Among the progressive left, there is growing popularity with the narrative that the United States of America was founded on slavery and therefore inherently racist. The founding fathers wrote that “all men were created equal” while blacks were enslaved, Native Americans were being driven from their land and/or slaughtered, and women were denied the right to vote. Therefore, the founding fathers were “racist, sexist, and pro-slavery white supremacists”. However, this is a misunderstanding of history and the founders.
First of all, slavery was not at all an inherently American institution. It was practiced around the entire world at the time. South American countries practiced slavery. European countries practiced slavery. African countries themselves practiced slavery. Many African slaves sold to the U.S. were already slaves to other Africans before that.
It’s not that the founding fathers were pro-slavery—they just had to accept slavery in order to win the Revolutionary War and establish the country. Otherwise, they would have had to fight and win two wars at the same time: the Revolutionary War against the British and the Civil War against the South. That would have been impossible.
The founding fathers needed the South to fight on their side to defeat the British, so they had to allow slavery as a temporarily necessary evil to found the United States with plans to later abolish slavery when the public moral sentiment shifted (after the country was well established). The founding fathers didn’t see slavery as good or an integral part of the country; it was simply a necessary evil.
This is not an excuse for slavery—obviously slavery is and was wrong. This is just an explanation that slavery was not endemic to the founding of the United States. Correlation does not equal causation. Just because slavery existed when America was founded does not mean the country was founded on slavery.
One could make the claim that America was founded on misogyny, as the founders had no clear intention of eventually allowing women the right to vote. Though one could also argue the founders were correct in doing so, as ever since women were granted suffrage the country has gone downhill in a steep decline towards decay as an evermore centralized socialist dystopia. Again, correlation does not equal causation, but in this case the correlation is quite stark.
