THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Tuesday, September 3, 2019 |A
Reparation
By Lawsuit
Sweet Taste of Liberty
By W. Caleb McDaniel
(Oxford, 340 pages, $27.95)BOOKSHELF| By Fergus M. Bordewich
F
ew topics are as fraught as the demand for reparations
to African-Americans for their ancestors’ experience
of slavery. Even people who believe that repayment is
owed differ about what form it ought to take. The form it
might have taken early on, in the wake of the Civil War, was
the oft-cited promise of “forty acres and a mule” (minus the
mule, the phrase comes from William Tecumseh Sherman),
but it was never adopted as an official policy and was far
from a real promise. It does, however, express the most
modest form of reparation that the government might have
offered to freed men and women at the time. In the event,
as we know, they were abandoned to the Ku Klux Klan and
crushing economic repression.
In “Sweet Taste of Liberty,” W. Caleb McDaniel, a
professor of history at Rice University, describes one former
slave’s quest for reparation. His superbly written chronicle
tells the story of a twice-enslaved woman, Henrietta Wood,
who in the 1870s took one of
her enslavers to court and
miraculously won a settlement.
Wood was born around 1820
and grew up on a plantation in
northern Kentucky. She was sold
several times before she became
the property of a woman who
then moved to Cincinnati and
freed her in 1848. After working
in boarding houses for a few
years, Wood found her life
suddenly changed. In 1853 the
woman who employed her invited
her on a carriage ride across the
Ohio River into the slave state of
Kentucky, ostensibly just to keep her
company (“I have some friends to see, and we can
get back in time for supper”). Betrayed, Wood was handed
over on the spot to a slave-dealing kidnapper.
Since the documents that would prove Wood’s freedom
were locked away in Cincinnati, there was little she could do.
Like thousands before her, she was sold south to Mississippi
for agricultural labor. She eventually wound up in Texas, on
a plantation so isolated that she didn’t know the Civil War
had ended until months after Appomattox. During this
second enslavement she gave birth to a son, likely the result
of rape by one of her enslavers, Mr. McDaniel surmises.
In certain ways, Wood’s experience resembles that of
Solomon Northup, a free black musician who was kidnapped
from Washington, D.C., in the 1840s and sold into slavery in
Louisiana. His 1853 autobiography, “Twelve Years a Slave,”
was the source for the 2013 film by the same name. In
contrast to Northup’s powerful but plainly told account,
Wood’s story, as presented by Mr. McDaniel, abounds with
contextual detail. He deftly integrates court records with
fine-grained background stories of Wood’s enslavers and
lawyers, all the while presenting a panorama of antebellum
and post-Civil War America.
Although Wood left few records in her own voice, it is
clear that she was a determined woman whose desire for
justice, and sense of her own dignity, remained undiminished
even after her slave ordeals and the serpentine, 8-year
odyssey of her lawsuit. Her case, Mr. McDaniel writes, was
not about a single violent act “but about the long period in
which she was ‘deprived of her time and the value of her
labor.’” The case, in other words, was about slavery itself.The story itself is rich with vivid personalities and
unexpected turns. Wood’s kidnapper and the target of her
lawsuit, a hustler named Zebulon Ward, proved to be a
steadfast Unionist during the Civil War, though never a
friend to emancipation. Her best lawyer, Harvey Myers, was
a Radical Republican who campaigned for black votes during
Reconstruction but was shot dead by an estranged husband
in an unrelated case. The judge who ultimately ruled in her
favor had once run as a candidate for the Confederate
Congress and had owned slaves but viewed her sufferings as
“a case of peculiar and complicated oppression.” Wood’s
story reached the public thanks mainly to an article in the
Cincinnati Commercial written by the peripatetic half-Greek,
half-Irish Lafcadio Hearn, who years later would become
famous as the expatriate who helped introduce Japanese
culture to the West.
After the war, Wood toiled again at domestic work and
struggled to raise her son in the slums of Cincinnati. Mean-
while, Zebulon Ward made a fortune in Arkansas by
arranging to lease the state penitentiary and squeezing profit
from the inmates’ labor. He was praised in the local press as
the “new” Southern man, a model of “good spirits and go-
aheadativeness.” When he died in 1894, he left an estate of
$600,000, making him in today’s terms a multi-millionaire.
In 1870 Wood sued Ward for $20,000; in the end, she got
$2,500. She was one of only a very few former slaves—the
actual number is unknown—who received any kind of
payment for their years of servitude. The money wrested
from Ward certainly didn’t make Wood rich. But it was
enough for her to buy a house and send her son, Arthur, to
school. In 1889 Arthur became one of the first black
graduates of Union College of Law, later part of
Northwestern University. He went on to practice law in
Chicago and invest in real estate. His descendants included
a Tuskegee airman, a jazz musician and a doctor. Wood’s
legal victory, Mr. McDaniel notes, was evidence of the
difference that even a modest amount of money might have
made to the opportunities of a once-enslaved family.
