Then there is the clause about slavery in Jefferson’s original rough draft of the declaration. King George, said Jefferson, had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.” This seems like conclusive evidence that white Americans were capable at the time of grasping the concept that slavery was evil. Thus judging those who engaged in it is not “presentism,” in which we impose today’s moral standards on the past.
Of course, Jefferson himself owned at least 600 slaves during his life. Presumably he understood they were not working his plantation by choice, just because they wanted him to have more free time for philosophizing. Jefferson squared this circle by also condemning King George for “now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them.” First, King George forced people like Jefferson to enslave human beings, which they never would have done otherwise! And now King George was making these enslaved humans believe it was terrible to be enslaved, something they never would have figured out on their own! This was Tyranny in its purest form.
...
And obviously there are some good parts in the Declaration of Independence, ones so universally inspiring that Ho Chi Minh copied them directly when he wrote a Proclamation of Independence for Vietnam in 1945. America was so touched by this that a few years later we considered giving France a few nuclear weapons to drop on Vietnam.
:uncle-ho-2:
Jefferson's anti-slavery declarations further look like virtue signaling when you take into account that in 1772 the court case Somerset v Stewart began to put the legality of slavery into question, spawning a slew of similar cases throughout the British Empire. But no, I'm sure the revolutionary war just a few years after the ruling was about
State'sColony's Rights.Damn, I really need to read The Counter-Revolution of 1776.
Also, I noticed that the slave in question in Somerset v. Stewart was purchased in Boston. It wasn't just a big British case at the time; it had a direct connection to the American colonies.
Ooh, so do I. Thanks!
Yeah, as someone who reads up a lot on the Kochtopus astroturfing and manufacturing consent, I have a hard time believing that much of the adoption of slogans like No Taxation Without Representation and the other tax protests weren't astroturfing from the slaveholder class.
Good book. I enjoyed reading through it so far. Just gotta keep in mind the overall Marxian context that it was a bougeoise revolution against the old monarchist system and among the first nails Capitalism hammered into the casket of Feudalism
I'd give Gerald Horne credit for shedding light upon a subject that's kept silent on in historical education on the 18th century slave trade, and the overall evolution of the concept of American racism in the colonies.
if we're honest about America's founding (or any point in its history), then people will want to change things now and we can't have that
