Free Republic

Abraham Lincoln was right when he declared that, at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the Constitution, it was widely expected that slavery was on the wane, and would soon die out. That broad sentiment is actually a matter of public record, but that record has been effectively suppressed. ... Massachusetts in the Lead In 1767, the General Court of Massachusetts (the equivalent of the House of Representatives) passed a bill “to prevent the unnatural and unwarrantable custom of enslaving mankind in this province and the importation of slaves into the same.” That is, the...

The initial forced labor in the British North American colonies involved indentured servants who served a limited amount of time and were then freed. Many whites volunteered to serve a period of time in exchange for funds to pay for their trip to North America. Although these indentured servants were only temporary slaves, they were slaves in every sense of the word. Owners could mistreat them and even choose their sexual partners. Use of indentured servants continued through April, 1775, when prominent Virginia planterGeorge Washington advertised a rewatd for the teturn of 8 white 2 black runaways. s The Africans...

"With luck it will help to vindicate the fathers of liberal government and the free market in the 17th and 18th Centuries, falsely accused until now of abetting - or promoting - the great crime of race-based African slavery. For academic orthodoxy holds that John Locke and the great Whig thinkers of the Glorious Revolution (1688) helped to design and foster the economic system of hereditary slavery that shaped Atlantic capitalism for a century and a half. ...Except that this established version of events is not true. It is a near complete inversion of what happened, and this matters in...