Northern newspapers’ coverage of Wood’s 1878
settlement showed a kind of complacency, one report
suggesting that it was “pleasant to reflect that such days
will come again no more to her or any of her race.”
Ambiguously, the New York Times commented that it “would
willingly close this dark chapter in American history,” except
that Wood had “opened it again,” raising questions about
the nation’s “unsettled account” with the formerly enslaved.
Meanwhile, Southern Democrats were busy overthrowing
Reconstruction governments and undermining blacks’
exercise of freedom. While Mr. McDaniel barely refers to the
present-day push for reparations, he amply demonstrates
that the generation of men and women who escaped slavery
deserved far better from America than they got.Mr. Bordewich’s most recent book is “The First Congress:
How James Madison, George Washington and a Group of
Extraordinary Men Invented the Government.”In the 1870s, a twice-enslaved woman took
one of her enslavers to court
and, miraculously, won a settlement.The Airbnb Hotel Next Door
Scottsdale, Ariz.B
ecoming a homeowner
is part of the American
dream, and after three
years searching, my husband
and I found a fixer-upper in a
quiet Scottsdale neighbor-
hood. Unknown to us, how-
ever, the house next door was
a short-term rental, an Airbnb
that can host more than 16
people.
An optimist, I thought it
would be a way to meet inter-
esting people. Then reality set
in.
It’s known as “the party
house” for good reason. A
party it is, day and night,
from screaming kids in the
pool at dawn to buses arriv-
ing to pick up a rowdy wed-
ding group. Short-term rent-
als are usually filled with
vacationers for whom every
day is a celebration. This is no
exception. There have been
dozens of late-night, loud,
drunken festivities filled with
foul language. One group
smoked so much pot, the
smell was overwhelming in
our front yard.
Another visitor arrived
with a large group of men. He
got so drunk he wandered
into the wrong house—the
owner had left the door un-
locked—and passed out. He’s
lucky he didn’t get shot for
trespassing—many of my
neighbors own guns.Fourteen women once ar-
rived to celebrate a bachelor-
ette party. Three banged on
our door several times to bor-
row household items, which
they never returned.
The party house isn’t
alone. Across the street is asecond short-term rental, and
there are several more within
five blocks. It’s disruptive to
the many families with young
children who bought houses
in the neighborhood looking
to set down roots.
In 2016, Gov. Doug Ducey
signed a law known as the
Airbnb bill, which severely
limits local regulation of
short-term rentals. The only
restrictions it allows are for
safety, noise, parking and
neighborhood nuisances.
Even these are poorly en-
forced. While Scottsdale law
mandates only six adults and
their dependents can stay in
a short-term rental, you will
find all over Airbnb’s website
houses boasting rooms for
far greater numbers of peo-
ple. Before 2016, Scottsdale
prohibited rentals of fewer
than 30 days in residential
neighborhoods.
According to All the Rooms,
a company that analyzes
Airbnb data, in July 2019
there were 3,026 Airbnb rent-als available in Scottsdale and
the adjacent town of Paradise
Valley, with a 40% occupancy
rate. These rentals generated
$5.3 million in revenue. How
can they not be viewed as un-
licensed hotels? I didn’t sign
up to live next to a hotel.
In May 2019 Mr. Ducey
signed another law, with a
few more restrictions. Owners
of short-term rentals must
provide cities or towns with
contact information and re-
spond to complaints in a
timely manner.
While the owner of the
neighboring house has great
reviews for being prompt and
attentive to his guests, he is
unresponsive to my concerns.
He told me in one year he
raked in more than $100,
from this property. That’s
quite a return, but his neigh-
bors paid the price.Ms. Siegel is a freelance
journalist who covers interna-
tional affairs, business and
travel.By Masada Siegel
Short-term rentals, a
boon for travelers and
landlords, make life
hard for homeowners.OPINION
Are pro-lifers
in bed with
white su-
premacists?
That’s Ma-
rissa Brost-
off’s conten-
tion in a
Washington
Post op-ed
last week,
wherein she
alleged that “antiabortion pol-
itics” can provide “cover for
white nationalist sentiments.”
Her argument followed a Lau-
rence Tribe tweet in which
the Harvard law professor
told his followers, “Never un-
derestimate the way these is-
sues and agendas are linked.”
