[x]

If the American Revolution has nothing to do with slavery, why did five states (six including Vermont) take steps to abolish slavery even before the Constitution was ratified?

It would also be instructive to consider the Northwest Ordinance, as an indicator of the mindset of the Founders on Egalitarianism.

That is the document that forbade slavery in the territories north of the Ohio, west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River.

Of course, you're off-target as usual. What we are talking about here isn't equality but liberty - equal liberty, the same basic rights for all.

Whatever came out of the Civil Rights movement in the end, the original motivation was liberty, as it was in the American Revolution.

[jmacusa]

I thought it had to do with taxation?

[Ohioan]

It is you who are off target on the Northwest Ordinance.

Yes it provided that my Ohio would be a free State, but that hardly makes it an egalitarian document. You might look at the suffrage requirement as to that.

The slavery argument is quite independent of whether any American State--in formation--wanted a distant Government redistributing its people's resources. Because we rejected the idea of distant interference did not mean that we were focused on the questions involved in allowing involuntary labor systems. The six States to which you refer had every right, as free & independent States, to interdict involuntary servitude, both on moral & economic grounds.

That does not mean they favored any variety of communistic Egalitarianism.