(06-12-2020, 11:42 AM)TJBender Wrote:

(06-12-2020, 11:19 AM)americus 2.0 Wrote: Without going too far into this a break the CoC this is my thought on this very thing.

The men who founded this country were Christians and in the bible there is scripture that says "all men are created equal" but it doesn't stop there. It says "all are created equal in the eyes of God." Notice it doesn't say in the eyes of man. God did his job, we screwed it up. Our founding fathers wanted equality for all people it seems, but people.....we don't always like or appreciate what's different. It may not be wrong, these differences, but it's different and we're comfortable with what is familiar. 

So the founding fathers, who included the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause in the US Constitution, the founding fathers who, for the most part, were slave owners and in the case of at least Jefferson were banging those slaves, wanted all men to be equal.

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The founding fathers sincerely believed that slavery would be abolished in all states by the early 1800s.
When the Declaration of Independence was adopted, there were slaves in all 13 states. Between 1776, and the constitutional convention of 1787, the northern states had freed their slaves, or at least adopted laws saying that no new slaves could be brought in and nobody could be born into slavery. It was reasonable at the time to expect that the southern states would eventually do the right thing in this area, though everyone also understood that it would be harder because the southern states had a lot more slaves in the first place.
We see this optimism in the part of the Constitution that says no new slaves can be imported after 1808.
So I have a lot more sympathy for guys like George Washington and James Madison who though they did not free any slaves, thought they were bringing the country closer and closer to a day when the slaves would be freed. I have no sympathy for guys who came later. The ones who insisted on expanding slave holding into the territories. The ones who wrote supreme Court decisions saying black people were not citizens regardless of which state they reside in. And I have the least sympathy of all for guys like Robert E Lee, who clearly saw the time to free the slaves, the time his ancestors hoped for, was at hand, and Lee along with his entire generation of southern bastards, hardened his heart and raised his hand against it.

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