Fred Klonsky writes that when slaves were emancipated in Washington, D.C. in 1862, the slave owners received payment for the loss of their property, but those who had been enslaved received nothing.
Not everyone thought paying reparations to slaveowners was a good idea.
“If compensation is to be given at all,” the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said at the National Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia in 1833, “it should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who have plundered and abused them.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As we know, Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere despite having won its freedom from France in 1804. As a result of their conflict with France, Haiti became very isolated as many countries refused to trade with them. Many people do not know that Haiti was forced to pay reparations of approximately $27 billion in today’s money to France until 1947. This article explains Haiti’s difficult position. Since this article was written, President Moise was murdered by Colombian contract killers allegedly hired by a Miami doctor.https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/12/06/in-1825-haiti-gained-independence-from-france-for-21-billion-its-time-for-france-to-pay-it-back/?sh=4e725cd2312b
Certainly a part of history we will never see taught in Texas. Shameful.
Presumably, the rationale was that slaveowners could not have their “property” taken from them by the government without just compensation.
It doesn’t make it “right”, of course, but at the time when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, that was actually Constitutionally justifiable (by the takings clause of the 5th Amendment)
In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation itself violated the Constitution (which, by inclusion of its infamous 3/5ths clause made it perfectly clear that not everyone was free or even meant to be free) and Lincoln and others knew that, which is why Congress quickly moved on the 13th Amendment.
It’s instructional to consider – and pretty obvious — how today’s “Originalist” Supreme Court would have ruled on these matters (reparations to slaveholders for freeing slaves Emancipation proclamation, even Dred Scott) back then (or even today).
Well, of course. The 6-3 Originalist majority would rule against civil rights and women’s rights because they were not in the Constitution. Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett would resign. Sonia Sotomayer and Wlisa Kagan could stay because they are not Originalists.
Original Intent
If Lincoln were the Prez today
Supremes would supercede
“Emancipation ain’t OK”
In Founding Fathers’ creed”
“And those who owe a debt
To major banks and such
We cannot ever let
Employ the ‘bankrupt’ crutch”
Especially not the student
Who borrowed for their school
It’s really quite imprudent
To pardon, as a rule
So let them stay enslaved —
Be debtors all their life.
They really shan’t be saved
From hunger and from strife
Alternative title for the above : “Roberts’ Rules of Order”
“Roberts’ Rules of Odor” also works
Original intent”
Original intent
To keep enslaved in order
Original in scent
The Roberts’ Rules of Odor
Lest anyone think I exaggerate.
Supreme Court Rejects Student Loan Bankruptcy Case, Leaving Harsh Standard Intact For Now(June 28, 2021)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2021/06/28/supreme-court-rejects-student-loan-bankruptcy-case-leaving-harsh-standard-intact-for-now/?sh=6b38a6253021
Robert’s Rules of Mordor
I like beer.
It makes me a jolly good fellow,
‘Cause Cit’zens United caused such a kerfuffle,
Some guy won’t bake cake for not one same sex couple,
Coney Barrett’s religion is gonna be trouble,
I’m CRTainly sure to ignore the class struggle,
And NOTHING makes me shed a tear!
I like beer.
One “originalist,” John Marshall, ruled in favor of the Cherokee nation but was “cancelled “ by A president who was sure that enforcement of the ruling, which would surely have required sending troops to remove Georgia natives from Cherokee territory, would have meant civil war. Jackson was unwilling to risk civil war to uphold the principles of constitutional government so long as the alternative was the sacrifice of some “sort of” people. His appointment to the bench, Roger Taney, arguably caused the civil war with the Dred Scott decision.
Love your poem about I Like Beerbanaugh, SomeDAM!
Twas in the Roberts Rules of Mordor
I saw a rule that’s fair
But Roberts and the evil Kavnaugh
Crept up and sipped away on bee-er
Bee-er
(Ramble on, Led Zeppelin)
Much as I would like to take credit, that was Leftcoastteacher’s most excellent poem about beer and the K-man.
Me K-man
You Jane
I like beer
And K-man name
Laws are falling all around
Time I was in my way
Thanks to Bret, I’m much obliged
For such a drunken stay
But now it’s time for me to go
The auto highbeam lights my way
For now I smell the rain
And with it pain
And it’s headed my way
Ramble on
And now’s the time, the time is now
To sing my song
Though it might sound queer I got to find my beer
On my way
I’ve been this way 50 years to the day
Ramble on
Gotta find the keg of all my dreams
Ramble on, Led Zeppelin
Maybe
“Folks are falling all around”
Would be better
“Robert’s Rules of Odor” was so apropos, I just had to riff off of it a bit.
