Sorry Apology

Slavery is a vile crime against humanity and human dignity. America to its sorrow and shame allowed slavery in some states from early colonial times until the end of the Civil War. However, the congressional resolution of apology for slavery is an act of trivializing inanity. It is inane because there is no one left to apologize to. Everyone who suffered under slavery in America is dead and has been for a very long time, and so is everyone who was to blame for it. Apologies from Congress to present day descendents of antebellum slaves are almost as silly as apologies from the Italian parliament to Americans of English descent for enslaving their ancestors under the Roman Empire would be.

This particular resolution of apology seems to make errors on some fairly basic elements of history such as missing the fact that there were free states and slave states. It also, by fairly clear implication, lends support to the false and morally repugnant notion that, while slavery and serfdom may have been ubiquitous throughout history, non-Western peoples practiced some sort of nice slavery that was more or less okay compared to the mean slavery of the Old South. So in its resolution the House got some of the facts wrong, committed a moral outrage, and took action about a hundred and forty years too late – all in all a fairly typical performance for that body.

The resolution also apologizes for Jim Crow, and, at least on the surface, that makes more sense. There are still many people alive who suffered under Jim Crow laws before they were overturned in the 1950’s and 1960’s. However, even there the apology is poorly focused. The population of the nation as a whole is not to blame for Jim Crow. A large majority of the people in the country today either were not born or were not yet adults when Jim Crow ended. They have no responsibility for it and nothing for which to apologize. Millions more who were adults in those days either opposed it or at least had nothing to do with supporting it and are likewise innocent. The outrages were the responsibility of specific people who acted over time through particular organizations to implement Jim Crow. A quick look at history will suggest how an apology might have been more to the point.

There is one large, successful, and ongoing political organization in the United States that bears a major historic responsibility for slavery and Jim Crow, and that organization is the Democratic Party. The Democrats were the party of the Southern slave states and their northern apologists. Robert Ingersoll was essentially correct when he said that, during the Civil War, not every Democrat was a traitor, but every traitor was a Democrat. (The Republican Party, by contrast, was founded in opposition to slavery, and abolished it within fifteen years of the party’s founding.) After the Civil War, a Republican federal government and Union soldiers protected the civil and voting rights of former slaves in the South. Black Americans entered public and commercial life as citizens, and black men were elected to both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Eventually the troops left, and former rebels and their allies gained control of the southern states and reestablished one-party rule by the Democrats. The creation and perpetuation of Jim Crow in the former Confederate States were almost entirely the work of politicians belonging to the Democratic Party. A few of those responsible for its continuing after World War II are still active in the party and in the Congress.

Given that, one might conclude that if the House were of a mind to apologize, a better resolution of apology for Jim Crow might have been made in the name of the Democratic Party. That would of course have quite unfairly blamed many Democrats, past and present, who had nothing to do with Jim Crow. But it would have come closer to being fair and appropriate than the one they passed.