Quote Originally Posted by cheeseburger
Look, I don't know what youre trying to prove. 7.5/19.5 is about 1/3. The U.S. government knew about the practice of slavery going on in the south. They supported it. There was even an entire buisness based on it.

...?

As soon as you agree with me that the United States of America did something totally inhumane and contrary to just about any civil rights law, its a starting point for an apology.

Again, it is not a personal apology. Let me use a more recent analogy. Hypothetically, *If* The Government supported torture, in say Abu Ghraib, then The Government should apologize. Does that mean that I, a citizen of the U.S., tortured people in my backyard? No. However, they should still apologize.
You still haven't made your case for blaming either the majority of the people or the government of the United States for slavery so no, I'm not about to agree with you on that point.

In fact you seem to like skip over that part, which must be convenient since if this were a court case that's the section where you'd prove culpability. Instead you seem to want to go straight to punishment.

Umm....clearly math was not your strong suit. Let me help you out here

In this case you had 7.5million Southern whites (but only 25% of those owned slaves so that would be 1.87), and 19.5 million Northern whites....to come up with the percentage you have to first add the two populations together (7.5+19.5=27) to get the total U.S. population at the time. The answer thus is 27 million in total population.
Since what we want to know is what percentage the Southern white slave owners represent of the total, we divide 1.87 by 27 (1.87 million/27 million) which yields .069 or...translated as a percentage, 6.9%. That means that just 6.9% of the population of the United States owned slaves at that time.

Alternatively, you seem to support the concept that ALL southern whites should be held reponsible for slavery(even though 3/4th of them didn't own slaves and some were in fact indentured servants themselves... ). In that case then, take the 7.5 and divide it by 27 and that comes out to 27.7%....which means that either way...again...overwhelmingly the population of the United States did not support slavery (either 93.1% or 72.3% depending on which number you prefer but either way its a huge majority of people who aren't supporting slavery).

Your more recent analogy is most certainly flawed in the following way.

The torture of detainees at Abu Graib was conducted by direct employees of the United States government...the U.S. military, thru the members of the U.S. Army and other branches of service. In this case, obviously the government, thru its officials and officers is responsible for the conduct of its employees.

Nowhere am I aware of any case where the United States government (thru it's officials or officers) either owned or sold slaves or in some way participated in slavery. In fact, in researching, not even any of the anti-slavery or pro-reparations sites can point to a single incident where the U.S. government owned or sold slaves.

That means that in order to make your argument, you're saying that by simply failing to take direct action and stop the practice, the United States government is responsible and therefore should be forced to pay reparations (reparations being a punitive measure under the law).

If that argument is correct, then lets take another recent example. The employees of Enron perpetrated a fraud in which millions of people, both stockholders and employees lost money. The Federal government was aware of this and had thru the Justice Department, FTC and SEC filed suits against them, but under your argument, I should be able to sue the Federal government to recoup my loss because hypthetically they failed to take direct action and seize the company and its assets. That's great because then I'm not responsible for making a bad decision and buying stock, nor is the the company responsible...it's the U.S. government that's responsible because they didn't stop it.

Your argument fails to acknowledge that individuals are responsible for their own conduct unless under direct control or cohersion from some outside force. In the case of Abu Graib, the individual members of the U.S. military are directly responsible for their conduct, but because they operated under the direct control of the U.S. government, the federal government is thus also partially responsible for their conduct.

Individual slave owners were most certainly responsible for their conduct up to the time of the emancipation of the slaves, but they were not in any way being ordered, controlled or forcibly coherced by the federal government to own or use slaves. Therefore, the U.S. federal government should not be held responsible for their actions.

Incidentally, you failed to answer any of my questions regarding who's going to pay the reparations you so vehemently support.