Loren Schweninger

The Wealth of Races: The Present Value of Benefits from Past Injustices.

Introduction Overview and Summary Forty Acres and a Mule: Placing a Price Tag on Oppression Economic History and the Current Benefits and Costs of Slavery Past History and Current Policy: The Legacy of Slavery Who Pays for Slavery? An Appraisal of the Estimated Rates of Slave Exploitation Slavery and the Economics of Discrimination Black Labor in the American Economy since Emancipation: What Are the Legacies of History? A Calculation and Comparison of the Current Benefits of Slavery and an Analysis of Who Benefits Estimated Present Value of Income Diverted during Slavery Black Exploitation and White Benefits: The Civil War Income Revolution Slave Exploitation in Neoclassical Economics: Criticism and an Alternative Direction Achieving Racial Equality through Restitution Racial Inequality and Reparations An Illustrative Estimate: The Present Value of the Benefits from Racial Discrimination, 1929-1969 Income Transfers: Are They Compensation for Past Discrimination? The Social Debt to Blacks: A Case for Affirmative Action What Was Lost: The Cost of Slavery and Discrimination for Blacks Achieving Parity through Reparations Conclusions Selected Bibliography Index

The underside of slavery: The internal economy, self‐hire, and quasi‐freedom in Virginia, 1780–1865

From the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars have shown an keen interest in various aspects of black life in Virginia. In 1902, J. C. Ballagh published A History of Slavery in Virginia in. Johns Hopkins Press series on race and slavery; and between 19t),; and 1930, Beverley Munford, Charles Ambler, John Russell, and Theodore Whitfield wrote on such subjects as the anti-slavery movement, the origin and legal status of free blacks, and the political crises following the publication of David Walkers Appeal and Nat Turners slave revolt. During the 1930s and 1940s, black scholars Luther Porter Jackson and James. Hugo Johnston analyzed the economic, religious, social, and cultural condition of slaves and free Negroes in the state. Jacksons study, Free Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830-1860, culminated more than twenty years of research. In the past quarter-century, historians have explored such topics as slave rebelliousness, industrial slavery, free black slave owners, emigration, and the criminal justice system, among others.

Black Owned Businesses in the South, 1790-1880

This essay analyzes the changing configuration of black-owned businesses in the South over nearly a century. It divides the region into two sections—the Lower South and the Upper South—and examines changes that occurred prior to 1840, during the late antebellum era, and as a result of the Civil War. It uses a “wealth model” to define various business groups, and then creates business occupational categories based on the listings in various sources, including the U.S. censuses for 1850, 1860, and 1870. The article compares and contrasts the wealth holdings among various groups of blacks in business, and it analyzes, within a comparative framework, slave entrepreneurship, rural vs. urban business activity, color—black or mulatto—as a variable in business ownership, and slave ownership among blacks engaged in business.

Kenneth and John B. Rayner and the limits of southern dissent

In this fascinating story of two nineteenth-century southern political mavericks, Gregg Cantrell details their fate as dissenters, telling a human story at once heroic and shameful, hopeful and tragic. The two mavericks were the slaveholding congressman and planter Kenneth Rayner of North Carolina and his illegitimate mulatto son, John B. Rayner of Texas. Born in 1808, Kenneth served in the North Carolina legislature for twenty years and in Congress for six as a Whig. In 1854 he became a major leader of the American (Know-Nothing) party. His staunch Unionism and a willingness to cooperate with Republicans incurred the wrath of his fellow southerners. After supporting secession, working for a peace settlement during the war, writing a biography of Andrew Johnson, and going broke in a grandiose cotton-planting venture, he joined the Republican parry and held federal offices in the Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur administrations. Kenneth Rayners son, John, was born in 1850. His mother was a slave. The elder Rayner acknowledged his paternity and provided a college education. John held local offices in North Carolina during Reconstruction, then led a migration of black farmworkers to Texas in 1880. There he preached, taught school, and took part in his adopted states prohibition battles. A master orator, he joined the Populist party in 1892 and soon became its preeminent black leader. After the turn of the century blacks were disfranchised and Rayner, like his father before him, found his political career in ruins. He spent the rest of his days working for black education and trying to preserve some voice for blacks in southern politics. Both men were out of step with the rapidlychanging politics of their time. Each eventually compromised his principles and personal dignity in futile efforts to salvage a way of life that earlier actions had jeopardized. Both were devoted to traditional republican principles, which estranged them from the Souths major politica

