The sun beat down on their backs. It was unbearably hot. Their fingers bled from the nearly constant pricking of the cotton boll’s thorns. There was only one break all day. If the foreman found them paused, even for a moment, their moment’s break would, almost certainly, result in whipping. Of course, the foremen didn’t really need a reason to whip a person. Some did it out of spite.
This startling image was a common one in the cotton belted South. One could easily make the claim that the United States was founded upon slave labor. Some have stated that the North did not employ slave labor and, therefore, it was innocent of any crime of slavery. However, this is simply not the case. The raw materials (indigo, cotton, tobacco, sugarcane, and livestock among others) gleaned from slave labor in the South was used, in part, to support the triangular trade of the Atlantic (to facilitate trade deals with the U.S. and Britain) but also provided raw materials to the North for use in manufacturing. So, in a sense, the North was profiting from slavery as much as the South, thereby embroiling the entirety of the United States into an economic system based heavily on slave labor. The idea of slavery as an institution would only end after the Civil War, but ultimately, the persecution of African Americans continued until 1964 with the passing of the Civil Rights Act by Lyndon B. Johnson. While the Civil Rights Act put legal enforcement behind the equality movement, many argue that persecution of African Americans continues to this day, though under a veil of equality.
Since the United States was supported for much of its early history by African American slave labor it makes sense for the African American community to campaign in favor of some kind of government compensation program. This, however, in our current economic state would be impossible to accommodate. There is little that the federal government can now do to compensate those ancestors of slaves and those people who have been mistreated since (essentially) the very beginning of United States history. The vast amount of people (of various racial backgrounds) wronged by the United States past policies is numerous and the financial backing to compensate all of them utterly nonexistent in the world, let alone the United States. Therefore, it would be fiscal suicide to commit the United States to a financial burden that it simply could not support. That being said, how does one determine the actual amount of compensation? How can one put a price on suffering? This, though it could be determined by a court of law, would almost certainly enflame tempers and split the country further.
Second, if such a compensation program were put into place, how would the federal government determine who should receive said compensation? Were not the American Indians and the Asian Americans also persecuted at one time? Why would only the African Americans be included in a compensation plan? These questions, among others, would need to be addressed before any plan could be put into action. A conflict within this vein also arises. If we are to compensate those wronged by the United States some kind of genealogical proof must be employed to protect the interests of the federal government as well as the tax payer who would, I assume (yet another place of contention), be paying for this program through increased federal taxes. While it is hard enough for ancestors of the former planter aristocracy to trace back their ancestry, how hard would it be for ancestors of a former slave to trace back their roots? My guess is that with nearly nonexistent birth and death documentation, spotty public records from the time period coupled with covered up and “unofficial” marriage certificates, tracing back one’s roots to uncover a history of servitude would be next to impossible.
It seems altogether unfeasible for a government program to be set up to deliver compensation to all those peoples that have been wronged by the United States at some point. While we, as humans, would like to see unjust suffering righted, it is impossible, in some cases, to deliver justice, if simply for the fact that it would require nothing less than total revolution and economic ruin.
