re: #10 freetoken

Well, the Weakly Standard piece is an attempt to try and cover Bachmann’s behind and I don’t expect it to really explore the complexities and nuances of real life.

And the writer, like Buck, seems to think that Lincoln was some sort of impartial observer.

The reality is this: chattel slavery existed at the time of the Revolutionary War. And, the US Constitution 13 years later did not eliminate said slavery.

Conceptually, the universal application of the Enlightenment principles that led to the formation of a democratic United States of America would, of course, ultimately lead to the end of chattel slavery. It was not a matter of a “founding father” in any one country.

Yet the role of slavery was too important to daily life - before the steam engine economics required more manual labor to produce food and goods, and thus to be rich often meant to own slaves.

And several of the founding fathers were (relatively) rich… and guess what, they owned slaves.

That England ended slavery (at least inside their country) before the US should be telling here. The intransigence of some in the US to the rising abolitionist movements (at least in the Anglo-sphere) of the 19th century ought to demonstrate that slavery was, from the very beginning, part and parcel of the United States of America, even though there were some from the start who hated slavery. The simple fact is that some citizens of this country, from the very founding, including some of the leaders at time of the founding and up until the Civil War, put economic gains above a universal application of the concepts of freedom.

Thus the founders of this country were a mixed bag on this subject. To try and cast them otherwise is to try and rewrite history.

I agree on all points.

These conversations cannot be reduced to a page or two.

Your remarks on the Enlightenment principles are quite apropos. From where I sit, those principles more than anything else were the great catalyst of change- not just with regard to slavery but a whole host of other ideas as well.

The confluence of the American Revolution, French Revolution, and even the Industrial Revolution were absolute game changers on the moral, ethical, political, social and cultural levels that reverberate to this day.

FT, we could talk about this for days. Great stuff.