The Elephant in the Room of the American Founding – Slavery
By Dr. David Glesne
President, The Virtues Campus
Might the Declaration of Independence & the U.S. Constitution shed light on a better way forward?
“Black lives matter! Systemic racism! Tear down those statutes! White privilege! Racial injustice! Reparations now!” Impassioned voices, many of whom want to tear down the system and the principles upon which it is built! How ironic - given that the Declaration of Independence is the greatest of all anti-slavery documents! It launched the greatest abolition movement in human history, the United States of America. Within the wider context of slavery itself, one group of people, far from being morally perfect, dared to declare a universal, true moral idea: that all men are created equal in terms of inalienable natural rights. Might the Declaration of Independence be the only thing that prevents our country from further descent into violent chaos and the tyranny that typically follows?
The Colonial Period: Early 1600s to 1760
Slavery has been the rule rather than the exception among human civilizations since before written records were kept. It is very old.
That being the case, the U.S. did not create slavery, not even on the American continent. Spanish colonists held slaves in the new world long prior to 1619 when British colonists imported slaves to America. The Spanish began importing African slaves to Hispaniola (West Indies) in 1501. The first African slaves arrived in Spanish Florida in 1526. Slavery was not uncommon among Native American tribes either.
Slavery has never been uniform. It has taken different forms among different people in different places around the world. It has existed for short periods of time or often for long periods of time on every continent. Slavery has resulted sometimes from religious persecution, sometime from war, sometimes from debt. The color of skin has been important in some kinds of slavery, but not so much in others.
With the rise of advanced shipbuilding and sailing which made for reliable transportation of cargo, the transoceanic trade in slaves became lucrative business. It was the first time in history that large numbers of slaves were sold and carried to distant lands where they lived among people unlike themselves.
The evil, ugliness and injustice perpetrated on black slaves on those ships is deplorable. Owned, controlled, used, bought and sold as mere property was among man’s greatest inhumanity to man.
During the latter 16th and early 17th centuries, even though the slave trade was already existing in other areas, the British had no plan to enslave people or to export people from Africa to North America to work on English farms. The English had in mind colonies of free people. At no point in this initial formulation did the English think they needed to import slaves from other areas.
But the spread of tobacco began to change the dynamic for the English in the middle decades of the 17th century. Tobacco was a labor intensive product whose expansion demanded more labor. At first nearly all the men who came to the colonies were indentured servants from England. They would serve for a time not exceeding seven years, become free, and receive a certain amount of land which they then tended as free men.
But by the 1660s, the colonists could not attract enough servants from England to tend tobacco crops. An outbreak of the plague and a major fire in London in the 1660s led to improved conditions for potential servants. The tobacco economy demanded new supplies of laborers. The solution? They looked around and saw the slave trade already taking place in the world and decided to rely on slaves to provide labor for their plantations. The English did not invent the idea of slavery or the slave trade, but they did embrace it to meet the specific economic need in eastern North America in the middle decades of the 17th century.
Although the English did not invent the system, it does not follow that they bore no responsibility. The English cannot be exonerated of their responsibility in the system - the horrors of capture in Africa, the degradation of the middle passage, the psychologically devastating effects of slave auctions in the colonies, often breaking up families.
To this day, historians cannot find the moment in colonial statutes when slavery became fully established. But the English established slavery in their legal system. By 1700, they defined slavery as permanent, inheritable, and fit for Africans and African-Americans. By 1720, one-half of the population of Virginia and two-thirds of the population of South Carolina were of African descent.
By the middle of the 18th century, approximately 20 percent of the American population traced its ancestry to Africa, and the vast majority of these residents were enslaved. But there was no single slave “system” in the mainland colonies. Slavery existed in the colonies north of Maryland, but it was not widespread. In the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, slavery was well established, especially on larger plantations. In the lower South colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia, slavery was deeply established.
What was the Founders view of slavery?
There is a mountain of evidence that the Founding Fathers thought slavery was wrong on principle. No rational person could easily justify the continued existence of slavery when it was such an obvious contradiction to the principles of the revolutionary movement. Hamilton and Madison both referred to slaves as persons. As such, they have inalienable natural rights. Slavery can only rest on the basis of positive law and therefore by definition, slavery is an injustice.
