Abraham Lincoln Monument Torched In Chicago

The Washington Times ^ | Douglas Ernst

[piasa]

By 1770 Franklin had freed all of his slaves.

http://www.benjaminfranklinhouse.org/site/sections/about_franklin/Issue%205%20Spring-Summer%20200%20Benjamin%20Franklin%20and%20Slavery.pdf

[piasa]

Just think of the poor snowflakes having to see slave owners on their money...

I guess that explains why there’s a move to go digital

[Vaden]

Oh my Holy God. What is happening?? I woke up one day and overnight my country has turned into the Twilight Zone. What is this mass mental illness that has afflicted the West??

[ConservativeDude]

of the signers of the Declaration, of those that we know their views on slavery, there were more abolitionists than slavery apologists.

[Verginius Rufus]

Many of the Founding Fathers recognized that slavery was evil, even some of those who owned slaves, but they were optimistic that it was on the way out. If that Yankee had not invented the cotton gin, maybe it would have declined. From about 1830 you start to see a new attitude in the South on the part of people claiming that slavery was a positive good and that the slaves were better off in servitude.

The people who are asserting their virtue today by denouncing the Confederacy don't know how they would have acted if they had been alive in the 1850-1865 period. If they had been slave owners would they have freed their slaves and adopted a life of poverty for themselves and their families?

The slaveholding aristocracy was so entrenched in power in the slave states that it was hard to imagine how the institution could be ended. Delaware was a slave state with only a few thousand slaves (more "free persons of color" than slaves there) but even during the war the slaveholders resisted very strongly any effort to end slavery there. When West Virginia broke away from Virginia, they did not free the slaves but only adopted a plan for gradual emancipation (to benefit black people born after a certain date, not those already enduring slavery).

[ConservativeDude]

thank you. Great additional detail.