw 2,500; the Creeks 2,000; and the Chickasaw and Seminole about a thousand each. To protect their slave property, the Five Civilized Tribes, except for a few dissident factions, sided with the Confederacy when the Civil War erupted."

The government did not own slaves; people did. Conservative Dinesh D'Souza estimates that no more than 10 Republicans, out of tens of thousands of slave owners, owned slaves. The Ku Klux Klan was founded by Democrats. Congressional Democrats were overwhelmingly opposed to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. As a percentage of their party, more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats. Maybe the Democrats should sue themselves to pay for reparations.

Reparation proponents often say things like "slavery built America" or "America was built on the backs of slaves." Ta-Nehisi Coates, testifying at a recent congressional hearing on reparations, made the following claim about slave-produced products: "As historian Ed Baptist has written, enslavement — quote — 'shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of America, so that, by 1836, more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves.'" (Read more.)