Founding Fathers Were 'Guys Who Didn't Give Women the Vote and Let Slavery Stand' (ABC)

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2011/07/03/abcs-week-founding-fathers-werent-gods-they-were-just-guys-didnt-let- ^

[chessplayer]

ABC's "This Week" began its Independence Day weekend program with a segment that echoed Time magazine's cover story questioning whether the Constitution matters anymore.

After historian Douglas Brinkley said, "We shouldn't act like [the Founding Fathers] were somehow omnipotent," ABC's John Donvan responded, "They were not gods, they were guys - guys who didn't give women the vote and let slavery stand"

[Steelfish]

Hamilton kept slaves?

[GeronL]

Nice to know that Britain finally got around to finishing off slavery in its colonies in 1936!!

[Iron Munro]

Thanks for the link to the list of communist goals.

I just went through the list to grade progress.

Sadly, almost all of the goals are clearly complete successes for them, or they are making good progress toward the goals. A very few are moot points, bypassed by events.

As I see it, the only one on the list that is a clear fail for the international communists and one-worlders is number 45, repeal of the Connoly Reservation.

In researching it I was disheartened to learn that the ABA has opposed the Reservation from the start. They probably see a one-world government as a great opportunity to file more and bigger lawsuits.

[okie01]

So, John Donovan is a POS. What’s new? He’s a news reader right?

And he obviously knows very little about American History.

Like most news readers and J-school grads.

[sinsofsolarempirefan]

The US Civil war was a divisive issue in Britain, although the governing political class was generally sympathetic to the southern cause for their own elitist/pragmatic reasons, the ordinary people of Britain tended to be sympathetic to the anti-slavery Union cause. There is a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Manchester standing that was paid for by subscription by people who suffered economically from the Union blockade which prevented southern cotton reaching the cotton mills of Lancashire. In spite of the hardship they endured because of Lincoln's policies, they viewed him as a hero.

If it wasn't for the 'anti-slavery crusade' element of the US Civil War, it is likely that the British (and the French) would have intervened in favour of the south, but they didn't, because they knew that it would have been an extremely unpopular intervention...

[darkwing104]

Hamilton kept slaves?

His wife did. None of the Adams own slaves

[eyedigress]

That’s a very good way to put it.

[reefdiver]

Didn’t they put the fags in the closet too?

[DesertRhino]

You are dead wrong,,, the european monarchs all held power than was VERY real. Their ‘constitutions” were at best agreements between the nobility and the monarchy.

There was nothing like what the founders created. The fact is that in England, Holland, or any of those monarchys,, there was nothing our founders recognozed as freedom, and they did indeed hold the power of life and death.

[SkyDancer]

In those days, voting rights were primarily tied to land ownership. Widows and single women who inherited their family's land, especially common in the era immediately following the Revolutionary War, held the same voting rights as a male land-owner. Another group of women land-owners/voters in that era were some of the country's earliest entrepreneurs, the madams who ran the local brothels.

There is not one single word in the Constitution, or first 10 ammendments, regarding ANYONES voting rights! Voting rights were added later on in amendments,

[SkyDancer]

(Sorry for the double post. Posted accidentally before spell checking.)

In those days, voting rights were primarily tied to land ownership. Widows and single women who inherited their family's land, especially common in the era immediately following the Revolutionary War, held the same voting rights as a male land-owner. Another group of women land-owners/voters in that era were some of the country's earliest entrepreneurs, the madams who ran the local brothels.

There is not one single word in the Constitution, or first 10 amendments, regarding ANYONE'S voting rights! Voting rights were added later on in amendments.

[AfricanChristian]

I don’t want to get into a long debate over the Civil War. The fact is that before the Civil War, slavery was legal in many parts of the US. After the Civil War it was not.

[masadaman]

Exactly. Our public schools spew Goebbels quality crap 24/7.

Were the slaves forcibly taken from Africa by "white guys" who invaded and captured them and hauled them across the ocean? No. The were captured and sold as tribal enemies by mainly Arab and Arab-Africans to middlemen who then resold them in North America. The major vendors were from the horn of Africa, today's Tanzania and Kenya, then called Zanzibar, Coast of Rust (iron) in Arabic. Recent biographies of Dr. Henry Morton Stanley, highlight that it was 'people of color' who were slavers then and are still at it today.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks chessplayer.

echoed Time magazine's cover story

[arasina]

Well guess what, ABC. We're going to be celebrating another Independence Day in early November of next year. It may even surpass the one we currently mark each 4th of July.

You can hop on up into the wagon or you can stay on the side of the street, but I wouldn't remain there too long if I were you. If you do, you'll end up under Obama's bus just like the many before you who thought it could never happen to them.

[GeronL]

and slavery still existed in many parts of the world after the US Civil War, including some British and French colonies.

[Steelfish]

His wife or his wife’s parents?

The striking distance between Hamilton and Jefferson on the question of slavery.

While Jefferson continued to own slaves and to suspect that blacks were inferior to whites, Hamilton wrote that “the contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor in experience” and believed that “their natural faculties are as good as ours.” (See Moulton, The Reach of Jefferson, for more on Jefferson’s views on race and slavery).

[sinsofsolarempirefan]

If you think that George III had arbitrary power, including the power to have people executed 'at will', you are seriously mistaken. England (prior to the formation of Great Britain in 1707) fought its own bloody civil war and had its own 'Glorious Revolution' to put pay to the idea that Kings ruled by divine right or had the right to rule arbitrarily. Yes, George III had more political influence than modern British monarchs do, but it had already been established in the 17th century that Parliament now called most of the shots. In actual fact, George III was the very monarch who surrendered the revenues of the Crown Estates to Parliament in return for a stipend in 1760, making him totally dependent on Parliament for his income in peacetime as well as war...

Here is a fun fact for you, John Adams originally envisaged that the American colonies would pay their taxes directly to him, rather than to the British Parliament. This would have made him more powerful because it would have given him an income that would not have been subject to Parliamentary oversight. George III, being a dedicated constitutional monarch, refused to have anything to do with this idea, and supported his Parliament for THEIR policies towards the American colonies (they were not his)...

[SuziQ]

*rolls eyes* So I guess ABC is laying the groundwork to reject the Constitution as a founding document, since the men who wrote it were so mean and nasty.

[JDW11235]

“I don’t want to get into a long debate over the Civil War.”

I’m sure you don’t, you’ve clearly shown so little understanding you have in the diatribe you already posted.

“The fact is that before the Civil War, slavery was legal in many parts of the US. After the Civil War it was not.”

The death of King Frederick VII of Denmark happened in 1863. That has about as much pertinence as what you said.

“The fact is that before the [death of King Frederick VII of Denmark], slavery was legal in many parts of the US. After the [death of King Frederick VII of Denmark] it was not.”