Slavery and Racisim essays

Slavery and Racisim essays No issue, of course, raises deeper questions about the founders' commitment to liberty and self-government than slavery. Critics of the Founding Fathers ask how can we take seriously anything said by Jefferson, Madison, and their contemporaries on the subject of liberty and democracy when these men and many of their countrymen were denying liberty and self-government to some hundreds of thousands of black Americans. Common today is the view that "the founders excluded the Negroes from the rights of man' expressed in the Declaration of Independence and sanctioned slavery and Negro inferiority in the Constitution" (chapter 6). As Storing shows, this critique embraces both the radical Abolitionists' view that the Constitution was a "compact with the devil" and the view of mid-nineteenth century slavery defenders, who held that the principle of human equality in the Declaration of Independence was a "self-evident lie." Yet these interpretations of the founders' approach to slavery were rejected by no less a person than Frederick Douglass, former slave and the most prominent and gifted black orator and spokesman during the decades surrounding the Civil War. Storing's close analysis of the constitutional provisions related to slavery is a masterful defense of Douglass's view (chapter 7)one also shared by Abraham Lincoln and other leaders of the Republican Party, but now all but forgotten and therefore little taught. The Civil War ended slavery in the United States, but in so doing it precipitated a challenge of perhaps equal difficulty: bringing the two races together onto a plane of social and political equality. Storing shows that leading American statesmen such as Jefferson and Lincoln had entertained grave doubts as to whether white prejudice and black resentment for past wrongs would allow the creation of a peaceful biracial democratic society. He speculates that a thoughtful Founding Father reviewing present-day circumstance ...