In 1764 James Otis, a rising star in the legal world, spoke out against slavery. Slavery was not only unjust but it corroded individual characters and made it impossible to imagine a situation in which one could own slaves and govern in a just society.
Thomas Jefferson tried to blame King George III for imposing slavery on unwilling colonists. This gives insight to his own sense of guilt. In the list of King George III’s tyrannical actions, reference to the slave trade was edited out of the final version of the Declaration of Independence because of South Carolina and Georgia. He did not condemn the slave trade for fear of condemning these southerners whose support was needed if the resistance was to survive. But slavery as a legal institution survived beyond the colonial period, beyond the time they could blame slavery on the British.
Jefferson was a tortured soul over slavery. He said that slavery is at war with human nature and justice. It is bad for the slave. It is bad for the masters. It is bad for society. He realized the cruelty of the slave trade:
“We are so wrong on the question of slavery that it is certain God will punish us if we don’t get it right.” Between slaves and masters over the future of the country, he said: “The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” (Notes on the State of Virginia, March 14, 1779)
The Founders understood that they had a colossal problem on their hands. They all recognized the fundamental contradiction between slavery and the principle of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. They all knew that slavery was wrong and a massive injustice, incompatible with the principles of liberty they were declaring. But as a practical matter, slavery existed in all the colonies - and a number of the Founders themselves were slave owners.
What did the Founders do about slavery?
The Founders did not end slavery altogether but that is not to say they did nothing. They did many things to restrict slavery, to hem it in within the narrowest limits of necessity.
Before the Revolution slavery was normal. The Revolution made it a problem in that states and sections of the country now had to justify it. Slavery became a regional issue. During the Founding period, nine states became free states. There were free blacks in every state at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. But civil rights varied from state to state and they were never perfectly equal with white citizens.
All of the original states north of Maryland, from Pennsylvania northward, abolished slavery in one way of another. Sometimes they did it very quickly as in Massachusetts where slavery disintegrated. Sometimes they did it gradually as in New Jersey where provisions were made to abolish it, but a few still legally held slaves on the brink of the Civil War per the 1860 census. Elsewhere slavery remained a part of life.
Even in states where slavery was retained, laws were changed in significant ways. They eased their manumission laws to an individual act of emancipation. Thousands of slaves were set free (manumitted) in southern states. We see southern courts favoring the claims of slaves suing for their freedom.
There were reforms in the slave states that tended to recognize the humanity of slaves. In North Carolina the killing of a slave before the Revolutionary period brought incarceration of 1-2 years. By 1800, the killing of a slave incurred the same penalty as the killing of a free person.
The new states of Vermont (1791), Ohio (1803) and Maine (1820) came into the union as free states from the beginning. No slavery was allowed north of 36 degrees, 30 min. Slavery was prohibited in the vast bulk of the Louisiana Purchase.
In crafting the Constitution, slavery was a very difficult problem the Founders had to deal with. Slavery existed, but in the Constitution itself, there is no mention of the word “slave” in any variation of the term. One of the reasons they did not mention slavery or slaves was because they were looking forward to the day when slavery would no longer exist. They did not want to taint the document with any reminder of the existence of slavery. James Madison said that the indirect language of the Constitution was because they never wanted to suggest that there is such a thing as a right of property in man. For that reason, Lincoln said “slavery is hid away in the Constitution.” The Founders recognized that slavery was wrong and their goal was its ultimate extinction.
The Constitution allowed the slave trade to go on for 20 years and then gave Congress the power to end it which they did. It was legally abolished in 1807 and took effect in 1808. Later the slave trade was declared to be piracy, a death penalty offense.
But compromises and concessions needed to be made in the Constitution out of necessity. In the short run they were needed to preserve the Union so that in the long run liberty could be secured for all. Even though the word “slave” or “slavery” is not mentioned, everyone knew exactly to what the provisions were referring. They provided certain safe-guards for slavery. They made compromises but went no further than the concessions.
