Isn't it remotely possible that the legacy of slavery has done serious harm to all of us? Moreover, shouldn't we at take into consideration that there are a great may ways to acknowledge the evil of slavery, and the complicity of a good many of our past statesmen, perhaps even most, in its perpetuation? The issue of slavery, and the damage it has done to all Americans, is deeply engrained in our nation's history. We can, broadly speaking, refer to the American political tradition as a species of liberalism. Those of our ancestors who wanted to reconcile the ownership of slaves with the social contractarian liberalism of the founders faced a tricky problem. They solved it by emphasizing the paternal benevolence of slavery, and the perpetual childlike nature of those people qualified to be enslaved. Guys like John C. Calhoun (or in Virginia, Stringfellow, Dew, or Fitzhugh) suggested that slavery was good for the slaves because it civilized and christianized them, just so long, of course, as they remained under the paternal supervision of the slave owners. The character of American racism stems from this brilliant synthesis of liberalism and its antithesis--the slave could not be entrusted to exercise responsible adult self-government, and thus was unfit for citizenship. Its a mistake then to call racism "illiberal." Rather, the peculiar nature of American racism derives from the effort that its most able advocates extended to reconcile the circumstances of perpetual chattel plantation slavery with the liberalism of Locke, and after him Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and the rest of the founders. What had been a racism based on English ethno-centrism became fused with the American liberal tradition. Or to put it another way, the corruption represented by slavery extended pretty deeply into various influential strains of American political thought. This corruption, needless to say, extended well past the ratification of the 13th Amendment. By the time slavery ended, the corruption was deeply entrenched, and it permeated American public thought well into the 20th century. It received a strong nudge from social Darwinism in the late 19th century, and from the development of Eugenics thought in the 20th. The last professor committed to teaching Eugenics retired from UVA in 1954, and the influence of Eugenics thinking extended well into the 1970s in the state's mental health institutions. The explicit repudiation of this variant of racism is, relatively speaking, a recent phenomenon. Reparation or apology for the corruption that slavery represented, and which, as I have argued above, extended well beyond the simple ownership of slaves, does not have to take the form of cash transfers. Its pretty easy to see why that is not an option that we have to take seriously, if for no other reason than it would have the perverse effect of accentuating racist thought in the short term (by introducing a calculus of racial genealogy reminiscent of the miscegenation laws of early 20th century Virginia). But there are other ways to repay the debt, and to acknowledge publically not only the crime, but the deep taint it left behind. For example, we have an excellent and well funded museum on the mall in Washington DC dedicated to the study and memory of an historical crime that did not take place in the U.S., and in which, the U.S. was not involved to anywhere near the same degree as it was in the crime of slavery. Why is there no museum dedicated to the study of plantation slavery in our nation's capital, in the space we as a people set aside to allocate to the memorialization of our heritage? Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D. Department of History James Madison University To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html