“The United States of America didn’t invent slavery, nor did we introduce it to the shores of America.
When the Nation was founded and the Constitution written, the founders had to deal with the reality that half of the Country used slave labor and would have fought with England if they couldn’t continue to do so.
There would have been no United States of America because much of the money and military talent came from Virginia...a slave state.”
Thank you for making that point! Thomas Jefferson addressed this and would have liked to end slavery, but fact is the revolution could have never succeeded if they had taken on doing away with slaves at the same time. Heck, we haven’t solved the problems of emancipation yet.
In a prophetic letter decades earlier ,
President Thomas Jefferson expressed
the fears of many of his contemporaries over conflicts
of states’ rights, westward settlement, federalism and slavery.
“This momentous question,
like a fire bell in the night,
awakened and filled one with terror,
I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.
It is hushed indeed for the moment.
but this is a reprieve only,
not a final sentence . . .
we have the wolf by the ears
and we can neither hold him
nor safely let him go.”
Interestingly, TJ’s letter expresses his opinion that attempts to restrict slavery appear to be the problem leading to future civil war, not slavery itself. Let slavery spread indefinitely and it will end more quickly.
This is, of course, the exact opposite of the later consensus on both sides of the issue that preventing slavery from expanding would eventually kill it.
But even in this letter he states that slavery is an evil, quite different from the later conventional wisdom of the South that slavery was a positive good.