REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY

A recent media suggestion that governments be forced to pay reparations to African American descendants of slaves has prompted me to offer a few facts on the subject. Realizing this subject to be a delicate one (though why it should be so nearly one hundred and fifty years after the legal abolition of said practice mystifies the sensible mind), I proceed with little confidence that the plainness of my points will find gracious reception.

The reader will rightly concede that the United States of America did not institute the enslavement of Africans on the North American Continent, indeed that any citizen of the United States of America could have done so. For the first person on this continent to be stripped of human rights by European colonists and to be dubbed a "slave" lived and died in the seventeenth century (the sixteen hundreds), more than a century before the United States Constitution was ratified, which document formed the union of states. This must force an acknowledgement that slavery generated and flourished among the previous occupants of the continent, namely the British colonies situated on the eastern seaboard of North America-where the institution in question lived and died-the colonists being subject to their majesties, the monarchs in power during the aforementioned period. Thus, it may be concluded that the United States of America inherited slavery when it won its freedom from that monarchy, and had this unseemly practice not appeared under the kingdom, there is little reason to conclude it would have done so under the republic.

Many attempts to outlaw slavery predated the war between the states. In 1652, members of the Rhode Island Congress passed a law that gained that very point, and in 1735 Georgia sought the same. However, resistance from the British Parliament to universally outlaw the practice made its illegality virtually impossible. Similar attempts continued after British rule had been thrown off.
Indeed, the Constitution of 1787 had not been ratified before several astute individuals, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison among them, attempted to pass legislation in the Continental Congress prohibiting the practice of slavery among the states. Yet, at this point, those opposed to slavery faced a greater impediment: slave owners now governed themselves and could make their own laws. As history has shown, slave owners refused to comply. The conflict over and debate upon this issue at such an early

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