First, I start with quotes from a November 17, 2020 speech by historian Larry Arnn, as published in the excellent free newsletter IMPRIMUS, that I have been reading since the 1970s. Arnn is president of Hillsdale College in Michigan, the only libertarian college in the Unites States:
"American schoolchildren today learn two things about Thomas Jefferson: that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and that he was a slaveholder. This is a stunted and dishonest teaching about Jefferson.
... They don't learn that when our nation first expanded, it was into the Northwest Territory, and that slavery was forbidden in that territory. They don't learn that the land in that territory was ceded to the federal government from Virginia, or that it was on the motion of Thomas Jefferson that the condition of the gift was that slavery in that land be eternally forbidden.
The astounding thing, after all, is not that some of our Founders were slaveholders. There was a lot of slavery back then, as there had been for all of recorded time. The astounding thing -- the miracle, even, one might say -- is that these slaveholders founded a republic based on principles designed to abnegate slavery."
I want to add that people in Africa were sold INTO slavery by black African leaders. They were not seized by white people with guns. So when you condemn white people for owning slaves -- and only a very small percentage of white people ever owned slaves -- also condemn black people for selling their own people as slaves. And celebrate several hundred thousand white Americans in the Union Army who gave their lives in the Civil War to end slavery, even though very few of them owned slaves.
The following link is American history in about 45 pages, the truth, needed to offset the false marxist narrative of the 1619 project. The 1619 project is leftist brainwashing designed to make American children hate their country's founders, and dismiss the US Constitution as a worthless "slaveholder's document". The US Constitution, in fact, was intended to limit government power. Leftists hate the concept of a limited government. You will see that under a Democrat president.