There was the 3/5 Clause concerning how to count the slave population in terms of representation and direct taxes. The clause was not indicative of some judgement about the human value of the slave or monetary value of a slave’s labor. It was simply a compromise. Congress under the Articles of Confederation had attempted to adopt a 3/5 ratio and had gotten eleven states to approve it. But amending the Articles of Confederation required all 13 states so when they came to the Constituting Convention where only nine states were needed, they knew they had a ratio acceptable to enough states to get beyond the ratification hurdle.
The Importation Clause was looked upon by many people as a death sentence for slavery. It was widely believed that the slave population could not be self-sustaining and that only continued importation would allow slavery to survive in a community. That proved to be true -except in America where slavery was proved to be self-supporting.
The Fugitive Slave Clause allowed slaves to be returned to masters upon a claim of that master, but there was an ambiguity. When it said the slave “shall be delivered up” it never said by whom. That is, it didn’t impose upon the Federal Government or anyone else an affirmative obligation to return those slaves.
Finally, and most important, the Founders passed a piece of legislation called the Northwest Ordinance (the NW Territory consisted of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of MN) in 1787. The NW Ordinance was the greatest testimony to the power of anti-slavery forces, banning slavery in perpetuity north of the Ohio River. In some ways it was more significant than the Declaration of Independence. It banned forever the development of slavery in territories all agreed would become states. The language of the NW Ordinance eventually became the language in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing slavery nationwide.
The Founders had adopted a policy of containment like the U.S. did during the Cold War. They were not going to surrender to slavery and allow it to spread. They were not going to war over it immediately like John Brown and the radical abolitionists proposed. Rather, they made a prudential choice. They would contain slavery and by containing it, put it on a course of ultimate extinction.
The Founders did not have the luxury of working out the contradiction in a classroom philosophy seminar. They were living in real time and place. They wrestled with the very real question: “We know slavery is wrong but how do we deal in the circumstances in which we find ourselves where slavery actually exists?” The Founders had no clear answer as to what to do in place of the slavery system, in the sense of what race relations would be like.
In the post-Revolutionary Era, increasingly in the 19th century there grew a moral, political and religious polarization of the sympathizers and non-sympathizers of slavery.
On the sympathizer side, although the slavery issue was primarily a domestic issue under the control of the states with the Federal government not much involved, when issues arose, usually the Federal government took the pro-slavery side. The Compromise of 1850 was a gain for popular sovereignty in letting the people of the territory decide on slavery for themselves. The work of Stephen Douglas in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 pushed popular sovereignty north of 36, 30. The infamous Supreme Court case Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1857) declared that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Free blacks had no rights as citizens of the U.S.
On the non-sympathizer side the religious revival of the early 19th century moved many evangelical Protestant denominations in the north to make a moral and religious condemnation of slavery. When Lincoln was in Congress, as a member of the Whig Party he opposed slavery in territory gained from Mexico in the Mexican War. The Republican Party, which started as an anti-Nebraska Party, was birthed out of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and brought Lincoln back into politics.
In 1858, Lincoln challenged Douglas for the Senate seat. In this heated debate, Douglas defended his principle of popular sovereignty. Lincoln defended the Founder’s principles of natural law and rights. For Lincoln, slavery is a moral principle and departs from the Founders’ principles. Douglas countered by claiming the founding principles did not apply to slaves or black people. They apply to white people only. This is a white man’s government.
Lincoln says that all men are equal but not in all respects. We are not all equal in color, in size, in intellect, in moral development or in social capacity. But we are equal in certain inalienable rights, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He said:
“They [Founders] did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were actually then enjoying that equality. Nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no such power to confer such a loan. They simply meant to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which will be familiar to all, and revered by all.”
Lincoln lost the election but he won the debate. He discredited Douglas as leader of the anti-slavery party and was acceptable to Republicans in 1860. He had to preserve the Union within Constitutional limits.
Why did the Founders not do more and finish the task of emancipation?
Surely a significant factor was that self-interest is a part of the human condition. That does not make it right but self-interest is real. They believed that slavery was essential to their livelihood. It is very difficult to get people to ignore what they perceive to be a critical interest for the sake of an abstract principle.
