I think we’re in agreement on a basic point. I don’t view slavery as America’s ‘original sin’ that somehow negates all the good our nation has brought to the world.
Our Founders outlawed slavery where they could without destroying the nation in the process. Slavery had been around forever and was the ‘norm’ for the time, but the Founders still looked upon it as morally wrong.
What many overlook is that at the time of the founding (1776 not 1619!) slavery looked to be on its last legs here in America. It just didn’t make economic sense. Then the cotton gin was invented and very quickly someone with lots of slaves could make huge amounts of money in any place where green-seed cotton could be grown. So by the 1830s eliminating slavery in the U.S. was politically impossible.
My point was and is that Great Britain did end slavery in its empire and did actively try to end it around the world and should get some credit for it, in spite of its role earlier.
It’s like the argument that “women didn’t get the right to vote in the U.S. until 1920! What a sexist nation the U.S. was! When the fact is that women got the right to vote here (in most places) far earlier than anywhere else on earth.
Agreed. I just made the point to another user that had Britain allowed the colonies to do their abolitionist laws instead of vetoing these laws, we might not be in this mess that we are in today. Americans would have begun abolishing slavery prior to Independence.