The NY Times makes egregious errors in its attempt to tie founding of US to slavery

Erick Erickson:

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The problem with this is first factual — the abolitionist movement in London did not take off in any meaningful way until after 1776 and it still dragged out well into the new century. In fact, Massachusetts’ began considerations on abolishing the slave trade in 1767 and voted again in both 1771 and 1174 to end its practice altogether, though both times were overriden by the British governor’s veto.

Second is the statement about “one of the primary reasons.” Hannah-Jones claims preserving slavery was a primary reason for the revolution and that is a lie. Don’t take my word for it. The Continental Congress, in 1774, pledged to end the slave trade and in 1776 even southern states had agreed to abide by nonimportation of slaves from abroad. Take it also from the founders on words, who were writing before 1776 about slavery and the need to end it.

Few even of the most enlightened Virginians were willing to declare, as Jefferson did in the instructions he wrote for his colony’s delegation to the first Continental Congress, that “the rights of human nature [are] deeply wounded by this infamous practice” and that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state” — Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

[I]n 1766, the Reverend Stephen Johnson of Lyme, Connecticut, preaching on “the general nature and consequences of enslaving measures” and dilating on the iniquity of slavery and on its “shocking ill effects and terrible consequences” to both enslavers and enslaved. — Id.

Samuel Cooke, in his Massachusetts election sermon of 1770, argued that in tolerating Negro slavery “we, the patrons of liberty, have dishonored the Christian name, and degraded human nature nearly to a level with the beasts that perish,” and he devoted most of his text to “the cause of our African slaves.” –Id.

And Benjamin Rush, in a sweeping condemnation of slavery, “On Slave-Keeping” (1773), begged “Ye advocates for American liberty” to rouse themselves and “espouse the cause of humanity and general liberty.” Bear a testimony, he wrote in the language of the Quakers, “against a vice which degrades human nature… The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery. Remember, the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the globe.” –Id.

By 1774 this cry had become a commonplace in the pamphlet literature of the northern and middle colonies. How can we “reconcile the exercise of SLAVERY with our professions of freedom,” Richard Wells, “a citizen of Philadelphia,” demanded to know. There was no possible justification for the institution, he said. If, as some claimed, the slaves were bought from those who had a right to sell them, where are the titles to prove it? –Id.

Even Patrick Henry, while admitting the colonists could not immediately eradicate slavery, said he hoped “an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.”
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There is more.

The left in this country has been trying to rewrite history to push a lie.   They also omit the facts that Africans were not the only ones who came here as slaves.  Irish were also brought in as slaves at one point and Englishmen were brought in as indentured servants.  One of my ancestors came here that way,  Indentured servants were essentially slaves but unlike the African slave trade, the indentured was for a specific period of time and when completed the servant was free.

The left has joined in this vile smear of America's founding.

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It doesn’t explain why any reference to slavery was kept out of the Constitution. James Madison, per his notes during the drafting convention, “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”

The careful avoidance of the term was subsequently used to buttress the position of opponents of slavery from John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass. The great black abolitionist asked, “If the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument,” how could it be that “neither slavery, slaveholding nor slave . . . be anywhere found in it?”

The notion of slavery as a founding principle doesn’t explain the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, prior to the adoption of the Constitution, setting out the terms of settlement in the swath of territory between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. It stipulated that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.”

It doesn’t explain why the Constitution permitted the prohibition of the slave trade as of 1808, when it was indeed prohibited.
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