Beernabaugh the Kave Man grabbed on Aim-y Coney Barrett,
Eyed her up and down and, grunting, begged of her to show—
How all the rights of “all men” God could one day disinherit;
She said I dunno— better go ask Elite-o.
I Am Sam, Elite-o, ‘nnounced crusader number three:
Janus is a case to do the trick!
Just have some beers and go see Clarence T.
So the K-man went to see the Lunatic:
Thomas sat, hands over ears, asked not a single question;
He and Gorsuch are NOT to be bothered.
Don’t worry, Beer-man!
Robert’s Rules of Odor have their roots in the Secession;
Mad law has been before founding fathered.
By the way, I have made an economics “Nobel” worthy discovery: if you leave the “a” out and spell it kavnaugh, it doesn’t go into moderation.
The “a” is key
From A to B
Of Kav-a-naugh
We’ve had a nuff
SDP, brilliant. I confer upon you the Nobel Prize.
Roberts Rules of Odor
Are rooted in olfaction
In darkest depths of Mordor
In Crack of Doom’s attraction
One Party to rule them all with Gorsuch, Barrett, and Brett Kav’naugh
Yep, Poetic justice. Good to know.
Diane, ha!
So, Leftcoastteacher has entered among the few, the proud, the metrical,
THE PLUCKY POETS OF THE RESISTANCE!
It is said that when they sing, all nature dances attendance upon them. The woodland creatures gather ’round. Trees uproot themselves to move closer, bending their crownéd heads to the tune. The very stones grow ears. Ah!!! Ed Deformers slither or creep or scurry away to hide themselves beneath a Gates or Walton wing. Repugnicans scream “Socialism,” then “All my beautiful wickedness, gone!” and shrivel ’til nothing is left of them but the tiny cysts that serve as their hearts and resemble nothing so much as walnut shells burnt by fires (fires caused by global warming, I might add).
Ah, such sweet sad songs these peace-loving pugilists make! these playful, polished, passionate, pugnacious, proficient, perspicacious, prophetic, prolific, priceless, and a little paranoid poets make! They can parade pantoums ’til the last ding dong of doom! They got your ghazals, y’all! Show them a villain, and they’ll hurl a villanelle at ‘im. You want a screama of a terza rima? Talk to the Resistance poets, wearers of the red cloak. Of bards, the bardliest!
And O! they are funny. And free. Free as a nude beach on a shore in paradise.
Pluck on, Resistance Poets, pluck on!
One Odor to rule them all
One Odor to find them
One Odor to make skin crawl
And in the foulness bind them
In the Land of Mordor, where malodors lie
DAMN, we need a formal induction ceremony, I think. I mean, what’s more human than parading around in silly costumes and muttering a lot of mumbo jumbo while feigning high seriousness?
By the pricking of my thumbs, Gates and Kaveman this way come.
Was that order, SomeDAM, or ordure?
All the most puffed up of the Repugncans are now being invited to dine at Mar-a-lago and ordure from the menu.
I think, Diane, that you must be thinking of the Noetic Prize in WordPressery Wizardry.
But can SumDAM I Am pass the Trump IQ test? Let’s see. cow, tv, person, stole the election, uh
I like beer and laws
I like beer and laws
And courts and Constitutions
I like drills and saws
And amps and revolutions
I like beer and laws
But mostly just the beer
Cuz beer is just the cause
For why I’m mainly here
I like beer and laws (2)
I like beer and laws
And really just because
The law is like the beer
And beer is why I’m here
The beer is icy cold
And law is icy too
When beer is very bold
It makes you want to sc__w
The beer is sometimes flat
When sitting in the Sun
And law is all of that
And nothing can be done
The beer is like a potion
A magical elixir
And law can nix abortion
It really is a fixer
The beer can help you sleep
When listening to cases
The sleep is really deep
When drunken by the cases
The beer can make you sick
As also can the law
But if I had to pick
The beer is what I’d draw
Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout
Would not take the garbage out!
Justice Amy Coney Barrett
Makes sure garbage all inherit!
Apparently, SCREWDUS justices’ full names go into moderation. That makes sense. Let me try your Nobel winning trick on Amy:
Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout
Would not take the garbage out!
Justice Aim-y Coney Bar’ett
Makes sure garbage all inherit!
Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout goes into mod? Huh. That’s interesting.
