Posted on 06/03/2002 6:39:18 AM PDT by johnqueuepublic
*By now, haven't reparations for slavery and the royalties due to the descendants of the Caucasian Dr. James Naismith, for inventing basketball, canceled each other out?
I know it would never happen. That there would be a lot of details that would need to be worked out. And that the idea would be attacked by the bleeding harts - but - it is allowed under the constitution.
Amendment XIII - Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
If America has no debt to Blacks for slavery then Blacks have no debt to America. Call it an even deal and everybody on both sides shut up about it.
Here's an excerpt from a well-researched textbook used in colleges until Political Correctness idiots gained power and now suppresed. Slaves were valuable property, but the Irish were expendabe. I want reparations!
A History of the South
Fourth Edition
Alfred A. Knopf 1947, 1953, 1963, 1972
Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland
P. 125-126
Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen (slaves) were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed, and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rough plenty prevailed on the average plantation. “The best preventive of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian.
Slaves probably fared as well in the enjoyment of the necessities of life as did most of the free laborers of the country. One of the most respected of all Northern critics of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote that the Southern bondsmen lived in quarters quite as adequate as those of most mill or mine workers elsewhere, and that the slaves were perhaps the best fed “proletarian class” in the world. He also testified that they worked less than did free laborers.
Incomplete statistics reveal that the slaves averaged somewhat higher sickness and death rates per thousand than did Southern whites as a whole. But the slaves were from all indications as healthy and long-lived as white common laborers in the United States before the Civil War. It was general knowledge at the time in Louisiana that the slaves were better off in these respects than were the thousands of Irish immigrant laborers engaged in clearing land and digging drainage canals on the sugar plantations. The planters were reluctant to commit their expensive chattels to this dangerous work, but preferred to hire free laborers, whose loss by death, sickness, or injury cost nothing. A careful study of the figures on a group of 875 plantation slaves whose records are preserved indicates their average life expectancy at the time of birth to have been longer than that of the general population of such cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia during the same period. An authority on urban slavery concludes that the medical care, health, and welfare of slaves in Southern cities were superior to the care, health, and welfare of the free Negroes; and the outstanding work on the life of Negroes in the North at this time shows that they fared no better in such matters than did free blacks in the land of slavery.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The "...except..." part modifies involuntary servitude, ie. prison. Slavery is outlawed, you will never find a con law professor to agree to your interpretation.
If you're interested in Slavery, you might also want to read the interesting book, Cane River, by Lalita Tademe, a former high-tech exec who wrote the history of her family as slaves in Louisiana. Slaves were slaves and did plenty of work, according to this book, but they were to a certain extent integrated into the families that owned them and were not treated miserably.
I got the book I cited earlier, A History of the South, at eBay for a couple of dollars. It's an excellent textbook.
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