There was the self-interest not only of economic but of physical survival. Slave owners lived in perpetual terror of slave insurrection. They looked at the decade-long slave rebellion in Santo Domingo (modern day Haiti) that rose out of the French Revolution. They feared that to end slavery would lead to a race war. Many whites had exiled the Caribbean island and settled in South Carolina. They brought with them their first-hand experience of the civil war. Jefferson knew the gravity of self-preservation when he acknowledged, “We have the wolf by the ears.”
They were greatly concerned for the survival of the union. South Carolina and Georgia had made it abundantly clear that if the delegates to the Constitutional Convention tried to outlaw slavery in the Constitution, they would leave and set up an independent republic or republics. With that declaration, there was a disaster in the making. Paramount was the preservation of the Union. They were terrified that America would turn into Europe Junior. It was a momentous choice: they could end slavery and face disunion or preserve the union and tolerate slavery at least for the time being.
They were optimistic about the future eradication of slavery. There had been enormous progress in that direction already. America was the first nation in world history to declare as a people that slavery was bad for everyone, that every man should be free. They couldn’t act on it right away but declared the principle and were moving in that direction.
What went wrong?
Abolitionists of the early 19th century saw the Revolutionary’s actions as a betrayal of their commitment to universal equality. But there were northerners and southerners who were needed for the rebellion to succeed who believed it was their right to keep humans as property. As such the Founding Fathers thought slavery was a necessary evil to be tolerated but it was to be placed in the path of extinction. But after the founding period, in the southern states progress toward emancipation slowed, then stopped, and then began to reverse. Why?
There were personal factors. The founding principles required slave-holders to acknowledge on a continual basis that they were behaving unjustly toward fellowmen. They were wronging people on a continuous, daily basis. That is hard to accept. We like to think of ourselves as good and not acknowledge our injustices.
There were economic factors. There were new developments that made slavery even more desirable. There was the invention of the cotton gin. It gave slavery a new lease on life. The profit motive increased a great deal. Also, cotton had grown only in coastal areas but new strains of cotton introduced in the 19th century moved the growing of cotton to the interior of the south and made it profitable in places like Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and northern Louisiana. The survival of slavery beyond the era of the writing of the Constitution suggests how deeply woven the institution was in the social and economic fabric of regions of the nation.
There were social factors. Over time southern slave holders came to like the social system and culture that slavery made possible. The enjoyed the imitation of the life of the European aristocracy.
There were intellectual factors. When 19th century American graduate students wanted more advanced learning, they attended universities in Germany and brought back with them new theories of government and philosophy. Man is first and fore mostly not an individual but a social creature. In those universities they studied philosophers like Kant and Hegel who were openly hostile to the American Founding. European immigrants also brought with them ideas of the German intellectual tradition.
There were also home grown ideas that were hostile to the founding principles. There was a very overt rejection of the notion of social compact, the idea of rights being derived from nature and from the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God. These ideas culminated in a new ideology which saw slavery as a positive good rather than a necessary evil.
The most articulate American expositor and defender of slavery was John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). Calhoun held every major political office except president. He was extremely and openly critical of the American Founding. He looked at the Declaration of Independence’s words “all men are created equal” and “all men are born free and equal” and proclaimed them to be the most false and dangerous of all political errors.
Jefferson had written, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Calhoun said, “They are not self-evident to me. I reject these truths. I do not believe they are the truth.” He said that the Founders were not interested in natural law or natural rights. Rather, as revolutionaries, they were interested in preserving the rights of Englishmen, rights derived from the English Constitution over a period of centuries. He rejected the notion that man has inherent rights.
Rather, man by nature is a political creature. He exists in civil society. That is his natural condition. Whereas the Founders taught that the individual has natural rights before government comes on the scene, Calhoun believes everyone is born into government of some kind, most basic being the political society of the family. He believes man is a political creature by nature and the reason it is so is because it is only in political society that man can be the moral and intellectual creature that God made him to be. It is the only place his nature can develop.
The implications of these ideas for Calhoun shaped his thinking and actions. If political society is so extremely important for a person’s nature to develop, then any government is better than no government. Even the worst form of government, tyranny is better than no government.
