You have no brief at all against slavery at any other time or place than in America, perpetrated by whites.Doesn’t that bother you at least a little???
Either you have to condemn everyone in all of history, or you have to recognize that the people who lived prior to our time had different cultural norms and either did the best they understood at the time, or else did not. And of course none of them, Christ excepted, did the best at all times. The reason that Jefferson and Washington didn’t free all their slaves traces back to their own upbringing, what their fathers did before them, and what everyone around them took for granted.
Everyone in America, essentially, was prejudiced against blacks before Reconstruction. And after, because under the best of circumstances those attitudes don’t change on a dime. When I say, “everyone,” I certainly and specifically include Abraham Lincoln. Everyone.
Everyone was inculcated with that stuff, one way or the other - and if they weren’t directly told it, they absorbed it because the blacks themselves had such different culture from whites. And race consciousness is still with us, and if Jesse Jackson et. al. have anything to say about it, race consciousness will never go away. It is their rice bowl.