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It's easy to criticize someone when you're not the doing the work. The world was a lot more racist a few centuries ago, so considering what they had to work wit
by Aunche 8y ago
It's easy to criticize someone when you're not the doing the work. The world was a lot more racist a few centuries ago, so considering what they had to work with, the founding fathers did well. The alternative is that there still would have been civil war, and slavery could have continued to this day.
- geofft 8y agoThis counterfactual would be more convincing if the UK did not ban slavery before the US did, and did not need a civil war to do it. And it is just as easy to praise someone when you're not the one they're hurting.
- Aunche 8y agoEven if the Great British Empire was "better" than the early US (I'm sure some of their former colonies would say otherwise), it bears no relevance to the discussion of whether the American Constitution was a success or failure. The US isn't Great Britain, so it can't be compared as such. I also don't understand why you would hold the founding fathers responsible for things that happened several decades in the future.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> I also don't understand why you would hold the founding fathers responsible for things that happened several decades in the future. The Constitutional explicit protections for both slavery and the slave trade were written in by the framers, they did not occur several decades later. The concrete divergence between UK and US policy on slavery began no later than the UK 1807 ban on the slave trade, which was less than two decades after the adoption of the Constitution while the framers were still politically active in many cases (Jefferson was President, for instance).
- Aunche 8y agoThe US actually banned the slave trade the same year. Slaves didn't become fully emancipated in Britain until 1838 or so.
- donarb 8y agoThe UK may have banned slavery early on, but the US was the first of many British colonies to gain independence, something which took a few hundred years for the UK to relinquish world-wide. Colonization was a milder form of slavery, but oppressive none the less.
- ionised 8y agoIt's not like the American colonies gained independence because they were just that special compared to everyone else. They did it because France (a major power) helped them to do it (France being at war with Britain at the time). Without France the American revolution would have failed.
- watwut 8y agoIt may be easy, but it is worth saying anyway. Otherwise nostalgia based on myth will be used to guide our future actions and may lead to same problems. Also, it just make sense to keep history accurate. There were people both opposed to slavery and those for slavery. Some founding fathers had financial interest in keeping slavery and making it. The people who were opposing it were disadvantaged in competition for power.