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Making Good on the Broken Promise of Reparations
Timothy H. O’Sullivan/Library of Congress
Formerly enslaved people preparing cotton for the gin on Smith’s plantation, Port Royal Island, South Carolina, 1861–1862
A bill calling for the federal government to “study and consider” how to provide reparations to African Americans for slavery has been introduced into every session of the US Congress for the last thirty years. The bill’s aim is “to address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the thirteen American colonies between 1619 and 1865.” Representative John Conyers, the primary sponsor of the bill, stated in 2017 just before he retired from the Congress, “I’m not giving up… Slavery is a blemish on this nation’s history, and until it is formally addressed, our country’s story will remain marked by this blight.” Through both Democratic and Republican control of the House, the bill only once got a hearing (in 2007)—but may again this year, since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voiced support for the proposal.
Most recently, three Democratic presidential candidates—Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Julián Castro—endorsed the concept of granting reparations to black Americans affected by slavery and racial discrimination.(By contrast, Senator Bernie Sanders decried the call for reparations as “divisive.”) David Brooks recently made the case for reparations on the editorial page of The New York Times, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s foundational essay on reparations from 2014 in The Atlantic has received renewed interest. It seems that the time for meaningful consideration of reparations for slavery may have finally arrived—154 years after the institution of slavery was formally abolished in the United States.
The ripening of this realization has emerged as a response to the intractability of African Americans’ second-class political status in the US and the undeniable historical roots of black poverty, including recent data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances showing that the typical black family has only 10 cents for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family. There is a ready and workable model of how to repair the intergenerational disadvantage suffered by black people in the US: in communities across the country, racial justice activists have developed creative legal measures to move control and ownership of land into black communities. A collective, land-based approach to reparations makes particular sense as a remedy to redress the dire injustice suffered by humans who were treated as property.
Today’s emerging embrace of the moral imperative of granting reparations for slavery to black people renews an unanswered call that dates back to the end of the Civil War. There was then a widely accepted notion that delivering justice to formerly enslaved people must entail something more than emancipation alone. Contemporary calls for reparations are premised on the notion that the past has enduring moral and material relevance today, that slavery, though outlawed, has an enduring afterlife, that this afterlife pervades American culture, and that we should face, know, and make amends for that past.
In fact, Union military and political leaders who were directly responsible for stewarding black people from enslavement into their new lives as freed people felt strongly that slavery was an atrocity and a theft that required compensation. Reparations were understood as both a remedy for the rape, torture, death, and destruction of millions of human souls, and a measure that recognized that freedom without material resources would lock black people into second-class status for generations to come. And so it did.
Land-based reparations were thus promised at the end of the Civil War, with ambitious programs undertaken in several significant communities in the South. In the Sea Islands off South Carolina, and on the plantations owned by the slaveholders Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph, just outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi, radical experiments in land redistribution to formerly enslaved people were undertaken explicitly as a form of reparation for slavery.
Indeed, the process of redistributive justice began well before the war was over, as early as 1861. On November 3 of that year, the largest attack fleet ever to sail under the US flag was amassed to capture Port Royal, South Carolina. Confederate white Islanders were clearly outgunned and outmanned, and three days later, nearly all of the local white men had packed their wives, children, and favorite “servants” (the innocuous term many slaveholders used for the people they enslaved) into boats and rowed to the mainland. Here, as elsewhere in the South, federal troops immediately emancipated the black people held in bondage in territory under northern military control. So, when federal troops assumed control of the Sea Islands, approximately 10,000 black people living on 189 plantations were immediately set free, more than a year before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Corbis via Getty Images
Five months later, in early 1862, Brigadier General Rufus Saxton assumed governorship of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. It quickly became clear to him that something more was owed the black people of the Sea Islands than emancipation into abject poverty. The Union general viewed the freed people as holding an equitable mortgage on the land, secured by their past unpaid wages, sweat, blood, and lost lives. According to Saxton:
They had been the only cultivators, their labor had given it all its value, the elements of its fertility were the sweat & blood of the negro so long poured out upon it, that it might be taken as composed of his own substance. The whole of it was under a foreclosed mortgage for generations of unpaid wages.
