by Jeff Minick
Before the Civil War, several of my ancestors in
Western Pennsylvania were staunch abolitionists. They participated in
the Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves from the South make the
journey to freedom.
During the War itself, several of these same
ancestors, fought in that conflict. At least two of them died, along
with several hundred thousand other Northern soldiers fighting to bring
the South back into the republic and to end slavery. Another relative
who served with the North, Uncle Marion McNickle, survived and lived
long enough to share his tales of the War with my father in his boyhood.
So, a question: Why should I as a taxpayer pay reparations for an institution my ancestors helped defeat?
In “Getting Real About Reparations,” published in the June issue of Chronicles Magazine, Roger McGrath brilliantly addresses both this subject of reparations and the complexities of history.
The history of American slavery, as McGrath
demonstrates, is much more complicated than that presented in so many of
our classrooms and textbooks. The Africans who were carried to America,
for example, were slaves before they ever touched the deck of a ship,
captives forced into servitude by more powerful tribes or Arab traders,
and then sold for delivery to the New World. Because of the relatively
high cost of purchasing these slaves, planters and developers often
employed Irish immigrants for building canals and roads, grueling work
that left many of them dead from disease or accident. As McGrath tells
us:
Frederick Law Olmstead, the architect of New York’s Central Park, traveled throughout the South on the eve of the Civil War and was surprised to find, again and again, that Irishmen were used instead of slaves for the work of draining swampland, felling trees, digging ditches, quarrying rock, and clearing forests because “it was much better to have Irish do it, who cost nothing to the planter if they died, than to use up good field-hands in such severe employment.”
Nor were whites the
only slave owners. In 1860, nearly 4,000 free blacks living in the
South owned some 20,000 slaves. After analyzing this figure, McGrath
turns his attention to the black-owned slaves in Louisiana just before
the War:
The largest concentration of black slave owners was in Louisiana. Marie Metoyer owned 287 slaves and more than 1,000 acres of land. The widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards had 152 slaves working their sugar plantation. Antoine Dubuclet had 100 slaves on his sugar plantation. Cotton planter Auguste Donatto owned 70 slaves, as did Antoine Decuire. Verret Polen owned 69. Dozens of other blacks owned 30 or more slaves.
Various Native American tribes
– the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and others – also approved and
practiced the enslavement of blacks. By the beginning of the Civil War,
the “Five Civilized Tribes” owned approximately 10,000 slaves. McGrath
tells us that when the U.S. government forced the Cherokee west on the
Trail of Tears, they took with them several thousand slaves.
Moreover, many
Native Americans fought for the South in the War. In Waynesville, North
Carolina, for instance, William Thomas led his famous Legion of
Cherokees and mountaineers in a skirmish against the Yankees in one of
the last battles of the Civil War. Here the Cherokee encircled the Union
forces, lit bonfires on the ridges, and intimidated their enemies with
war cries. Learning that the war had ended, the next day the
Confederates and Union commanders negotiated a cease-fire and surrender.
As McGrath so aptly
demonstrates, the practice of slavery was not limited to whites. Blacks
and Native Americans owned slaves. Why? Because the society in which
they lived condoned slavery. Like them, we condone and approve certain
practices that may one day be condemned by our descendants.
At the end of his
article, McGrath writes: “Unfortunately, these complexities and
uncomfortable facts of slavery in the United States are unknown to the
majority of Americans today. I suspect those now talking about
reparations are among them.”
McGrath aims his
article at those calling for reparations with the intention of
demonstrating that the subject is far more convoluted than most
Americans know.
Yet “Getting Real
About Reparations” serves a broader purpose as well. It is yet another
reminder about history and the ways in which we view those who were a
part of that history. All too often we critique our ancestors without
making any effort to get to know them. Unless we attempt to walk in
their shoes, however, and see with their eyes, we have nothing but facts
and dates by which to evaluate them. Such ignorance of the past, and
worse, judging that past in the courtroom of the present, breeds
contempt for those who have gone before us and arrogance in ourselves.
In “Land Of Hope,”
historian Wilfred McClay writes: “For the human animal, meaning is not a
luxury; it is a necessity. Without it, we perish. Historical
consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual
identity.”
We develop
historical consciousness by reading writers like McGrath and McClay.
That consciousness in turn can act, as does our individual memory, as a
tool for making our way in the world.
Jeff Minick is a free-lance writer and teacher living in Front Royal, Virginia. He may be found online at jeffminick.com.
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