The Anti-Slavery United States Of America

Once again yesterday I was told by a black who was denouncing the Republican Party, "Blacks built this country. We are owed anything we get."

The truth is totally at odds with this new myth that has become gospel in the black community. The truth? At the time of the civil war the overwhelming majority of America was composed of free states that were much richer than the poor slave states. Free labor was always vastly more productive than slave labor and slavery in the South, far from being the basis of its wealth for any but a few slave holders, was a contributing factor to its poverty. Free people, overwhelmingly white, built this nation.

Blacks were a minority within the minority of states that permitted slavery. The majority of states and the vast majority of American people opposed slavery. It was clear that as the nation expanded, this abomination was going to be ended. That reality is why the slave states seceded.

As statistical proof. At the time of the civil war, the Union was composed of 20 states with 23 million people. The Confederacy was composed of 11 states with a population of 9 million - of which 4 million were slaves. 5 million fighting 23 million left little realistic chance for victory, either in war or politics. In the war to preserve our free Republic which we had created in the previous century, and to end slavery within our nation which the majority had come to see as an unacceptable abomination, 300 thousand white soldiers died in that cause for the Union. Thousands of letters home from Union soldiers during the war specifically proclaim their pride fighting in the just cause of ending slavery.

Today the vast majority of blacks do not concede that these true facts are true. They proclaim that ALL America existed off slavery. ALL wealth was created by slaves. The death of Lincoln (inconveniently for the new myth - at the hands of a Southerner) is a guilt shared by ALL whites who, according to the myth, ALL opposed his emancipation proclamation. The black community does not differentiate between whites who fought for the freedom of slaves and whites who fought to keep them slaves. ALL whites are evil goes the myth.

Nothing will persuade most blacks that blacks are better off in America than blacks in any other nation in the world. Not even the fact that nearly half of the black population in America today came here after slavery ended or are descended from these black immigrants. Significantly more Africans have freely chosen to come to America than were ever imported in slave ships.

Yet blacks still want reparations from descendants of the whites that freed them of their chains. How is that just? Starting from this hostile disagreement over who is owed what, how do we ever reach a place in our nation where race can become irrelevant and King's dream can become the reality?