re: #351 Ward Cleaver

But then again, slavery was legal in this country, for 87 years. Jus’ sayin’.

Yes, and it was opposed through legal means, up to and including war declared by the U.S. government. This is an interesting bit from Wiki (I know, I know):

President Abraham Lincoln said he was a “misguided fanatic” and Brown has been called “the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans.”[1] His attempt in 1859 to start a liberation movement among enslaved African Americans in Harpers Ferry, Virginia electrified the nation. He was tried for treason against the state of Virginia, the murder of five proslavery Southerners, and inciting a slave insurrection and was subsequently hanged. Southerners alleged that his rebellion was the tip of the abolitionist iceberg and represented the wishes of the Republican Party. Historians agree that the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 escalated tensions that a year later led to secession and the American Civil War.

As just as his cause was, Brown deserved to be hanged. The part in bold just shows how politics never really changes.