The timing is likely not ac-
cidental. The hope may be
that tarring pro-lifers with
white nationalism will dis-
tract attention from the
agenda the Democrats have
rallied around as they head
into 2020. That would include
federally funded abortion on
demand up to the moment of
birth—and even after birth, if
necessary, as Ralph Northam,
the pediatric neurologist and
Democratic governor of Vir-
ginia, awkwardly made clear
earlier this year.
As with all single-issue
movements, pro-lifers can be
accused of many things, from
political rigidity to moral ab-
solutism. But single-issue
movements also offer undeni-
able clarity. The pro-life prop-
osition is simple: Human life
begins at conception, and ev-
ery human life is equal in dig-
nity and worth.
Whatever else this may be,
it is incompatible with white
supremacism. Perhaps that’s
White Supremacy and Abortion
why so many African-Ameri-
cans, especially African-Amer-
ican women, have been lead-
ers in the pro-life cause.
Mildred Jefferson, the first
African-American woman to
graduate from Harvard Medi-
cal School, was a founding
member of the National Right
to Life Committee. Kay James,
now president of the Heritage
Foundation, founded Black
Americans for Life. Before he
ran for the Democratic presi-
dential nomination in 1984,
Jesse Jackson spoke of abor-
tion as “genocide.”
Black pro-lifers, alas, are
treated as if they don’t exist.
Quick example: How many
outlets even reported the Na-
tional Day of Mourning that
concluded this past Saturday
with a prayer service in Bir-
mingham, Ala., for all the
black lives lost to abortion?
One of its leaders was Alveda
King, a niece of Martin Luther
King. Another was Catherine
Davis of the Restoration Proj-
ect, who notes that the esti-
mated 20 million black abor-
tions sinceRoe v. Wadein
1973 are more than the entire
African-American population
in 1960.
But facts don’t matter
these days; narratives do,
even when they are absurd.
So when Ms. Brostoff went
looking for a living example
of white supremacy hiding be-
hind a pro-life mask, she
found author J.D. Vance. If
Mr.Vanceisawhitenational-
ist, he sure stinks at it: As he
noted on Twitter, he has a
“bi-racial family and non-
white son,” and he wrote a
book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” chroni-
cling not white superioritybut white dysfunction.
By contrast, who was it
who said frankly that the Su-
preme Court legalized abor-
tion in part because it was
concerned about “growth in
populations that we do not
want too many of?”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has
tried to walk back her remark
because of its plainly eugenic
implications. But that’s the
point. Eugenics have been
used to justify abortion from
the start. It wasn’t Mr. Vance
who worried the “more rebel-
lious members” of the blackcommunity might start think-
ing “we want to exterminate
the Negro population.” It was
Planned Parenthood founder
Margaret Sanger, speaking of
the Negro Project—a cam-
paign to get African-Ameri-
cans to have fewer children.
As my colleague Jason
Riley noted in a column last
year, the high abortion rate
among African-American
women is something people
don’t talk about in polite soci-
ety. Just one of the grim sta-
tistics Mr. Riley noted: In New
York City, more black preg-
nancies end in abortion than
in live birth. This doesn’t
mean that Planned Parent-
hood promotes abortion so
America will have fewer black
citizens. But it’s undeniable
that this is the outcome ofwhat they are doing.
Contrary to Mr. Tribe’s
tweet, the real white suprem-
acists understand and cele-
brate this. On AltRight.com,
someone writing under the
name Aylmer Fisher warns
against “the pro-life tempta-
tion,” because abortion helps
weed out “the least intelligent
and responsible members of
society,” who are dispropor-
tionately “Black, Hispanic and
poor.” Ditto for Richard Spen-
cer, the white nationalist who
in May 2017 led protesters
carrying torches and shouting
“you will not replace us” after
the Charlottesville, Va., City
Council voted to remove a
statue of Robert E. Lee from a
downtown park. Unlike pro-
lifers, who want to be “radi-
cally dysgenic, egalitarian,
multi-racial human rights
thumpers,” he says, “we want
to be eugenic in the deepest
sense of the word.”
Against these white nation-
alists stand the pro-lifers, and
not just on behalf of African-
American babies. They also
speak for the unborn child
with Down syndrome, for the
child conceived in rape or in-
cest, for the unplanned preg-
nancy that will undeniably
crimp any career plans a
mother might have if she car-
ries the baby to term. These
are all hard cases, and the
clarity of the pro-life proposi-
tion—the insistence that each
of these lives is no less pre-
cious than any other human
life—can make for a difficult
political sell.
But no pro-lifer ever said
life is easy. We say life is
beautiful.
