Few presidents have been so corrosive to American life as Barack Obama. The timeline speaks for itself: when the Race-Baiter-in-Chief took office, there hadn’t been a serious race riot in the US for 17 years. Ever since, the nation has been nearly continually plagued by manufactured racial tension. This is, after all, Obama’s stock-in-trade: he won his initial presidential primary largely on the strength of bellowing that Hillary Clinton was a ‘racist’ (something conveniently forgotten by the legacy media ever since).
Small wonder, then, that Obama is still at it. On the occasion of America’s 250th birthday, Obama chose to berate the Founding Fathers of the nation that gave him everything that Kenya never could, which is odd, considering that in his father’s native Kenya up to 90 per cent of the population were slaves until nearly half a century after the US. And even then, only when the British forced them to.
Even more bizarrely, while pointing the finger at the Founding Fathers, Obama kowtowed to Native American tribes. Who were, y’know, slave owners. Some of them so determined to hang onto their slaves that they fought for the Confederacy and refused to recognise the Emancipation Proclamation.
But consistency and humility have never exactly been Obama’s notable traits. The man who built a $850 million temple to himself in Chicago had the gall to dismiss the Founders as mere “men of property and wealth”. This from a guy whose own centre sprawls across nearly 20 acres with a 225-foot tower. Talk about property and wealth.
The historical reality is far more complicated – and far more honourable – than Obama’s cartoonish sneering allows.
All of the Founders, even those who defended slavery, knew well that blacks are human beings. Hardly anyone claimed that slavery is right in principle. Each of the leading Founders acknowledged its wrongness.
As historian Tom West documented, the Founders overwhelmingly viewed slavery as a moral evil. They took concrete steps to strangle it where they could. Official actions against the trade began in 1774, before independence. By 1798 every state had banned slave imports. Congress killed the international trade in 1808. Northern states moved to abolish the institution outright or gradually: Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation in 1780, followed by others through the early 1800s.
George Washington personally detested slavery. Unable to sell the slaves on Mt Vernon (they were entailed to his wife’s relatives), he was nonetheless much-gossiped about by his neighbours for the laxity with which slaves on his lands were treated. Washington wrote that he fully expected slavery to naturally disappear in a few years after the Revolution. Abolishing it nationwide in 1776, though, was impossible. The southern colonies would have walked. The fragile new republic would have collapsed before it began. The Founders compromised to win independence first, then spent the next decades chipping away at the evil.
It would surely have astonished Washington that it instead took “four-score and seven years”, Abraham Lincoln and a cataclysmic Civil War – the bloodiest conflict in American history – to finish the job the Founders started. Democrats, the party of slavery, secession and Jim Crow, fought every step. Republicans, formed explicitly as an anti-slavery party, passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments against unified Democratic opposition.
Lincoln understood perfectly. At Gettysburg he framed the war as a test of whether a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could endure. He called the Declaration the “apple of gold” framed by the Constitution’s “picture of silver”. He would rather die than surrender it and he did.
Obama’s selective historical illiteracy serves a grotesque purpose, though. It keeps racial grievance alive as a political weapon. Never mind that the American experiment, however imperfectly begun, set in motion the machinery to end slavery and extend liberty. Never mind that the Founders planted the seeds of abolition decades before the guns of Fort Sumter. Never mind that Kenya and countless other societies practised slavery long after America’s bloodiest war to end it.
The truth is messy, heroic and human. The Founders were flawed men who articulated principles greater than themselves. They knew slavery was wrong and acted against it within the political realities of their time. Their Revolution required a second, terrible phase in the 1860s to fulfil its promise.
On the 250th anniversary, Americans should reject the race-baiter’s cartoon history. The Founders gave the world a proposition – that all men are created equal – worth fighting and dying for. Lincoln finished what they started. That is the real American story. Not grievance. Not guilt. But hard-won progress toward the ideal they boldly declared.
