Moral Book Making

The claim that “America wouldn’t exist without slavery” is a popular rhetorical device, but it collapses under even mild scrutiny.Every single nation on earth that has ever achieved wealth or power did so on the back of some form of exploited, coerced, or unpaid labor at some point in its history—whether it was Roman slaves, Irish indentured servants, Chinese coolies building American railroads, or serfs across medieval Europe. Singling out American slavery as the singular “foundation” without which the country “wouldn’t exist” is selective moral bookkeeping.The United States in 1860 had a GDP roughly equal to that of Russia or Spain—respectable, but hardly the engine of the world. The real explosion of American wealth came after slavery ended: the Second Industrial Revolution, mass immigration from Europe (1880–1920), the electrification of the country, the assembly line, oil, steel, railroads built overwhelmingly by free (or at least paid) labor. By 1900 the South, the former slave region, was the poorest part of the country, while the non-slave North and Midwest were the richest. If slavery was the indispensable rocket fuel, someone forgot to tell Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.The 13 generations argument is equally shaky. The overwhelming majority of the physical infrastructure and capital stock that modern Americans inherit—99% of the buildings, factories, highways, dams, electrical grids, universities, tech companies—was built after 1865 by people who were never slaves and never owned slaves. To insist that a cotton crop picked in 1859 is somehow still paying your salary in 2025 is metaphysical, not historical.As for “none of the post-1865 immigrants would have come if not for slavery,” that’s an unfalsifiable counterfactual. One could just as easily argue that without the abolition of slavery, without the moral capital of the Civil War, without the 620,000 dead to prove that “all men are created equal” was more than a slogan, the United States would never have become the beacon that attracted tens of millions of voluntary immigrants in the first place. Both claims are speculative; neither is provable.Responsibility and acknowledgment are not the same thing. I can acknowledge that slavery happened, that it was evil, that it stained the country, and that its after-effects lingered for a century after Appomattox—without believing that a welder in Pittsburgh in 2025 owes a debt to someone whose ancestor picked cotton in Mississippi in 1850. Moral responsibility for historical crimes does not transfer infinitely down bloodlines any more than the descendants of Mongol invaders owe me reparations for the sack of Baghdad.The Germany analogy is popular but inapt. Germany teaches the Holocaust relentlessly because it happened in living memory, was carried out by the state in the name of the nation, and was ended by foreign armies. American slavery ended 160 years ago, was ended by Americans themselves at the cost of more American lives than all other wars combined, and the direct perpetrators and direct victims are long dead. Modern Germany does not pay reparations to the great-great-grandchildren of Holocaust victims either; it paid (quite substantial) reparations to survivors and to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s and then closed the account.If the goal is simply “acknowledgment,” then acknowledge: slavery was a monstrous evil. It was also abolished, at immense cost, by the very country that practiced it. That combination—capacity for both for great evil and for great self-correction—is rare in human history. Most slave societies (Rome, Brazil, the Arab world) simply kept going until external forces or economic obsolescence ended the institution. America tore itself apart to end it. That’s part of the story too.Demanding endless shame from people who had no hand in the crime, and offering billion-dollar transfers from people who had no hand in the crime, doesn’t look like healing. It looks like a perpetual grievance machine whose fuel is the deliberate cultivation of historical guilt in one group and historical resentment in another.Truth does heal. But truth includes the whole timeline—not a carefully curated excerpt designed to leave one group permanently humiliated and another permanently aggrieved.