Write to [email protected].It isn’t the pro-life
movement that wants
fewer black and
Hispanic babies born.MAIN
STREET
By William
McGurn
Colombo,
Sri Lanka
The drama in
Washington
sometimes
makes this
difficult to
remember,
but the most
important
foreign-pol-
icy develop-
ment of the current presiden-
tial term isn’t the president’s
tweets. It is the slow, inexo-
rable shift in American strat-
egy from the Atlantic and
Mediterranean theaters of
world politics to what U.S.
diplomats and military offi-
cials call the “Indo-Pacific.”
That shift, which the Obama
administration called the
“pivot to Asia,” isn’t the spe-
cial property of Republicans
or Democrats, of national-se-
curity hawks or doves.
Yet if Americans are in-
creasingly united on the im-
portance of the Indo-Pacific,
we are very far from united
on strategy there. This is
partly because the executive
branch is led by a president
with unconventional views
who is often at daggers
drawn with the network of
professionals and institutions
that have shaped American
foreign policy for many de-
cades. But larger forces are
at work than President
Trump.
Never in human history
have so many people and
states faced such an ava-
lanche of political and eco-
nomic change as the Indo-
The Rules of Geopolitics Are Different in Asia
Pacific faces today. If
American policy makers find
it challenging to understand
and respond, they aren’t
alone. The teams around Xi
Jinping, Narendra Modi and
Shinzo Abe are often simi-
larly perplexed.
There is another problem:
The tools of statecraft and
habits of mind the U.S. devel-
oped during the Cold War
and its unipolar aftermath
are in many cases poorly
suited to the Indo-Pacific. An
Indo-Pacific coalition of pow-
ers aimed at balancing China
will look and feel very differ-
ent from the Atlantic alliance
that contained Soviet commu-
nism after World War II.
Just how different was ev-
ident as I met with India’s
External Affairs Minister
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar
and a series of Indian ana-
lysts and policy makers re-
cently. The message was un-
ambiguous: India wants to
cooperate with the U.S. to re-
duce the threat from China,
but concepts like “the liberal
international order” have no
real purchase in New Delhi.
India may be a democracy,
but it isn’t a crusader. It sees
no particular ideological or
moral value in globalizing
the values of the European
Union and NATO or in ex-
tending the American Cen-
tury. Mr. Modi’s India wants
to balance China to preserve
its independence and the de-
velopment of its indigenous
civilization and values, not to
promote the Westernization
of Asia.The rules of alliance-build-
ing are also different in the
Indo-Pacific. Sri Lanka’s trou-
bles with China have gotten a
lot of attention lately. After
Sri Lanka was unable to re-
pay the cost of a Chinese-fi-
nanced (and poorly thought
through) port development
on its southern coast, China
demanded and got a 99-year
lease on the port to satisfy
the debt. This sent tremors
through the region, causing
other countries to take an-
other look at the fine print
on their Belt and Road con-
tracts with China.Sri Lanka seems less wor-
ried than some of its neigh-
bors. From my hotel window
in Colombo I can see a giant
new development rising on
one of China’s artificial is-
lands across the bay from
the Sri Lankan capital. Like
the Hambantota port project
in the south, the economic
projections for this massive
development strike many ob-
servers as overly optimistic,
and there was little demand
for the new island in Co-
lombo. Nevertheless, thanks
to a diplomatic push by
China, it is there, and again
much of the new acre-
age—270 acres of the 665 onthe new island—is leased for
99 years to China.
So is Sri Lanka handing it-
self over to China? That is
not how it looks from Co-
lombo. Sri Lanka, whose na-
tive kingdoms guarded their
independence by balancing
among Portuguese, Chinese,
South Indian, French, Dutch
and British powers for hun-
dreds of years, has another
view of how a small country
can maintain its indepen-
dence in a hostile world.
The goal, they feel, isn’t
to choose among the jockey-
ing great-power rivals, but
to keep the bidding perpetu-
ally open. They want to
avoid driving any great
power into outright hostility
and ensure that each one has
reasons to support Sri
Lankan independence.
This Asian realist thinking
underlay the enthusiastic
participation of many Indian
Ocean countries in the Non-
Aligned Movement during
the Cold War, and it contin-
ues to shape their view of re-
lations with the U.S. and
China today.
Western Europe was polit-
ically and culturally a much
easier theater for American
statesmanship than the Indo-
Pacific world. Nostalgia is of
little use. Both security and
economic interests are pull-
ing the U.S. toward deeper
engagement in the Indo-Pa-
cific. The region holds the
key to the future of U.S.
power, and Americans must
learn to make themselves at
home there.Indo-Pacific states
care about great-
power balance, not
promoting democracy.GLOBAL
VIEW
By Walter
Russell Mead