[sinsofsolarempirefan]

I believe that was Thomas Jefferson’s contention when he was drawing up his list of grievances against George III. Never mind the fact that he was himself a slave-owner, whilst George III personally opposed slavery and banned sugar from his household in protest at the horrific conditions under which slaves lived in the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

[virgil283]

Thomas Jefferson’s contention ... you're right... "We tend not to be aware that King George III actively perpetuated the slave trade in the late 18th Century, vetoing laws by Virginia and other states trying to deter the inflow by raising import taxes on slaves. It is why Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the US Declaration of Independence contained a clause saying the king "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us." And no, Jefferson was not a hyprocrite because he owned slaves. They were mortgaged, due to his family's crushing debts left from monetary deflation after the Seven Years War. They could not legally be freed." ..from the article...