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About reparations, a skeptical U.S. President Barack Obama in 2016 told reparations proponent Ta-Nehisi Coates that it would divide the country. Obama said: “It is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to make that right. … So the bottom line is that it’s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts.”
The polls bear Obama out.
Just 26% of Americans support reparations. In fact, according to conservative Michael Medved, since so many of today’s non-black Americans are descendants of post-Civil War immigrants, as few as 5% of today’s whites have a “generational” connection to slavery. University of North Carolina historian Joseph T. Glatthaar, author of Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee, estimates that 4.9% of the population, or 24.9% of households in slave states, owned slaves.
Of the free blacks living in the South, some were slave owners. Famed historian Carter G. Woodson found that in 1830, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves. Historian Roger McGrath notes: “Every one of the 13 states and most of the major cities that would become part of the Confederacy had substantial numbers of black slaveowners. New Orleans by both numbers and by proportion had the most. A staggering 28% of free blacks in the Crescent City owned slaves.”
Those we call “Native Americans” also owned black slaves. McGrath writes: “Accompanying the Cherokee on their ‘Trail of Tears’ were some 2,000 black slaves. They were put to work on Cherokee farms in the new tribal home, raising cotton, corn, and garden crops, and tending hogs and cattle. … During the antebellum decade, slavery reached its peak among the Five Civilized Tribes. The Cherokee, numbering only about 20,000 themselves, owned nearly 5,000 black slaves; the Choctaw 2,500; the Creeks 2,000; and the Chickasaw and Seminole about a thousand each. To protect their slave property, the Five Civilized Tribes, except for a few dissident factions, sided with the Confederacy when the Civil War erupted.”
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