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One bad idea whose time has apparently arrived is that the United States government should issue a formal apology for slavery.
For starters, why should the United States, of all the nations which have permitted slavery, be the only one to apologize? Go back to biblical times, and there's Egypt, along with assorted Mesopotamian empires -- Babylon, Assyria, Ninevah.
In the classical world, should Greece apologize for the raiding and slave-taking recounted by Homer? The Romans for enslaving entire Mediterranean population?
Elsewhere, does Britain plan an apology -- slavery was legal throughout the empire until 1833. Or what about Saudi Arabia, where slavery was legal until the 1960s?
Regarding the New World, has Spain proposed apologies for replacing Inca and Aztec slave systems with its own? Should we expect an announcement out of Ignacio one of these days, that the Southern Utes want to apologize for capturing, using and selling slaves, back during the Shining Times?
Assuming that the credo of American exceptionalism means that an apology is in order, is the federal government the proper government to make the apology?
Slavery in this nation was essentially a state institution, not a federal one.
Whenever the federal government threatened to get too involved in slavery, as with the Fugitive Slave Act, the union began to fracture. The first real secession movement was not in the South, but in New England during the 1820s. The Republican Party was established in 1854 to oppose slavery in the territories under federal control -- not to eliminate slavery inside states.
Recall that Abraham Lincoln, the president who freed
the slaves,
often observed that he had neither the
desire nor the authority to meddle with slavery in states
where it was legal.
When the Emancipation Proclamation came, it was issued as a military order by the commander in chief, and it did not apply to slave states like Delaware, Maryland and Missouri that stayed in the Union.
There seems to be an assumption that the antebellum federal government could have abolished slavery, but for some reason chose not to. But the federal constitution would never have been ratified if it had given the central government that kind of power.
It took a constitutional amendment to give the federal government the power to eliminate slavery within states. The chattel slavery that flourished from 1789 to 1865 was tolerated by the federal government, but it was institutionalized by state governments.
If formal apologies are in order, they should come first from Georgia and South Carolina and Alabama and all those other places that still proudly fly the historic banners of treason.
Even if we assume that the federal government is somehow responsible for slavery, hasn't the nation suffered enough? Do the Civil War deaths of 498,332 soldiers and sailors mean anything?
Slavery poisoned the American polity from the earliest days, when Thomas Jefferson's denunciation of King George for supporting the slave trade was eliminated from the Declaration of Independence.
American foreign policy suffered from slavery, with effects that linger to this day in relations with Haiti (we refused to recognize its independence in 1803 because it resulted from a slave revolt) and Mexico (we invaded it in 1846 and took nearly half its territory to protect Texas slave owners).
And that's just part of the national burden from slavery. Add in the individual suffering of millions of slaves (if they were so happy on the plantations, why did they race to Union lines as soon as there was even a rumor that the Yankee soldiers were near?), the racism endured for more than a century since by millions of American citizens, the rancor of the affirmative action controversies, the current necessity to tailor American foreign policy to suit Sen. Jesse Helms -- America continues to pay the price for slavery. It isn't as though the nation somehow got away scot-free.
Finally, what good does an apology do? To mean anything, it must be offered by the perpetrator, and the last American slave-owner died long ago.
An apology would be just another one of those empty feel-good share-your-pain statements, and it might well keep the nation from addressing real racial problems like bad schools, disparate sentencing and police harassment.
Any time a troublemaker brought up one of those issues,
the answer would emerge: We already said we were
sorry.
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