Every Drop of Blood

June 17, 2020 By Dan Truitt

America’s sin debt for slavery was paid for long ago.

“Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural, March 4, 1865

Delivered a scant forty-one days before Lincoln gave, as he himself put it in his address at Gettysburg, the “last full measure of devotion,” our sixteenth president’s language sings, it soars; it is high poetry. Somebody called Lincoln “that sad poet of a president,” words which capture pretty completely what in essence this great man was. The only other American public figure who has even arguably come close to wielding the English language so profoundly and effectively is Martin Luther King. And it is no coincidence that both men were animated by the same cause, in different iterations...........

The common accepted death toll for the American Civil war is 618,000. That figure was recently reliably revised upward to750,000. At any rate, I decided to compare that number with the total number of Africans imported as slaves to the continental US throughout her colonial and national history. I was wondering, frankly, whether the life of at least one American taken during the Civil War, of which its proximate cause was the existence and spread of slavery, was balanced out for every African brought here.

American historian Henry Louis Gates says the following:

“Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.”.................. To Read More.....