this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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What would the lost wages in their entirety amount to?
Now that would be really hard to figure out, you'd have to determine what sort of jobs were done as slaves and how many hours. I don't think slavers kept those sorts of records in the antebellum South.
Even granting the value of 40 acres and a mule plus 200 years of interest to descendants of slaves would be a challenge.
I think they may have, as slavery was an industry so were plantations. The planters as well as the slavers probably kept meticolous books and records. I assume such as they probably lacked any guilty conscience for their crimes.
I will look it up once I am back home again and have access to the library.
I'd expect large plantations to have records of how many slaves they own and production numbers. Perhaps one could extrapolate from that an estimate of labor hours per slave, but individual slaves' productivity and hours worked, I'd be surprised if this was possible. Smaller scale slave owners might not have been so meticulous about record keeping and much documentation may be lost to time. It is regarded as a shameful institution today, discouraging holding on to such things.
I'm interested in what you find!
Some speculate nothing at this point since generational wealth doesn't tend to stick around for long,
The more sensible solution is instead paying reparations for red lining since the fiscal affects of that are directly observable today without argument over generational entropy, and because it's arguably still ongoing.