Culture Watch: Legacy Admissions.

A controversy over nomenclature at Yale University has spun into a broad discussion of America's national purpose, and the role of slavery, past and present.

The germ of the spat at Yale is the fact that one of its twelve residential colleges is named for a famous alumnus, John C. Calhoun (class of 1804). How could a modern liberal university enshrine the Cicero of the slave power? Upon examination, it turned out that most of the other 18th- and early 19th-century worthies who were namesakes of Yale's colleges-northerners all-had also owned slaves.

This embarrassing fact led back to others. All 13 colonies, and their successor states, north and south, permitted slavery. Even after slavery in the North ended, northern merchants and manufacturers were heavily invested in transporting and processing slaves and slave-picked crops.

David Brion Davis, one of the nation's premier historians of slavery, and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, published an essay in the New York Times tying the threads together, and arguing that America has only in recent decades emerged from an amnesiac period of ignoring "slavery's centrality" in its history. Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore and a Yale trustee, then asked whether this centrality meant that America should now pay reparations to slaves' descendants (he thought not).

Universities, and people generally, should be mindful of history. That includes not overcorrecting. By focusing on pre-Civil War foreign policy, Davis can write that the "one" antislavery act taken by the early national government was John Adams's recognition of Haitian independence. At home, however, many restrictions were laid on slavery. In the founding period, seven states began the process of abolition; beginning with the Northwest Ordinances, more than half the territories of America, from Ohio to California, were ruled free. The founding document of the country, of course, had proclaimed that "all men are created equal"-a rhetorical advantage that slavery's opponents never surrendered.

Much American wealth rested on bondage: Davis writes that in 1860 there was more money tied up in slaves than in manufacturing or railroads. But that is like comparing the money invested in country houses and steam engines in England in 1800. The money of industry reaped the exponential dividends that made America wealthy.

Schmoke is right to be leery of reparations. By now equity is too snarled to untangle. Does Colin Powell, whose parents came from Jamaica, deserve an American payment? Will Tiger Woods pay himself? Calculating divine equity, as Lincoln tried to do in his Second Inaugural, is even more audacious. If the Civil War was God's punishment on a nation that allowed slavery, was slavery itself a punishment for the sins of Africans?

Americans should know their past to know where they stand. But their guide to action should be to do justice to the people before them, to work hard, and to hope for the best. Happily the American system, purged of its original failings, gives work and hope maximum play.