Forty Dollars and a Mule (Obamacare version)
Forty acres and a mule
What they got from Sherman’s rule
Forty dollars and a kick
What I got for getting sick
Speaking of The Lord of the Rings
https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/iqVCM6h_ZoCnz46AJlTldA–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyNDI7aD0xNTUyLjU7Y2Y9d2VicA–/https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/AYVpCMBq6i5gxuLaBmW7rw–~B/aD0xNTAwO3c9MTIwMDthcHBpZD15dGFjaHlvbg–/https://media.zenfs.com/en/people_218/c9207ddae1c72363dc0c91ac42115c5b
It makes perfect sense in light of “woke” history (sarcasm noted). Slaves certainly were considered property.
Lincoln’s primary concern was maintaining the Union not freeing the slaves. By paying reparations in DC., he was showing that if slavery were to be abolished the South could expect to be well compensated for their “property”.
In the Emancipation Lincoln only freed the slaves in the states not under Union control. Slaves in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware were not freed till the 13th Amendment 1865. Prior to the Emancipation Lincoln had made a declaration that unless the Rebel States returned to the Union their slaves would be freed giving a Jan 1,1863 deadline ..
The implication being they would not be freed or slave owners would be compensated for their property if they eventually were.
Now gee all I remember being taught k-12 (Class of 69 in case we have improved) was about a Cherry tree and Lincoln walking to school then freeing the slaves. Would not want to burden our Children by telling them there was no stinking tree.
It’s true that Lincoln’s maneuvering in the middle of the Civil War was entirely war tactical. My 12 and 13 year-old, California students arrive at my classroom doorstep every fall already knowing that Emancipation was anything but. Paying slaveholders in Washington D.C. to relinquish their slaves was a smart move, that’s all. It’s amazing how Lincoln seemed so daft at the beginning of the war, and then turned out to be one of the greatest tacticians in history, once everything came together.
General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, 40 acres and a mule, in 1865, was intended as reparations. Lincoln didn’t live to see that though. Sorry to disagree with Fred Klonsky’s choice of words, but what President Lincoln did in D.C. in 1862 was not the awarding of reparations to slaveholders. Reparations are given to repair lives after they have been ruined by torture and genocide. Wealthy D.C. slaveholders’ lives were not so much in need of repair. He gave them not reparations but incentives, like police departments do today when they offer to buy back people’s firearms. (Sorry, I don’t mean to compare human beings to guns.)
Today, half the crops grown in the world are produced by a small handful of big agriculture companies. On the model of 1862, the modern equivalent of incentivizing reparations could be, I suppose, offering tax incentives to big ag companies for giving away controlling shares of their companies to low wage working people, shares worth the value of a certain amount of farmland. Let’s say about 40 acres. Just a little food for thought.
It would really upset Bill Gates, a bonus.
Fat chance that the little guy will ever be given 40 acres these days.
Or even a mule.
A kick by a mule (or is it donkey?) is more like it.
I bet the little guy could get charter mule, or a voucher for 3% of the cost of a mule if he does some volunteer work for the mule and doesn’t expect the mule to do what public mules do.
Oh my, LeftCoast, what a beautiful dream that is!
I hiked down into the Grand Canyon once in July.
Not bad going down but coming back up was brutal.
Should have chartered a mule.
It would upset Bill Gates, which is a bonus.
OK, LC. You win the Net today.
Charters
Charter schools
And charter mules
Stinky tools
With stubborn rules
I am glad to hear that your 6th or 7th graders have been told the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves before leaving 5th grade. . I tend to think you might be a little generous with that assessment. After all 50% of Americans might say that slavery was beneficial to the Black man .
That must have been their parents. ( forgive poetic license and the exaggeration )
Were they also taught that Lincoln may never have thought the Black Man was equal to the White . That only a few years before ascending to the Presidency he very publicly stated his belief that they should and would never be allowed to vote and could not co exist . That in no way did he fight the war to end slavery . He would gladly have seen the Union united with or without it early in the war. That had Lincoln Conceived of 40 acres and a mule and not Thaddeus Stevens after Lincolns death those acres might have been in Liberia or Haiti .
Okay I am being a little tough on the man who the war may have changed. He was anti slavery and after all he was assassinated a few days after proposing limited voting rights for Blacks. And that position may well be the reason . This was mid 19th century America and he was very much a man of that era.
With LBJ I think we have a clearer picture . ” What do these God damn N—–s want from me” . And he goes on to do what he knew was right even though he knew the cost. He did under estimate . I believe it is over 2 Generations and it ain’t just the South.
I teach in a relatively liberal enclave of Southern California. My diversely multicultural school has had Black Lives Matter assemblies in years past. If a history teacher at my school told the students that slavery was benign, there would likely be complaints to the school board and possible repercussions. My students have been taught the developmentally appropriate truth, for the most part.