John Hope Franklin, Legal Scholar and Teacher

On March 25, 2009, John Hope Franklin died of congestive heart failure at the age of ninety-four. Obituary notices and magazine articles appeared across the country, eulogizing his public career, his academic career, and his scholarly career, but little was said concerning his writings and teachings about the law. Among his many interests and publications, however, and perhaps closest to his heart, was history of the law and how the laws worked in practice. From the beginning of his career he emphasized how African Americans were forced to struggle against specific state statutes and federal codes designed to regulate their movements, curtail their activities, and deny them equal rights. In fact, they were the only group in U.S. history, except for the Chinese, under Exclusion Act in 1882, who confronted such laws. In his doctoral dissertation, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860, completed in 1941 and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1943, he devoted fully one-fourth of the 226 pages of text to the “Legal Status of the Free Negro,” discussing a broad range of legal and constitutional issues to show how free blacks could be sold as slaves, arrested for entering the state, jailed for traveling without papers, and denied full citizenship. Yet, they were not denied a trial by jury, or access to legal counsel, and prior to 1835, they could vote in state and local elections. Among Franklin’s more than twenty books written or edited perhaps none is more important than From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, the first edition published in 1947 by Alfred A. Knopf. Now in its eighth edition and having sold 3.5 million copies and translated into five languages, From Slavery to Freedom discusses many aspects of legal history, from the Black Codes in the Caribbean and South America, to laws and regulations in colonial America, the conflicts between the ideals of liberty and the defense of human bondage during the American Revolution, and the “Conservative Reaction” at the Constitutional Convention. The Founding Fathers, Franklin asserted, not only condoned the “peculiar institution” but also prolonged the Atlantic Slave trade for twenty years and permitted slave owners to retrieve their human property. “No Person held to Service or Labour in one state, under the Laws thereof, escaping to another, shall,

Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862 (review)

lights extreme differences between the southern states and even parts of a state like Tennessee. In the most interesting part of this section, Kolchin explores how memory of the past has hidden portions of the South’s history, thereby making it white, pro-Confederate, and antiReconstruction. In the third section, Kolchin compares the South to “other Souths”—regions outside the United States that have a similar sense of self-identity or similar experiences. He argues that such comparisons reduce parochialism, as well as help create and disprove generalizations. Among the well-known fruits of comparison are the observation that slave treatment in the antebellum South was not physically harsh, but race relations were unusually rigid. Kolchin also observes that the Civil War was only “a midlevel conoict” in terms of death and destruction (87). Having looked at other efforts to create a sense of nationhood, Kolchin argues that because the ideological reason for a separate nation rested upon slavery, supporters of the Confederacy had almost no chance of creating “national commitment at home or national support abroad” (92). The author closes with an extended comparison between the South and Russia that highlights the importance of race and racism in the South. Those interested in interdisciplinary history will and this book useful on many counts. It offers a convenient summary of much of the literature on the South, particularly the comparative literature. It makes a vigorous case for the type of comparative history that rests on deep knowledge of a speciac place set in a broad context. Toward this end, Kolchin offers three models for viewing and comparing speciac areas— with its obvious point of contrast next door, with its changing internal regions, and with roughly similar areas scattered around the globe. Kolchin also makes an eloquent plea for the importance of southern history. The history of the South abounds with questions of signiacance to all historians, questions such as “continuity versus change, slavery and freedom, the meaning of ‘race,’ the formation of national identity, the struggle between local or regional and centralized authority” (117–118). As such, the South offers a valuable point of comparison to all historians.