Half of the garbage they spew would fall to pieces if they included this letter and other works like it.
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Can sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar, be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste, compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men? Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!
Franklin himself had been an indentured servant.
Our Founders are being greatly misrepresented by the ‘anti-old-white-guy’ crowd.
Jefferson was known to look the other way when slaves ran away, if he could ascertain that they were doing alright; and it would have been very irresponsible for any slave owner, no matter how devoted to Emancipation, to just free them all with no concern for their welfare. And many people who might have liked to free their slaves were constrained by law. (Washington decreed in his will that he wanted his slaves freed; but in-laws intervened.)
They were living in different times, under a different culture and different strictures. Modern people of shallow minds and poor education, largely ignorant of history and the cultural exigencies of the time, who declare that these were morally ‘bad’ men, don’t know what they’re farting-off about; and could never navigate the legal and philosophical shoals that these men did in order to create our Republic.
Future historians will probably judge today’s intellectual tyros who fancy themselves ‘superior’ just as harshly as leftists today do our Founders.
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