How about the silly little fact that the Declaration of Independence laid the societal framework that inexorably led to equality of human beings being recognized as the true and just human condition. It was done by a bunch of Christian and Jewish white males of western European, mainly from Britain, Scotland and Ireland who had the intellectual honesty and courage to decry 6000 years of recorded governments as being established on a false premise of where power devolved from. People aren’t the property of the governing, the governing exist at the sufferance of the people. This is the basis of America. Slavery existed long before America. It is narcissism of the highest order to believe that the arrival of a Dutch ship carrying slaves founded this country. If you believe this, You should then change the date to the founding of St. Augustine, for the Spanish colonies in Florida and Mexico had slaves long before Virginia. Of course the oldest slave descendants in America would be the Jewish settlers, because they were enslaved in Egypt long before slaves were sold to Europeans by Africans. However, back to my main point...
People aren’t the property of the governing, the governing exist at the sufferance of the people. This is the basis of America.
The logical simplification is that people aren’t property.
That issue was decided at the court house in Appomattox County, Virginia, on the morning of April 9, 1865.
620,000 jurors made a verdict after 4 years of deliberation.
People aren’t property.
The governing exist at the sufferance of the people.
Welcome to America.
Well said.
Actually, chattel slavery came with the English. Chattel slavery is one where the slave is just a possession with no human rights. Spanish slavery was sort of long-term indentured servitude, where the slave could earn money, buy his freedom, marry, attend religious services and be baptized. When African slaves escaped from the English slave owners, they were free if they could get across the border into Spanish Florida. They had to become Spanish citizens and be baptized once they got to Florida.
The Spanish had been forbidden by both the Pope and Queen Isabella to enslave the Indians, whereas the British took many Indians as slaves and sent them off to the sugar mills in the British Caribbean.
Jefferson and others of the writers of the Constitution were very bothered by the existence of slavery in the English speaking area of the US, but they just didn’t feel they could forbid it or even free their own slaves. He had introduced a section dealing with the slave trade into the draft of the Constitution but it was rejected by the representatives.