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America Wasn’t Founded on White Supremacy
by Lucas Morel

Excerpt:

But if the Declaration of Independence cannot be trusted to represent the true intentions of the Founders, [essayist Nikole] Hannah-Jones does no better at interpreting the U.S. Constitution. We learn that “the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word.” But she ignores the debates of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Madison’s detailed records of those proceedings show that he “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” He and the rest of the Framers kept the word slavery out of the Constitution because they envisioned a day when slavery would no longer exist on American soil.

What about Article 1 Section 9, which prevents Congress from banning the importation of slaves for twenty years? Hannah-Jones sees in this only the perpetuation of slavery, but she misses the growing national impetus against this nefarious commerce. Had there been no such impetus, there would have been no need to delay Congress’ attempts to regulate it. As Madison observed in Federalist 42: “It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy.”

Reading Hannah-Jones, one would never know that Madison had anything to do with the Constitution, let alone that he and other Framers were at pains to document their anti-slavery intent. She claims that “the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.” This reflects a woeful ignorance of the writings of key Founders. The question was never whether the enslaved deserved their freedom; it was how to secure their rights in a peaceable, lawful fashion.

Full essay:

https://americanmind.org/essays/america-wasnt-founded-on-white-supremacy/

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