[JesusIsLord]

Ask any black in this country

My point was not about "any black man in this country". It was in reference to how a 18th or 19th century "slave" would think/feel about Independence Day. Would you expect a slave to celebrate the Independence of a nation where he held a slave?

[Pelham]

” Would you expect a slave to celebrate the Independence of a nation where he held a slave?”

Sounds like what William Lloyd Garrison and Karl Marx both were saying at the time.

Garrison famously burned copies of the Constitution at abolitionist rallies.

Marx wrote for the Whig/Republican Party flagship newspaper for a decade. Of all the writers of the time he sounds the most like today’s moralizers who consider pre Lincoln America to be evil.

[ladyjane]

Would you expect a slave to celebrate the Independence of a nation where he held a slave?

You are forgetting about the THOUSANDS of blacks who were slave owners. They must have been happy to be here away from tribal warfare.