Letter to Rowland G. Hazard, CW XVI, p. 1066.
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Letter to William Martin Dickson, CW XVI, p. 1100.
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impoverishment of the great landholders, and their disgust with the new state of
things, will cause a great number of the large estates to be sold and broken up, a thing
eminently desirable.
45
In this passage Mill expresses a desire for the division of the large plantations, with this land
passing into the hands of the former slaves, and he indicates that he would be satisfied to see this
done at the point of the bayonet if the same result is not attained spontaneously. (He believes that
it would be permissible for the American federal government to confiscate the property of all of
those individuals who supported the Southern cause in the Civil War because “. . . defeated rebels
have no rights but the universal ones of humanity. The Southern people, their lives, bodies and
estates, were by the issue of the war, placed at the discretion of their conquerors. . . .” )
46
Nevertheless, he never suggests that the former slaves are owed compensation as such. He wants
them to have land—and ballots—so that their rights will not be violated in the future, but he does
not aver that they are entitled to it (or anything else) because their rights had been violated in the
past.
There is a compelling “Millian” case to be made for compensating freed slaves, even if
Mill’s silence on the subject leaves us uncertain whether the man himself accepted this line of
argument but never happened to say so, rejected the argument, or simply never considered the
matter. We have seen that he believes that the slaves were victims of injustice and that their rights
were violated. It is part of our ordinary understanding of what it is to have a right to something
that if one’s right is violated then one has a right to compensation, and the whole point of Mill’s
Convention