Jenny Beth Martin asks it straight: we did all of this, we were different from the French, and we still had slavery. So how did the founders handle it, and why did they not abolish it?
Lawrence Reed starts with the record. The founders went further in the direction of the liberation of all men than any previous generation in all of history. Did they go the full measure immediately? No. They compromised for the sake of unity during a crisis with the mother country. These things, he says, are best understood in context, which turns the conversation to the sin of presentism: judging people of the past by the conventions of today. His test is the Wright brothers. Bring them into the room and ask what is wrong with them for building a rickety flying machine with no WiFi and no meal service. It is not an argument. They flew farther than anyone ever had and set us on a path.
Then the numbers. Slavery reaches back to 3500 BC in Mesopotamia and touched nearly every country on the globe. As late as 1700, almost nobody anywhere was questioning it. Within a hundred years it was being questioned everywhere, and one reason is the words of the Declaration of Independence, which Abraham Lincoln hearkened back to almost a century later: we cannot live as hypocrites.
The first country on earth to abolish slavery did not do it until 1804, and it was Haiti. By then eight American states had already abolished it or put it on the path to extinction. America is exceptional, Reed argues, not because we had slavery, since everybody had it, but because of the lengths we went to in order to get rid of it.
jennybethshow.com | teapartypatriots.org
00:00 — Why Didn't the Founders Abolish Slavery
00:34 — Further Than Any Generation Before Them
01:00 — Context Matters, and What 1900 Did Not Have
01:51 — The Sin of Presentism and the Wright Brothers Test
02:37 — Slavery Goes Back to 3500 BC
03:18 — 1700 to 1800: the Question Nobody Was Asking
03:47 — Jefferson Tried, and What Would Have Happened
04:13 — Haiti in 1804, and Eight American States Already Ahead
04:45 — Who Was Doing the Capturing in Africa
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