Such an idea was a direct inversion of the formula James Madison gives us at the end of Federalist 51 where he says that anarchy is better than tyranny. Calhoun disagreed. Because order in society is so essential for people to develop into human beings, Calhoun elevates that need for order in society to such a height that we need whatever government can be provided. Some lowlifes need despotism and the order it gives to develop into human beings. Instead of all men being created equal, instead of liberty being natural and inborn in all, Calhoun saw liberty as a prize to be won as a member of society, the reward of living in civilization.
Once you make the leap and say, “some people can handle liberty and others cannot” and transfer that idea to the American situation, America is understood differently. Calhoun said there are two races in America. There are two distinct groups. The free group (whites) can handle liberty and self-government to the highest degree. The slavery group (blacks) cannot handle liberty and self-government. But there is a unique benefit to slavery in a society where the two races live side by side. The benefit is that each of the two groups can get what they need.
Whites are able to co-exist with their slaves and not be pulled down. They are able to enjoy liberty and self-government in this arrangement. Blacks get what they need at the same time. They get access to order and protection and the fruits of a level of civilization they could never have enjoyed in Africa. Slavery makes possible a way of life which is beneficial for both groups. Calhoun does not claim that slavery is a universal good. It is a good for America because the two races live together.
Once we walk away from the Founding, it doesn’t take us very long to make a firm defense of slavery as a positive good. It is this theory that is going to pull the southern states away from their attachment to the Union, to the Constitution and to the principles of the Founding. It is this attachment to the institution of slavery and a defense of it as a positive good that is going to bring the nation to the brink of destruction by the beginning of the 1860s
Slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. What was at stake? Nothing less than to save or destroy republican government and equal natural rights.
Slavery puts poison into the body politic. The political effects are devastating. No one articulated this reality more clearly than the abolitionist Frederick Douglas. Douglas saw slavery as the most stupendous of all lies. Like tyranny, it must grow and take control of everything around it, reshaping the entire society in order to protect itself. Slavery must transform every society in which it exists. Hostile to the old society, a new society must be construed in replacement of the old one. All free standing institutions were considered a threat to slavery. All opposition is a threat to that new society slavery creates. Freedom must be severely curtailed for free people as well.
In the pro-slavery south, as the Civil War approached, the south increasingly created a Police State which it sought to export throughout the country. The press and free speech were curtailed. Post-masters opened and inspected mail as they looked for abolitionist thoughts.
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln grappled with the question of what will satisfy the South. He asked what they could do to show the South that they meant them no harm. “What would convince them that we will not attack them and take away their slaves?” He concluded that it came down to a choice. Either we call slavery wrong and not join them in calling it right or we must abandon our moral convictions and adopt theirs. He concluded that the only justification for not doing so is our sincere belief that slavery is wrong.
“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” (Address at Cooper Institute, Feb. 27, 1860)
Slavery was a poison that threatened to corrupt the entire nation and transform America from a free nation that tolerated slavery out of necessity into a slave nation that was rapidly running out of tolerance for these unusual people in the free states who seem to think that universal liberty was a good thing.
It was Lincoln’s election in 1860 that signaled that the north rejected slavery. He ran on an anti-slavery platform. It showed that the North could elect a president without the South. That was an insult to the southern way of life. In the aristocratic society of the South where honor was everything, Lincoln’s election said to the South that slavery is wrong and slaveholders are evil.
The southern states began to secede.
In his 1st inaugural address, Lincoln had said there is no such thing as secession. There was no unilateral right for one party to withdraw from a social contract. In rejecting that notion, the South began to see themselves as the heirs to Washington and Jefferson and their effort of revolting against England. But revolution in the American context is an appeal to natural law. Only a long list of grievances against natural rights of a people justified revolution. The right the South was fighting for was the right to hold others as chattel property. But in the Constitution there can be no human right to hold another human being as chattel property. Therefore, there can’t be a revolution.
For Lincoln, secession was insurrection. The South was willing to work within the system as long as they were getting their way. But in the 1860 election, people they disagreed with won and therefore they were going to secede. They lost the election so they were going to blow up the country unless the north renounced the principles upon which Lincoln was elected and submit to them. Instead of the solution to losing an election being that of winning the next election, they rebelled. Lincoln said that the end is going to either be anarchy or despotism. War would blow up the country and bring anarchy. Despotism would impose minority rule on the country. The South was looking at the North and saying “Not my president.” “Resist” with force. The Civil War became an attempt to overturn a Constitutional election by force.
