The Paradox of the American Revolution

We've talked at length on this blog about the issue of slavery. In fact, some of our best discussions have focused on this topic. As we all know, slavery is often a very heated subject in both the historical community and the general public. Needless to say, opinions and beliefs of the historical community differ over the issue of how slavery impacted the American Revolution. I'm sure we have all read historians who argue that the institution of slavery is damning to the legacy of the Founding Fathers. At the same time, we all know of writers that address the slavery issue as nothing more than an unfortunate fact of life in colonial America.

I bring this up because I believe that slavery is one of the most important issues of the American Revolution. How we choose to reckon slavery and the American Revolution is not only important, but also imperative to the historiography of early America. As most of you know by now, I tend to take a centrist view on most political and historical issues. For me, slavery is an undeniable black eye that will forever plague early American society. Their inability to effectively address the issue is the most obvious error of their generation. At the same time, however, I am forced to recognize that these Founding Fathers were, in the end, human. We would be foolish to expect perfection of them. Every society and generation has their proverbial skeletons in the closet. It would not be a stretch, for instance, to imagine future generations condemning us for allowing poverty, genocide or global warming.

Our Founding Fathers were exceptional individuals, who would stand out in almost any era of history. Their endeavors to establish a sovereign republic, where the voice of the people rules supreme is undeniably the foundation upon which we currently stand. We cannot discard all the good that they gave the world simply because they owned slaves. At the same time, we cannot give the Founders (or any slaveholders for that matter) a free pass simply because they were brilliant statesmen. In essence, the slavery issue becomes the great paradox of the American Revolution.

Keeping this in mind, I would invite you to read the following article from the Avenging Our Ancestors Coalition. The article attempts to give a quasi-condemnation of George Washington for his owning of slaves. Though I personally believe that the article has an obvious bias, I decided to post it here in the hopes that it might stir further discussion on the issue.

Here are a few segments from the article that I found most surprising. Even though this article singles George Washington out in particular, these same attacks are often leveled against every single slaveowner:

Although he personally cannot be held responsible for the institution of slavery in America, he personally — as president of the Constitutional Convention and president of the United States of America — can be held responsible for condoning, hence encouraging, slavery. He can be held so responsible because he enslaved Black human beings and because he refused to use his considerable political power to condemn slavery during his presidency of the convention and of the country...

The problem is that much of his money was earned from his investment in the slave economy and some of it specifically from the slave trade. In other words, his wealth, to a significant extent, was blood money earned literally from the blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants.