That time Charlie Kirk recognized abolitionism among the Founders

This is one of those things that so many times, someone says it, people listen to it, and its a topic all of us know and know to be true. But then everybody moves on.

No. Stop. Right here. We need a greater discussion and a greater recognition of the Abolitionist Founding Fathers. We need more of a focus on this instead of everybody just moving on. The progressives do not move on ergo we do not move on. We need sharing the details, knowing the details, being able to in specifics push back against progressivism when they wield the weapon of the Founding Fathers and transatlantic slavery.

The way Charlie Kirk does. Most cannot do this the way Kirk did. In a debate a few years ago with Briahna Joy Gray, one of the topic shifts moved toward the Founding and specifically Charlie was very insistent in driving home the point that abolitionism began with the Founders. (Charlie Kirk never explicitly uses the word "transatlantic" but that is the exact context) He cites several examples but this one: (I am giving the timestamps so you can follow along in the video)

This one is perhaps the most specific. And it is true. Benjamin Franklin was a slave owning abolitionist Founding Father. Many of those who became abolitionists had no idea that slave owning was bad for most of their lives since the practice of slavery was so widely adopted and promoted by the Empire. If you had a colony, be it the colony of Virginia, colony of Barbados, colony north(became Canada), colonies of Carolinas, colony of Jamaica it was all the same. Slavery was there. That's not an accident. The colonists did not just trip, fall over, and OH WOW look we have slaves. Where did those come from I don't know slaves must have fallen out of the sky or maybe slaves put themselves there!

This was something the empire wanted because slavery brought in huge amounts of money for the crown and thus, slavery was everywhere. The empire is singularly to blame for slavery being in 26 out of its 26 colonies.(prior to U.S. Independence) There were NOT 26 coincidences and oh my gosh - the King, the King has no idea. Parliament says "what? Slavery? Bloody impossible!" Parliament knew. They supported slavery. The King supported slavery. They all knew.

I recently made a long entry about the Abolitionist Founding Fathers, Franklin was one of 6 people named. All of this is true. The Founding Fathers of the U.S. were on the front lines of abolitionism and transatlantic abolitionism was in the first instant an "American thing". Abolitionism only showed up later in Europe after many copied the American abolitionist model. In a very small comment, he says of the Founding Fathers' inheriting slavery from the Empire: (The Founders did not choose transatlantic slavery)

That is, the Founders never defended transatlantic slavery. Gray looks a little confused that he would be so insistent on this topic, but he continued.

Kirk is correct to ask this question, as well as pointing out that the 3/5ths compromise was anti-slavery. If someone is favorable to progressivism, favorable to the left wing, or favorable to The 1619 Project then it makes those people very uncomfortable when you highlight this indisputable fact. The 3/5ths compromise was anti-slavery. Why does this make anybody uncomfortable? It should make people celebrate! Kirk apparently has been reading a little too much Frederick Douglass, who was one of the first to explicitly state in plain language that the 3/5ths compromise was a measure designed to do damage to slaving. The most interesting thing is that Gray has finally had enough and she asks:

I can heavily relate to this accusation. I get accused of having a "weird obsession" with highlighting the Abolitionist Founding Fathers as well. ("Abolitionist Founding Fathers" is my phrase and nobody else's. Yes anybody is welcome to use it but I am just saying, nobody but me that I have seen uses this phrase. "Abolitionist Founding Fathers") I can't and don't speak for Charlie Kirk but I can say what my motivation is and its progressive historians in general, The 1619 Project in particular. All of this fake history is constantly pumped through the schools and millions of children every day become falsely convinced that the U.S. was founded with an original sin of slavery. In the end Kirk and Gray debated this for nearly 5 minutes with Kirk mostly advancing the pro-Founders narrative; and pro-abolitionism at that.

Smearing the Founders with slavery is simply not factual. It's fake history, historical malpractice. Why isn't The 1619 Project accused of being a "weird obsession" given how fraudulent it is? That fraud, that right there is enough to create an army of "obsessed" people who know the history is not accurately told. Any "original sin of slavery" belongs exclusively with the colonial Empire of Britain, an entity which no longer exists in this world; The British Empire. The Empire is gone. Did any or many of the Founding Fathers own slaves? Yes, slave owning was common among Englishmen in a British slave colony. Why is that weird? It is not weird. It is also not weird nor a coincidence that as the Founders stopped being Englishmen and started becoming patriots that they also in many cases stopped desiring to be slave owners. Slave owning was a crown thing, it was not an American thing, not in those days.

And I want to close by highlighting my mutliple uses of the word "transatlantic". It is common practice for those who dishonestly wield slavery as a weapon to take a step back and cite some odd-ball random fact like France abolished slavery in the 1300s or whatever year it was. France abolished white people owning white people; France abolished Frenchies owning Frenchies. That has absolutely nothing to do with transatlantic slavery, sugar plantations in the West Indies, slaves on ships sent across to the other side of the atlantic, The Cotton Gin, or abolitionist movements such as the kind of movements that Benjamin Franklin or William Wilberforce led. It's entirely 100% irrelevant. So yes, transatlantic, transatlantic, transatlantic. Stick to the topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTswW9dg07A

I link to the video in the third paragraph but here it is again.

Charlie Kirk Debates Bernie Sanders’ Press Secretary on Systemic Racism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTswW9dg07A

I think that I'm doing what many other people have been doing over the past week and will continue to do so. Kirk's debates are amazing to watch. Its no wonder they wanted him gone.

Ping to just my ping list, maybe you might have similar thoughts.

So it is said (I’m still having more new thoughts) It would be good to watch more than just the tiny clips referenced and also more than just the 5 minutes generally highlighted.

But its an embedded topic and it needed to be highlighted separately.

Slavey became so common for European colonial empires. I should add that slavery had been all but eliminated in Europe thanks to the power of Christianity. However larger more centralized monarchies reintroduced slavery in their colonies or permitted their overseas vassals to practice it because it was beneficial.

Slavery always happens because wealthy connected legal bodies recognize they can make even more money by controlling the human side of labor as property.

Its one of the legitimate reasons for having legal restrictions by government against slavery and its practices.

You keep reiterating that “the 3/5ths compromise was anti-slavery.” No, it wasn’t. It also wasn’t pro-slavery (although it’s been heavily criticized by people horrified by slavery). What was it actually? It was, duh, a compromise.

The issue was how to compute House of Representatives memberships for states where many of the residents were slaves. The slave states wanted the slaves counted in full. Agreeing to that solution would have been pro-slavery.

The free states pointed out that, under the slave states’ own laws, slaves were property. They asked “Should our horses and cows be counted?” They wanted the slaves excluded. That solution would have been anti-slavery.

What emerged was the well-known 3/5 rule. It was a compromise. Neither side got everything it wanted. It’s misleading to focus on the rejection of the complete pro-slavery position without also acknowledging the rejection of the complete anti-slavery position.

The point was that unless the abolitionists had fought it, the hypocritical slave owners would have been successful in getting slaves counted as full persons for the purposes of political apportionment, giving slave states greater power. The abolitionists fought to not have slaves counted as persons if they weren’t going to be allowed to vote anyway. Not because they thought they were not persons, but because all the power from their numbers went to the slavers oppressing them.

The effect of the compromise was ant-slavery because a whole free black person or indentured servant could be added to the census as Northern states did for representation. Southern states could add only six tenths of a person for a slave.

Trying to understand how mere head counts, or split head counts, makes a statement of ethical nature toward the practice of slavery.

It was disingenuous to consider them property for all but a head count, but treating them as whole persons even to that extent strikes me as tacitly anti-slavery.

There is good reason I am not an attorney.

The free states pointed out that, under the slave states’ own laws, slaves were property. They asked “Should our horses and cows be counted?” They wanted the slaves excluded. That solution would have been anti-slavery.

Actually, it was under the Articles of Confederation that slaves were considered property for tax purposes. The system was so unsatisfactory due to undervaluations that in 1783 a proposal was made to base the tax apportionment on population not property. (The 3/5 Compromise entry on Wikipedia gets this wrong...) At that time, the northern states wanted to count slaves, as it would increase the population counts thus raising the tax contributions of slave states. The 3/5ths count per slave was the compromise solution, but the law failed due to two states, NY and NH, voting against it.