In the Founding, the people are sovereign and rule for the good of all. In an aristocracy, a few rule for the good of everyone. In the southern states, the aristocratic society morphed into an oligarchy, the rule of the few for their own good.
In his Gettysburg address of 1863, Abraham Lincoln stated that four score and seven years ago (i.e. back in 1776), the Declaration of Independence established a moral order. Eleven years later, the Constitution established a legal order, the law of the land. Our Founders were our moral fathers who laid down a timeless, moral principle. But the American regime had compromised with slavery. A new birth of freedom was needed. All men are created equal. The moral principles of the Declaration of Independence is the foundation of this struggle against a southern oligarchy.
What the Gettysburg Address tries to do is re-establish the relationship between the legal system of the Constitution and the moral principle contained in the Declaration of Independence. It is this truth and the guiding principles contained in the Declaration of Intendance that John Calhoun denied. The Constitution was made for the Declaration of Independence, for that moral principle of liberty to all of inalienable natural rights.
Lincoln and the Republican Party’s goal was to restore the principles of the American founding, the Founders’ Constitution. What had been initially an anti-slavery document had been hijacked for slave power. The Constitution established a system that was meant to contain and eventually end slavery. But the way government was actually administered had turned it in a pro-slavery direction.
Lincoln’s own political philosophy derived from the principles of the Declaration of Independence. He said he never had a political thought that didn’t derive its fundamental source from Jefferson’s statement that all men are created equal.
Natural rights principles of the Founders’ Constitution needed to be preserved. The purpose of the Union was to preserve liberty and equality. The purpose of government was to protect our natural rights. Slavery was the greatest threat to that system. Proverbs 25:11 says, “A word fitly spoken (is like) apples of gold in settings of silver.” The Declaration of Independence and its principles are the Apples of Gold. The Constitution is the frame or setting of silver meant to adorn the apples of gold. Lincoln had to deal with the slavery problem which had been there from the founding.
In his 2nd inaugural address, Lincoln sets out to establish that the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God are in fact real, guiding and governing for us. It would be irrelevant to go back to the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God if those laws are false and proven as such.
Lincoln said no one wanted this war but the Almighty has His own purposes. At the end of the Address Lincoln says, “With firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.” In other words, God has enabled us to see a portion of His Law. The evil of slavery is a cause of the war and even to understand the war as a kind of divine judgment on the nation as a whole, on the North and South alike for the sin of slavery. Slavery is unjust in the eyes of God. In a reference to God’s judgment against Adam in Genesis 3, he says:
“It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces….” (Abraham Lincoln, 2nd Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865)
If we know slavery is wrong and we have an opportunity to get rid of it, we better do it “with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”
At the cost of a terrible, bloody Civil War, Americans abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution abolished this evil institution only a few more than four score and seven years after the Declaration of Independence. In the context of the much older story of slavery itself, that was a remarkably short time. The American idea requires equal protection of the laws for the equal individual right of each and every citizen. No exceptions.
The Civil War shows us among other things that God rules the world and that we can know a portion of the Law by which He rules that world. Going back to the Founding, the portion that we call the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God is the basis of the re-establishment of the country for Lincoln and the reconstructionists. The making it whole again. Back to that original founding principle.
A Better Way Forward
Faced as we are with Marxists in our universities whose goal is the radical transformation/destruction of the American system, an oligarchic ruling class who rules not for the Common Good but for their own, an American Regime that has compromised with the Progressives who repudiate the principles of the American Founding and as socialistic slavery increases in its preparations to take control of families, education, churches and the White House itself, is not a better way forward a return to the principles of our Founding documents designed to preserve individual liberty and equality?
Is not what is needed today as in the Civil War era, a return to the founding principles of institutionalized freedom, institutionalized opportunity and institutionalized justice for all? Moving toward a more perfect Union means living up to our own standard in our practices and in our policies.