Slavery was a self-evident sinUm, you may want to move the word MYTH on this line to after the word sin instead of before the word slavery.
It is pretty self-evident that it was a sin.
...Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?"
Quite a lot, actually. While today both Washington and Jefferson are roundly condemned for owning slaves, it is nevertheless true that they both laid the first seeds for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Their first obstacle was the laws of Virginia Colony which forbade the freeing of slaves. When Jefferson tried to change the laws of Virginia in 1769, he ran into an obstruction in Crown law, which gave the Crown the unilateral and unambiguous power to strike down any and all American laws on any subject whatsoever.
Indeed, one great reason the Revolution was fought was to give liberty to the colonies to free slaves, which many of them did. For example, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1780, Connecticut and Rhode Island did so in 1784, Vermont in 1786, New Hampshire in 1792, New York in 1799, New Jersey in 1804, etc.
Why are we now headed back to the tyranny of others trumping our sovereignty now? We read daily of
So tell me again, why did we declare our independence if we're just going give up our sovereignty? Why should we submit to a absurd gaggle of UN Security Council members like Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico, Pakistan, Spain, and Syria?
Perhaps we need to declare independence again and tar and feather those who would sacrifice our nation's independence. Or, if we value independence no more than this, let's at least cancel Independence Day! We can't purport to be independent if we allow unelected foreigners in global organizations to nullify our local, state, and national policy. How free Is a country whose social policy is made by striped-pantsers in foreign capitols?