Slavery’s Enduring Resonance

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

"LAST week, a milestone passed for my family in South Carolina — the 150th anniversary of the last day of slavery. We were the slaveholders.

At the start of March 1865, a company of black Union soldiers from the 35th United States Colored Troops regiment rode up the oak allée of Limerick, one my family’s rice plantations north of Charleston, where 250 of our slaves lived and worked. At the head of the column was a white colonel named James Beecher, a brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

It was a Sunday, and the family of William Ball, my great-great-grandfather, sat in the dining room, reading from the book of Lamentations. With the Civil War rushing to its end, they must have found it an apt choice: The passage recounted the miserable fate of Jerusalem condemned by God for its sins: “She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces ... she weepeth sore in the night ... for the Lord hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions.”

Slavery’s Enduring Resonance

My family owned people. What would those people think of America today?

NYTIMES.COM|BY EDWARD BALL