When Slaveowners Got Reparations

[L Verge]

(04-17-2019 04:15 PM)Steve Wrote:  Didn't Maryland voters approve a new constitution (by a narrow margin) in Oct. 1864 which specifically freed its slaves with compensation to their owners?

Maryland voters did approve the new constitution to go into effect on Nov. 1, 1864 (just months short of approval of the 13th Amendment). It passed by a very close margin of about 1000 votes only because Maryland's Union soldiers in the field were allowed to have their votes counted.

However, I never remember any mention of the state's slave owners being compensated or that it was even brought up in the convention. Lincoln had previously offered compensation to Delaware, and they had turned it down flat. The D.C. freedom did come with compensation of about $300/slave.

"The Lincoln administration attempted to pursue a compensated emancipation policy in the Border States, but gave up after the Delaware legislature bluntly rejected his offer. Thus, no other American slave owner was ever compensated.

"Why is it important to remember uncompensated abolition?

"The uncompensated abolition of slavery was by far the most radical thing the federal government has ever done. At the time black men and women were the most valuable single form of property in the United States. The American economy was built by the enslaved and the cotton that they grew before Civil War was the most country’s most important export. Yet by 1865 almost every single of them ended up gaining their freedom without the government compensating their former owners. And it was not only the slaveholders of the Confederacy who were not compensated: the 13th Amendment abolished slavery without compensation in the slave states of Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky that had remained within the union. This map provides a powerful visualization of how slavery ended across the United States.

"But it’s also very important to remember that this revolutionary state of affairs didn’t just happen because Lincoln was a good guy or something. A powerful coalition of abolitionists, free blacks, and the enslaved had forced the slavery to the center of national debate, at a time when most politicians would have rather ignored it. Just to take one example, the runaway slaves who reached the North were assisted by white and black abolitionists. These men and women were willing to violate the Fugitive Slave Act—at great personal risk, especially for free blacks—and refused to allow slave catchers to take runaways back to their former plantations. This, of course, enraged slave owners and heightened the contradictions inherent in American slavery. The mass movement which formed in the 1850s propelled Lincoln to the presidency and led to secession, but Lincoln’s election is inconceivable without the preceding decades of political work.

"After the Civil War, this same coalition (except now with no more slaves) created Reconstruction that guaranteed blacks civil and voting rights. Though Reconstruction was eventually violently overthrown by reactionaries, one of the biggest tragedies of this was the 1865-67 period after Lincoln’s assassination where other, even more revolutionary policies, like land redistribution were quashed."

Source for quote above: http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2015/09...pensation/