Not written by me

quite obvious i did not write the following but thought it was a good read and decided to share

Slavery and Racism Were Embedded in the World of the Founders
Published: January 4, 1987

¶ To the Editor: Some recent letters (Dec. 7, Dec. 20) attempt to demonstrate that the Founding Fathers were opponents of slavery. This antiquarian exercise has obscured unpleasant truths about the men who created our nation.

¶ There is no question that many founders harbored doubts about the justice of slavery and that some -like Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton - can be called abolitionists. Yet no amount of selective quotation can refute that the Constitution strengthened rather than weakened slavery.

¶ The three-fifths clause gave the South extra representation and electoral votes for its disenfranchised slave population. Congress was prohibited for 20 years from outlawing the infamous Atlantic slave trade. And the fugitive-slave clause required that blacks fleeing to liberty must be returned to their owners, thus placing the authority of the new Federal Government behind the institution's stability.

¶ It is true, as one correspondent (Dec. 20) noted, that Jefferson included a ringing condemnation of the slave trade and slavery in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, only to see it deleted at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia. Yet this clause placed the blame for blacks' condition on King George III, a piece of sophistry that suggests the colonists were not prepared to face their own responsibility for slavery's introduction and continued existence.

¶ For all his private statements, Jefferson all his life owned slaves, bought and sold them like any other planter, and believed blacks innately inferior. Unlike Washington, he did not free his slaves in his will. Jefferson's 1818 letter to Mordechai Noah condemning anti-Semitism has received much publicity. But Noah himself held deeply racist attitudes toward blacks and was an outspoken defender of slavery. Like Jefferson, his definition of inalienable rights had its limits.

¶ To face up to the Founders' racist views and complicity in the institution of slavery does not diminish their many achievements. But an understanding of how deeply embedded slavery and racism were in the society that produced the Constitution may perhaps enable Americans to appreciate the unique barriers this nation has erected against blacks' advancement, and the historical roots of our current racial institutions and attitudes. ERIC FONER Professor of History, Columbia U. New York, Dec. 20, 1986.