Posted on 10/14/2025 11:34:17 AM PDT by Red Badger
PinGGG!.....................
Hmm...
I am always in awe of the Founding Fathers.
I’m saving this to pull out whenever I get the usual criticisms of Jefferson.
Bkmk
Those were removed in order to allow its passage as a unifying document.
Many of the influential founders understood what a black mark slavery was on the principle that all men are created equal, but the more pressing need of the day was to create a union.
It was the right thing to do at the time given the realities of the day.
This is nice to see, just to counter the idiots on the Left who decry Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as slave owners, but I despise the practice of impressing the morality of today on the morality of people who lived centuries ago.
Author is relatively late in becoming aware of this, but better late than never.
Bookmark
The leaders of the big states, New York and Virginia (Jefferson included), refused to ratify until ten additions (originally 12) were appended-incorporated into-the Constitution: the bill of rights.
Of course Federalists like Hamilton pooh poohed their concern. “Why do we need to expressly include things we fought and died to defend?”
Because of 2025 New York and Virginia statists.
Have read every decent biography This Guy has been able to find of our Founding Fathers, primary (Washington, Henry, Adams (John and Abigail), Sam Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison (Jemmy and Dolly!), Jay, etc.), secondary (e.g. Gen’s Knox, Greene and Wayne, Ethan Allen, Richard Sherman), and tertiary.
It’s a finite number, for sure, but there’s quite a few worth learning about.
Those were removed in order to allow its passage as a unifying document.
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I believe Beck stated the vote was 11 for acceptance and 2 against. Each paragraph had to receive a unanimous vote to be added to the Constitution.
So much for the charge that the founding fathers were totally racist.
> Those were removed in order to allow its passage as a unifying document. <
Right. And folks should always be judged within the context of their times.
Anyway, it would have been nice if the Founders had devised a plan to slowly phase out slavery. But even that might not have been accepted by the slave-owning states.
This sounds like this Jeff guy was really beefing on that George dude.
But since I do own them, I should bang the pretty ones when my wife is away. And two hundred years later Governor Arnold will do the same but it will be OK with the state because slaves will get minimum wage. But maybe Arnold’s wife will care. That will take another two hundred years to figure that one out. Ethics are trick things.
Great stuff, thanks very much.
Yes…they understood fully the incompatibility between slavery and “all men are created equal”.
I see it as simply necessary for that time. It eventually came to a head 85 years later, as it was destined to do.
The Founders made the conscious choice to put it off in order to achieve union.
Jefferson was 33 when he wrote it, which is simply astonishing. And apart from him, the depth and clarity of moral and political thought, and the ability to express it so eloquently, was something the Founders had in abundance. Kind of embarrassing to think how far we've sunk since then.
The slave trade was recognized early on as being worse and more brutal than slavery itself.
We’re not inclined to separate the two today but they very much saw them as two different things back then.
“Those aren’t the words of a man indifferent to slavery. They are the cry of conscience from someone who recognized its evil for the “cruel war against human nature” it was. This wasn’t just a policy criticism, it was an aggressive condemnation of a practice that assailed the very image of God in man. What’s more, Jefferson’s accusation was morally piercing.”
A visit to Monticello will tell you he was a decent man and not some cartoonish whip wielding slave owner. That was the world and labor system he was born into, but he was a truly decent man in a tough world.
I was walking down the path there and an elderly black woman was walking alone the path to Jefferson’s grave. She was having a tough time with her cane on the uneven sloping path and she took my arm, and we walked very slow. Her daughter was meeting her with the car at the bottom of the hill but neither realized how for it was.
She loved Jefferson, and she had spent her life as a history teacher. She regaled me with a lesson all the way to the parking lot.
She was annoyed with idiots who slander him.
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