working through this article....
“The Aeneid fascinated Dante and John Milton, Peter Paul Rubens and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, John Adams and T.S. Eliot.”
Also...CS Lewis did a partial translation of the Aeneid...FWIW
Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), for all its shortcomings as a historical document, manages to portray the revolution as a thrilling story of courage while still noting at a pivotal moment that freedom is a work in progress: “black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom,” says the solider John Laurens after the Continental Army’s victory at Yorktown. “Not yet,” says Washington. But Miranda’s work fundamentally insists that the birth of this country is worth praising and that nonwhite citizens should imagine themselves as protagonists of our founding story: it was the birth of their freedom, too, even if the maturation of that freedom was woefully delayed.”
That is very well said.
Also....it is an important body of data that many freedmen/women, once they became full citizens and took last names, many of them in fact took the names of American founders including Washington and Jefferson. Sam Houston’s former slaves, of course, took the name Houston.
Perhaps the story of slavery/freedom is a bit more nuanced than the left would like it to be