Let’s put first things first. I write as someone who joined the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 and who in 1975 and 1978 successfully advocated the resettlement in the United States of several hundred thousand refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

As the tide of well-intentioned opinion sweeps ever forward demanding a massive transfer of money from non-African Americans to African Americans descended from the slaves living in the defeated Confederacy (the Movement for Reparations), it boggles my mind that no one has remembered that on March 4, 1865 Abraham Lincoln addressed the reparations issue.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln confirmed that reparations for slavery had been paid -- in blood.

Lincoln said:  “Yet, if God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”

On this July 2nd, the 160^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, we remember with gratitude the young White men of the 1^st Minnesota Regiment who took 82% casualties to stop a charge by Wilcox’s brigade comprising the 3rd Alabama, 1st Mississippi, and 1st Virginia infantry regiments, and so save the battle for the Union. As Lincoln asked, we should also never forget the loss in that civil war of more than 360,000 Union volunteers and draftees, almost all of them White. They volunteered and fought that the slaves would be freed, which happened thanks to their sacrifice.

Their deaths do not include the additional suffering of the wounded nor the sufferings of the widows and children of the dead, also real costs paid that the slaves might be free.

In a similar fashion but from a different moral framework, White Southerners also paid in blood for their slave system. Of the Confederate armies, over 258,000 died.

In her proposed Federal legislation of last May to provide reparations, Missouri Representative Cory Bush argued without any mention of Lincoln’s calculation of the cost paid to end slavery: 

“I am one of the 40 million people in this country descended from enslaved Africans. Our ancestors were torn away from their homes and families, enslaved, and forced to fuel this country’s economy since the day it was founded. And then they were left landless, impoverished, and disenfranchised Black people continue to bear the harms of slavery and its vestiges, through the Black-white wealth gap, segregation and redlining, disparities in health outcomes, a racist and destructive criminal legal system, and countless other ways. Yet our federal government refuses to acknowledge the lasting harms of slavery and the unjust world it created for Black people. We know this injustice because we experience it every day. This resolution will move us closer to a federal government that acknowledges its responsibility for this injustice and enacts a holistic and comprehensive reparations package that begins to address the harm it has caused, the wealth it has extracted, and the lives it has stolen.”

Some say that in the United States we should put a dollar amount of $10 million on each life, the amount society pays to insure our continued good health.

If we use that $10 million as the current value of a lost human life, then the value paid in the loss of their sons by supporters of the Union during the Civil War -- a war fought to help African Americans -- was, in current dollars, $3.6 trillion.

Image: Public Domain