What the 1619 Project overlooks about slavery and the Constitution: There is an important oversight in the so-called scholarship

American Thinker ^ | 02/15/2023 | Stephen B. Young

[SeekAndFind]

There is an important oversight in the scholarship of the 1619 Project that is also implicit in Critical Race theorizing. Neither the 1619 Project nor Critical Race Theory includes the moral position of important White political thinkers opposing slavery as contrary to the natural order of our human species.

While drafters of the Constitution found themselves forced to accept the property laws of the sovereign states, each now fully independent of Great Britain, significant thought leaders philosophically opposed slavery. While thought is less efficacious than action, it is not unimportant. Thoughts set forth the course of action and bring about the will to act.

James Wilson, for one, believed that "slavery, or an absolute and unlimited power in the master, over the life and fortune of the slave, is unauthorized by the Common Law. Indeed, it is repugnant to the principles of natural law, that such a state should subsist in any social system."

This invocation of natural law laid the foundation for future reform of state laws abolishing slavery , as happened as the result of the Civil War.

In this view, Wilson followed the teaching of John Locke, who in his treatise concerning civil government, in Chapter IV, insisted that persons must never be "subject to the inconsistent, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature."

Federalist Paper #54, written by Hamilton or Madison to recommend adoption of the proposed federal Constitution, followed the ethic of Wilson and Locke.

[Vision]

The 1619 Project is hate.

[SauronOfMordor]

During the Middle Ages, serfs were effectively slaves to a degree.

In Europe, the defining characteristics of the nobility were the right to be armed, the right to own property, and the right to defend yourself and what was yours with your own arms.

The Constitution made every citizen a nobleman.

[GingisK]

Slavery is as old as human history. While certainly not a justification, one can’t really look unkindly upon those slave holders that were doing something that was in common practice around the world at the time.

[jamaksin]

Down by the Riverside
(A South Carolina Slave Community)
Charles W. Joyner
University of Illinois Press
ISBN 0-252-01058-2
1984

From page 4:

” ... I am acutely conscious, here on the Waccamaw, that
the river and the forest are the same river and forest
that silently witnessed events that took place long ago.
It was here, on the Waccamaw, in the shade of some of these
very same trees, that Spaniards and Africans are said to have planted in 1526 the first Old World settlement in what is now the United States - Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon’s ill-fated San Miguel de Gualdape. It was here on the Gualdape, as the Spanish named the river, that Africans were first brought to this country as slaves, and it was here that first slave revolt in what is now the United States took place. ...”

And, so it goes ...

[AndyTheBear]

Yes, Western Culture and Christianity were the engines that doomed slavery. All the more reason to not let Progressives trick us into defending any part of slavery.