A teacher from Philadelphia who traveled to the Sea Islands to help educate freed people echoed Saxton’s argument: “If there is any class of people in the country who have priority of claim to the confiscated lands of the South, it certainly is that class who have by years of suffering and unrequited toil given to those lands any value they may now possess.” This plea to make land ownership a key component of freedom for black people is all the more compelling given that many slave-owners used slaves as collateral in order to purchase land in the ante-bellum period.
Thus began a huge project of allocating to freed people land that had been confiscated by the federal government from Confederate plantation owners who fled the Sea Islands and abandoned their property. The enterprise of providing such reparations in the form of land titles became official policy when, in January 1865, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, confiscating a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida, and into the mainland thirty miles from the coast. The order redistributed the roughly 400,000 acres of land to newly freed black families in forty-acre lots. On this land, Sherman ordered, “no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside,” and the freed people would be left to their own control.
Four months later, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. The daunting project of repairing the wounds of slavery through the issuance of “Sherman land titles” to newly freed black people continued, as did auctions of confiscated land in which freed people were able to purchase the land on which they had been enslaved, often collectively with pooled resources. These original land titles are housed in the National Archives, and when I viewed them last year, I was moved to see the Xs where freed people signed applications for land on which they and their people had, not long before, been enslaved. Next to the “X” for many freed people’s signatures are ink smudges seeming to bear witness to the trembling hands undertaking this remarkable act of freedom.
For instance, on January 29, 1864, ten formerly enslaved men and women filed a claim collectively for what had been the Gabriel Capers plantation:
Katherine Franke/The National Archives and Records Administration
Land Claim for the Gabriel Capers Plantation from records of the Internal Revenue Service (Record Group 58), January 29, 1864
Another group of freed people filed a claim for the Pleasant Point plantation, accompanied by a hand-drawn map indicating how they would share the parcels as a community:
Katherine Franke/The National Archives and Records Administration
Land Claim for the Pleasant Point Plantation from records of the Internal Revenue Service (Record Group 58), January 29, 1864
Timothy H. O’Sullivan/Library of Congress
Formerly enslaved people preparing cotton for the gin on Smith’s plantation, Port Royal Island, South Carolina, 1861–1862
A bill calling for the federal government to “study and consider” how to provide reparations to African Americans for slavery has been introduced into every session of the US Congress for the last thirty years. The bill’s aim is “to address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the thirteen American colonies between 1619 and 1865.” Representative John Conyers, the primary sponsor of the bill, stated in 2017 just before he retired from the Congress, “I’m not giving up… Slavery is a blemish on this nation’s history, and until it is formally addressed, our country’s story will remain marked by this blight.” Through both Democratic and Republican control of the House, the bill only once got a hearing (in 2007)—but may again this year, since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voiced support for the proposal.
Most recently, three Democratic presidential candidates—Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Julián Castro—endorsed the concept of granting reparations to black Americans affected by slavery and racial discrimination.(By contrast, Senator Bernie Sanders decried the call for reparations as “divisive.”) David Brooks recently made the case for reparations on the editorial page of The New York Times, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s foundational essay on reparations from 2014 in The Atlantic has received renewed interest. It seems that the time for meaningful consideration of reparations for slavery may have finally arrived—154 years after the institution of slavery was formally abolished in the United States.
The ripening of this realization has emerged as a response to the intractability of African Americans’ second-class political status in the US and the undeniable historical roots of black poverty, including recent data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances showing that the typical black family has only 10 cents for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family. There is a ready and workable model of how to repair the intergenerational disadvantage suffered by black people in the US: in communities across the country, racial justice activists have developed creative legal measures to move control and ownership of land into black communities. A collective, land-based approach to reparations makes particular sense as a remedy to redress the dire injustice suffered by humans who were treated as property.
Today’s emerging embrace of the moral imperative of granting reparations for slavery to black people renews an unanswered call that dates back to the end of the Civil War. There was then a widely accepted notion that delivering justice to formerly enslaved people must entail something more than emancipation alone. Contemporary calls for reparations are premised on the notion that the past has enduring moral and material relevance today, that slavery, though outlawed, has an enduring afterlife, that this afterlife pervades American culture, and that we should face, know, and make amends for that past.
