Slavery and Founding Fathers

[Randy B Corporon]

I reacted to a commentary by someone who was arguing to my wife and others that those of us who revere the Founding Fathers are misguided due to their relationships to slavery:

 

My wife has not deeply studied US history or the US Constitution.  But, she has the best instincts of anyone I know, and knew something was not right with the main precept of this string of comments. 

As you undoubtedly know, but apparently chose not to share, the fact that some (not most) Founding Fathers owned slaves does not diminish the wonder of the Declaration of Independence and it's enabling document, the US Constitution.  It magnifies it.

 

Slavery was brought to the Colonies by the mother country, Britain, the slave trade supported and encouraged by the Crown, and it was deeply imbedded in the fabric of society at the time of the revolution. With over 500,000 slaves, mostly in the five most southern states and making up 40% of those states' populations, regardless of the deep and heart-felt beliefs of those citizens and Founding Fathers who fundamentally opposed slavery, you could not wave a magic wand and make it go away.  Nor could you, overnight, create shelter, education, food and clothing to care for those people outside of the system that was then in place.

 

Finally, you could not persuade through the force of will diverse populations, who did not see the moral depravity in slavery, to suddenly change their ways of life, of business and their societal structures in the name of trying to birth and unite a foundling country.  It took the bloodiest war in American history to do that.

 

If you care to know of what you speak, rather than diminish the greatest founding documents in the history of the world, along with their creators, for some political point of view, then read their speeches, the Federalist Papers, their letters and their deepest-felt beliefs, fears and hopes.  If you still choose to berate through unfounded conclusions and ill-conceived bullet points for pure political ideology, then it is your integrity that is in question, not your facility with history. 

 

To paraphrase the director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, Mathew Spalding, Ph.D.: The slavery compromises included in the Constitution are prudential compromises rather than a surrender of principle.  Lamentably,  it took a bloody civil war to reconcile the protections of the Constitution with that proposition and to attest that this nation, so conceived and dedicated, could long endure.