Considering the Case for Slavery Reparations: There's no just way to decide who should pay whom.

• Author: Grennes, Thomas J.

There is great current interest in the history of slavery in America and its legacy. What has stimulated this, 157 years after slavery was abolished? The Black Lives Matter movement that emerged following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and the New York Times's 1619 Project brought new attention to the problem of racism in U.S. history. Also, persistent achievement gaps between African Americans and other Americans raise questions about the ongoing socioeconomic effects of enslavement and subsequent segregation and racism.

Enslavement took away part of the humanity of previously free Africans, an extreme example of denying equal opportunities to workers. As property owned by someone else, slaves were reduced to the status of farm animals and other possessions. In their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and (now) University of Chicago political scientist James A. Robinson identified slavery and similar institutions that rely on coercion as major barriers to prosperity. (See "The Wealth--and Poverty--of Nations," Spring 2013.) Free workers can choose their skills, their location, and their employment (including self-employment), but slaves are denied those choices.

The misery of slavery and its lingering socioeconomic effects, along with the effects of segregation and racism, have inspired calls for the payment of reparations to the victims of slavery and their families. Liberals appreciate the notion of just compensation for harm. However, as we will see, reparations for slavery are subject to complexities and uncertainties that make a just compensation scheme unlikely.

HISTORY OF SLAVERY

An appreciation of the history of slavery in America and its connection to the global history of slavery is important to considering the reparations issue.

Although slavery is universally condemned today and is illegal nearly everywhere, it was common for most of human history all over the world. Enslavement of different groups, including Africans, was widespread in the ancient world. The Aztecs practiced slavery before the arrival of Columbus. Spanish colonists brought African slaves to Jamaica by 1513, Portuguese traders brought African slaves to Brazil as early as 1526, and Hernando de Soto brought African slaves to Spanish Florida in 1539. Of all the African slaves who were transported to the Americas, only about 4% came to the lands that became the United States, and most of them arrived during the colonial period when British, French, Spanish, and other colonial powers ruled the land.

Demand for slaves / Most popular discussions of American slavery focus on the end-demand for slaves by plantation owners in the South, and the intermediate demand by European slave traders who transported slaves from Africa to America. These end-demanders were almost exclusively white men, and their slaves were almost exclusively black. Slave owners were prominent during the colonial period and in the early years of the nation. For example, 10 of the first 12 U.S. presidents, including New Yorker Martin Van Buren, were slave owners.

If an observer looked solely at American slave owners and European slave traders, the history of American slavery would look exclusively racial. However, the slave trade was much more complex and multiracial than is commonly understood.

Suppliers of slaves/To carry out the massive Atlantic slave trade, there had to be suppliers. Among them were Africans who captured and enslaved other Africans and sold them for export. Slaveholders in America and elsewhere in the New World did not travel to the interior of Africa and capture previously free Africans. It was much easier to buy African slaves from European slave traders who bought them from African suppliers on the west coast of Africa and transport them across the Atlantic.

Africans who enslaved other Africans used a complex supply chain to move their human chattel to the continent's ports. Some European governments protected this trade by building forts on the so-called Slave Coast, such as the ones at Elmina in modern Ghana, Calabar in modern Nigeria, Luanda in...