In fact, Union military and political leaders who were directly responsible for stewarding black people from enslavement into their new lives as freed people felt strongly that slavery was an atrocity and a theft that required compensation. Reparations were understood as both a remedy for the rape, torture, death, and destruction of millions of human souls, and a measure that recognized that freedom without material resources would lock black people into second-class status for generations to come. And so it did.
Land-based reparations were thus promised at the end of the Civil War, with ambitious programs undertaken in several significant communities in the South. In the Sea Islands off South Carolina, and on the plantations owned by the slaveholders Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph, just outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi, radical experiments in land redistribution to formerly enslaved people were undertaken explicitly as a form of reparation for slavery.
Indeed, the process of redistributive justice began well before the war was over, as early as 1861. On November 3 of that year, the largest attack fleet ever to sail under the US flag was amassed to capture Port Royal, South Carolina. Confederate white Islanders were clearly outgunned and outmanned, and three days later, nearly all of the local white men had packed their wives, children, and favorite “servants” (the innocuous term many slaveholders used for the people they enslaved) into boats and rowed to the mainland. Here, as elsewhere in the South, federal troops immediately emancipated the black people held in bondage in territory under northern military control. So, when federal troops assumed control of the Sea Islands, approximately 10,000 black people living on 189 plantations were immediately set free, more than a year before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Corbis via Getty Images
Five months later, in early 1862, Brigadier General Rufus Saxton assumed governorship of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. It quickly became clear to him that something more was owed the black people of the Sea Islands than emancipation into abject poverty. The Union general viewed the freed people as holding an equitable mortgage on the land, secured by their past unpaid wages, sweat, blood, and lost lives. According to Saxton:
They had been the only cultivators, their labor had given it all its value, the elements of its fertility were the sweat & blood of the negro so long poured out upon it, that it might be taken as composed of his own substance. The whole of it was under a foreclosed mortgage for generations of unpaid wages.
A teacher from Philadelphia who traveled to the Sea Islands to help educate freed people echoed Saxton’s argument: “If there is any class of people in the country who have priority of claim to the confiscated lands of the South, it certainly is that class who have by years of suffering and unrequited toil given to those lands any value they may now possess.” This plea to make land ownership a key component of freedom for black people is all the more compelling given that many slave-owners used slaves as collateral in order to purchase land in the ante-bellum period.
Thus began a huge project of allocating to freed people land that had been confiscated by the federal government from Confederate plantation owners who fled the Sea Islands and abandoned their property. The enterprise of providing such reparations in the form of land titles became official policy when, in January 1865, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, confiscating a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida, and into the mainland thirty miles from the coast. The order redistributed the roughly 400,000 acres of land to newly freed black families in forty-acre lots. On this land, Sherman ordered, “no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside,” and the freed people would be left to their own control.
Four months later, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. The daunting project of repairing the wounds of slavery through the issuance of “Sherman land titles” to newly freed black people continued, as did auctions of confiscated land in which freed people were able to purchase the land on which they had been enslaved, often collectively with pooled resources. These original land titles are housed in the National Archives, and when I viewed them last year, I was moved to see the Xs where freed people signed applications for land on which they and their people had, not long before, been enslaved. Next to the “X” for many freed people’s signatures are ink smudges seeming to bear witness to the trembling hands undertaking this remarkable act of freedom.
For instance, on January 29, 1864, ten formerly enslaved men and women filed a claim collectively for what had been the Gabriel Capers plantation:
Katherine Franke/The National Archives and Records Administration
Land Claim for the Gabriel Capers Plantation from records of the Internal Revenue Service (Record Group 58), January 29, 1864
Another group of freed people filed a claim for the Pleasant Point plantation, accompanied by a hand-drawn map indicating how they would share the parcels as a community:
Katherine Franke/The National Archives and Records Administration
Land Claim for the Pleasant Point Plantation from records of the Internal Revenue Service (Record Group 58), January 29, 1864
