Monday, March 22, 2021

Jefferson complained about the slave trade

The anti-racists want to cancel Thomas Jefferson. His sins include owning slaves, and complaining about them in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, 1776:
he has 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 & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce ...
He was complaining about the slave trade, not slavery itself.

It is common to say that slavery was the American original sin. It was not. The sin was the slave trade.

No comments: