Have you ever seriously looked at the lyrics for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”? It’s an abolitionist song, and it’s stark and appalling. The theme of it is that slavery was America’s original sin, that it must be redeemed in oceans of blood, and that the Union Army is the instrument of the Almighty for that purpose. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Oceans of blood there in fact were. The last estimate of casualties I saw was around 600,000. Imagine the impact that would have had relative to the population at the time. Virtually everyone in the country would have had a family member or a friend who was killed or wounded in the war. The national pain would have been beyond description.
And so, the next time you hear someone with a short memory say that we as a nation haven’t truly paid the debt for slavery, tell him our ancestors already gave beyond his wildest dreams.