LIBERTY'S SECRETS

THE TRUTH ABOUT SLAVERY AND THE FOUNDERS

Exclusive: Joshua Charles explains how forefathers' long-term strategy succeeded

Was the United States founded on oppression? Such is a common charge we hear these days, particularly with regard to slavery. What those making the charge fail to understand is that while slavery existed at the time of the founding, and while compromises were made in order to maintain the Union, slavery would have existed anyway, whether the South joined the Union or not – so the Founders bet that the long-term existence of slavery would be more in jeopardy within the Union, rather than without it. This portion of my latest book, “Liberty’s Secrets: The Lost Wisdom of America’s Founders,” will give you an idea of the various nuances and details we are rarely taught when it comes to the issue of slavery and the founding generation:

The fact that our nation was unable to completely live up to the ideas on which it was founded shows how radical those ideas really were, particularly in historical context. This should be a source of both honest pride and candid reflection. There is no excuse whatsoever for slavery. Nothing can be said in its defense, and no efforts whatsoever should be employed to in any way diminish its inhuman brutality and superlatively cruel injustice. 

Slavery was beyond any doubt the great hypocrisy of the founding generation. What can and must be done, however, is to place slavery in its historical context, and realize that while the moral case against it is absolute and unquestionable, the realities at work at the time present us with a far more nuanced picture. 

This historical review is all the more important because this single issue has been used by many to convince Americans that the Founders are not worth bothering with at all. …

This is by no means meant to excuse slavery. It was a monstrous evil for which no excuse can possibly ever satisfy the righteous indictments against it. At the same time, those who insist upon moral perfection from the Founders, who were part of just as imperfect a world as we are today, are often engaging in the worst sort of hypocrisy. 

Again, we live in an age in which the murder of millions of unborn children has been officially sanctioned by our Supreme Court as a “constitutional right.” Many who argue for such a “right” are dehumanizing the human child in the womb in the same way that many blacks were dehumanized. The latter was used to justify keeping people in slavery, the former to sanction their murder. …

Joshua Charles’ popular new book is now available at the WND Superstore: “Liberty’s Secrets: The Lost Wisdom of America’s Founders”

Many of the great figures of history owned slaves, supported slavery, or remained silent as to its existence. Greek philosophers, Pharaonic kings, Roman statesmen, and others from all corners of the earth whom today we consider great and noble souls did nothing to advance its demise, and in many cases even stunted it. 

And yet it is the Founders alone who are actively and vociferously criticized. It is the Founders alone upon whom we inflict vituperative and delegitimizing scorn. It is the Founders alone upon whom we maintain a singular gaze of judgment and condemnation, and against whom we render our verdicts of “guilty” with torturous repetition.

Why?

Because the Founders, for the first time in history, discovered that most resplendent gold known as self-government, and the United States was the first nation to build its foundations upon this precious cornerstone. Having wrenched it from the bowels of the earth upon which it had always been accessible but cynically dismissed, they handed it to us, their posterity, with dirt and mud upon it. But they handed it to us nonetheless. 

Never before had a nation been bequeathed such a gift from its inception; this is why, as we are seeing, the great danger in dismissing or despising the Founders for handing us an imperfect Union is the danger of unjustifiably despising not persons, but the very gold they handed us in the first place. 

For in the final analysis, the only reason we today criticize slavery with such righteous invective is because a few imperfect men in an imperfect time in the midst of imperfect circumstances dared to declare and defend that which, since time immemorial, had been merely an ephemeral dream in human affairs: that “all men are created equal.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/12/the-truth-about-slavery-and-the-founders/#YZWMeoD1VkLb32dz.99