The exact same language from 1783 was used in the Constitutional Congress, only the debate was switched from northern states wanting to count slaves for tax apportionment to objecting to a count of slaves for apportionment of representation, both based on population. The 3/5ths compromise had already been argued out four years before, so it was the logical path to resolve the issue.

“. It is common practice for those who dishonestly wield slavery as a weapon to take a step back and cite some odd-ball random fact like France abolished slavery in the 1300s or whatever year it was. France abolished white people owning white people; France abolished Frenchies owning Frenchies. “

And omits entirely how “blacks” got to Haiti - brought in by the French as slaves for their plantations on Haiti.

You are mincing words. The 3/5s compromise was an anti-slavery “compromise”. Without the attitude against slavery there would have no need for any “compromise”, the counting of slaves would have been accepted by all the colonies. It - the compromise was produced to provide some satisfaction to the anti-slavery position of enough colonial reps.

“It - the compromise was produced to provide some satisfaction to the anti-slavery position of enough colonial reps.”

Indeed it was produced to provide some satisfaction to the anti-slavery position.

It was also produced to provide some satisfaction to the pro-slavery position. Slave states that treated blacks as property for most purposes were, for purposes of political power, allowed to act as if they were (at least sort of) people.

It was a typical compromise. Each side got something and each side gave up something.

It was neither pro-slavery nor anti-slavery. Fundamentally, it was practical. Without the compromise, there could not have been a Constitution. The former colonies would have continued to lurch along under the Articles of Confederation — which, by 1787, were widely seen, North and South, to be dysfunctional.

“It was neither pro-slavery nor anti-slavery.”

Wrong. The fact, the cause, the reason it was done at all was by the demand of the anti-slavery camp. That makes the matter a anti-slavery act, and it proved itself over time as the south kept losing representation and due to that losing votes in the following decades on Congressional anti-slavery acts. Without the 3/5 “compromise” the slave states would not have lost so much power in Congress. The 3/5 position proved its worth over time in favor of the anti-slavery position.

“The fact, the cause, the reason it was done at all was by the demand of the anti-slavery camp.”

No, the anti-slavery camp demand was for the slaves to not be counted at all. They wanted representation in the House to be based on the number of FREE people. The pro-slavery camp demand was for the slaves to be counted as full people.

The pro-slavery camp didn’t get everything it wanted. But that doesn’t make the compromise anti-slavery, because the anti-slavery camp also didn’t get everything it wanted.

Here’s a summary from Encyclopedia Britannica:
“The matter of how to determine population was anything but trivial. Having failed to secure the abolishment of slavery, some delegates from the Northern states sought to make representation dependent on the size of a state’s free population. Southern delegates, on the other hand, threatened to abandon the convention if enslaved individuals were not counted. Eventually, the framers agreed on a compromise that called for representation in the House of Representatives to be apportioned on the basis of a state’s free population plus three-fifths of its enslaved population.”
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/three-fifths-compromise?utm_source=chatgpt.com

You keep ignoring the fact that minus the push from the anti-slavery side the compromise would not even have come up. Minus the push from the anti-slavery position slaves would have been counted same as all other people, because there would have been no anti-slavery push against doing so.

But there was the anti-slavery push, and BECAUSE OF IT, the 3/5 compromise was made. That fact makes the comprise very existence due to the push from the anti-slavery position, and a compromised victory for that position.

You and I have completely different understandings of what “compromise” means. Specifically, you keep wanting to look at only part of what was going on.

Yes, if the anti-slavery people had kept quiet and let the slavocracy have its way, each slave would have been counted as 1.

But it’s equally true that, if the pro-slavery people had kept quiet and let the anti-slavery faction have its way, each slave would have counted as zero. (Representation would have been based on the number of free people.)

The “very existence” of the compromise was due to the competing pressures — the pushes from BOTH sides, not just one.

I don’t misunderstand the meaning of compromise.

You misinterpret the facts to try to water down the fact that (1) the pro-slavery people were not going to keep quiet and let slaves count for zero - there was never any chance of that, they had no such willing position at any time (2) and therefor why did a compromise have to be arranged to begin with - because of the pro-slavery position, or because of the anti-slavery position; it was only due the fact there was an anti-slavery position.

Did the compromise give the anti-slavery position all they wanted? No. It was still a victory, albeit a truncated victory for the anti-slavery position.

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