America is a nation that has evolved over time, of which, some of the principles and rights that we now pretty much take for granted in America, were the type of thing that were well-nigh impossible back in the 18th or 19th centuries. So then, to our modern ears, it does seem strange, wholly unfair, and just plain wrong, that when it came to slaves and slave owners, back in that time when slavery was legal within America, that propositions having to do with slaves, slave owners and freedom, basically only considered the viewpoint of what sort of compensation or incentive could be provided to that slave owner to thus encourage them to relinquish the “property” that they owned in human persons. The answer seemed to be, to provide monetary compensation to those slave owners, of which, we do so find that in Washington DC, that in 1862, President Lincoln signed a legislative bill that emancipated those slaves in Washington DC, in which the slave owners that owned those slaves and were also loyal to the Union cause, were suitably compensated. In other words, the policy of the United States at its highest governmental level was to compensate the slave owner but nary a dime to those so enslaved.
No doubt, it certainly makes logical sense that for people that owned property, legally, that the only conceivable way to get them to relinquish the hold of that peculiar property, would be to provide them with some sort of compensation to such. After all, when it came to slaves, those slaves, were sold for a price, and subsequently many slave owners invested time and energy into their slaves, thus signifying that to voluntarily relinquish their right to a healthy slave would necessitate some sort of compensating benefit to those slave owners, for having done so. None of that, seems especially unreasonable – what is unreasonable, though, is a failure to recognize that enslaved human beings that owned nothing, and were enslaved for no other reason than humankind’s inhumanity and greed to its own; deserved and necessitated either some sort of compensation for having been enslaved or, if not that, fair access to the tools of the trade for them thus to make good on their life, through valued accouterments such as land, livestock, or similar.
What has to be recognized, is that freedom is not all that, when the fundamentals of what a given person needs to be at liberty, are not at their disposal – especially when they have been precluded from being property educated, have no monetary assets, no tools, no land, and pretty much no means to make an independent honest living, because there is no real opportunity for them to do such. That type of freedom is a false freedom, which does not reflect well what America is supposed to so represent. The problem, then, that America seems not to understand, is that which is unjust and is never rectified or corrected in a suitable manner, lends itself to becoming not only a cancer upon the soul of America, but also an ongoing injustice that needs to be dealt with forthrightly, in the here and now, for that which is wrong, still needs to be made right.