I’m not sure exactly what Lincoln thought about slavery. He was kind of enigmatic. Rephrase: He was purposefully, strategically enigmatic. I tend to lean toward Gore Vidal’s assessment that he cared first and foremost about winning the war and keeping the Union united, and surrounded by racists, slavery would have continued if the war had been won by the Union at the First Battle of Bull Run. The Lincoln Republican Party had its roots in the Free Soil Party, though. Lincoln invited Frederick Douglass to the White House. He was married to an abolitionist. And he pulled strings no one knew he had to get the 13th Amendment passed. I don’t know what Abe Lincoln thought; I just try not to get mixed up in stories of log cabins and Great Emancipators.
LeftCoastTeacher
We have to assume that what people say, write and more importantly what they do is what they think.
We can not really ever know what the think. We are not mind readers . I have a big problem with several WaPo reporters because of that ;seriously “the president thought” and you know this how.
I agree, but while Lincoln didn’t work to immediately end slavery, he didn’t not work to end slavery. He came out looking like an accidental genius as an abolitionist, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron. I’ll say this in support of Lincoln as a great president, a President John Brown would not have been so triumphant, likely failing to pull together the disparate factions of a Union that was not soundly abolitionist. There were slaves in the North. Lincoln had to arrest the mayor of Baltimore, suspending habeus corpus. A real emancipation proclamation would have died a quick death in 1863.
Lincoln’s actions were calculated to win the war.
Emancipation Proclamation
Emancipation Proclamation
“All the slaves are free —
Except the ones in parts of nation
Where slaves were meant to be”
What if UFOs are just billionaires from other planets?
–Mary Edwards
What if billionaires are just UFOs from other planets?
— SomeDAM Poet
Elon Musk, phone home
Elon Musk, phone home. That’s good. I’m putting up my glowing finger and saying
ouch.
should probably be just
“E-lon, phone home”
By the way, what’s the main difference between ET and E-lon?
ET flies a bicycle and E-lon flies a car
Fewer than 10% of Black people voted for the Republicans who enabled the current religious conservative court majority. About 50% of women vote for the theocratic state
of the Republicans. The U.S.’s warning can be found in Iraq. “Equal rights for women were enshrined in Iraq’s constitution in 1970, the right to vote, run for political office, access to education and own property. Today, those rights are all but absent under the U.S. backed government of Nouri al-Maliki (3-19-2013).”
In a recent Deutsch 29 post about CRT, Mercedes notes an alarm in the final sentence of the post about “gender-separate schools.”
One of the news gathering sites about education that appears to favor “ed reform” posted
a story about a “Brooklyn All Girls Charter School”. The school’s founders are from Harvard Graduate School of Education and Columbia- two private institutions that stand as example of earlier colonialism.
The same news site referenced above posted, “Catholic school …(sue) state officials…saying (mask mandates) violated the school’s religious practices.”
Mask mandates violate Catholic religious practices?
I guess they are being consistent. They also oppose condom mandates.
Mask Mandates
The mandate for the mask?
Religious violation
Like condoms for the “task”
That ruin the sensation
What would Jesus do?
Did Jesus wear a mask?
Of course, he never did
One needn’t even ask
Cuz Jesus never hid
They oppose condom womandates too
“If compensation is to be given at all,” the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said at the National Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia in 1833, “it should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who have plundered and abused them.”
Critical Race Theorist
A Theorist before the time
When Critical Race would reach it’s prime
Will Garrison, on abolition
Was waaay ahead on his position
Economics was never really my thing, so I struggled with Thomas Piketty’s Capital, but if there was one lesson I learned, it is this: despite our fantasies about stardom, the lottery, or unique athletic ability, the building of wealth is a generational process. So are the legal and de facto structures designed to maintain and strengthen the systemic reality. So are the myths built to buttress the lies.
For example, some wealthy Oklahomans like to point to their Sooner roots, but please don’t bother them with details about how the rush for land was specifically designed to exclude many and terrorize those who made it through the cracks. Same with Westerners and their use of federal lands and drilling and mining rights. Not to mention the virtual reestablishment of slavery under Jim Crow which was compounded by the national sin of building of urban and suburban ghettos–and the subsequent squawking of those who “pay for it” (but never do).
The most conservative online inflation calculators would value 1862’s $300 at more than $8,000 today. That doesn’t take into account the many times these funds could have been reinvested and cashed in over generations. Today’s cost of those 1860s reparations are much greater than most of us would like to admit. How’s that for today’s lesson in CRT?
That was very good Greg . I suspect your mastery of economics is far superior to your claims.