IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:
Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton
Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton
Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton
Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean
Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark
Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton
42 comments:
It's as if it was written for today.
Eternally beautiful. And today, our kids have no clue what it means while they play video games.
Happy 4th.
The leftists at VOX regret all of that and long for the tyranny of kings and dictators.
All of these young people think Marco Rubio resides in a yuge mansion.
No way, man!
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE DEBATE OVER SLAVERY
When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776. Jefferson's passage on slavery was the most important section removed from the final document. It was replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George's incitement of "domestic insurrections among us." Decades later Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Jefferson's original passage on slavery appears below:
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
http://www.blackpast.org/primary/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery#sthash.mWRxDdPE.dpuf
@AprilApple/
Wait until the leftists and clueless kids are thrown from the rooftops once the Islamists take over..."It's a long way down! Watch your step!"
When ever I read that line, "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor", and know what happened to many of those Dead White Heterosexual Slave-owning Males, and know that they never gave up, especially their sacred honor, I can't understand how that doesn't give people a catch in the throat.
contemporary liberals no longer believe in progress. The Progressives' faith in progress was rooted in their faith in science, as one can see especially in the European thinkers whom they admired, such as Hegel and Comte. When science is seen as just one perspective among many, then progress itself comes into question.
The idea of progress presupposes that the end result is superior to the point of departure, but contemporary liberals are generally wary of expressing any sense of the superiority of the West, whether intellectually, politically, or in any other way. They are therefore disinclined to support any foreign policy venture that contributes to the strength of America or of the West.
Liberal domestic policy follows the same principle. It tends to elevate the "other" to moral superiority over against those whom the Founders would have called the decent and the honorable, the men of wisdom and virtue. The more a person is lacking, the greater is his or her moral claim on society. The deaf, the blind, the disabled, the stupid, the improvident, the ignorant, and even (in a 1984 speech of presidential candidate Walter Mondale) the sad -- those who are lowest are extolled as the sacred other.
The constant reminders of an imperfect past is particularly nagging. There is nothing, not even science, can do about it. Perfect for the purpose of tearing down the latest perceived transgressing institution.
So the sin of the founders was that they were capable of compromise.
Social justice – forever ill-defined so as to maximize the power of its champions – has become not just an industry but also a permanent psychological orientation among journalists, lawyers, educators, and other members of the new class of eternal reformers. By no means are social-justice warriors always wrong. But they are untrustworthy, because they aren’t driven by a philosophy so much as an insatiable appetite that cannot take yes for an answer...
Our politics will only get uglier, as those who resist this agenda realize that compromise is just another word for appeasement.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420560/culture-warriors-gay-marriage-polygamy-jonah-goldberg
"Our politics will only get uglier, as those who resist this agenda realize that compromise is just another word for appeasement."
Yup, I started realizing it ten years ago and it keeps getting worse.
Happy Independence Day everyone.
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Happy Secession Day!
Too bad that there is still slavery in Africa.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE DEBATE OVER SLAVERY
Meh - if their numbers declined to a point too low to do all the work, he (they) probably would have just impregnated Sally, (etc.) with however many more they needed to make up the balance.
Interesting to wonder what they would have done over time if too many of the slave kids started looking too white, though!
Why are we throwing the slavery thing in with this? I think we can have at least one day's respite from that distraction. Resume later.
I think TJ threw that passage in while in Philly because he probably realized that getting Northern delegates to sympathize with abolition, while he had the chance, and using the convention itself as an excuse for testing the potency of any attacks on the institution was the "safest" political way to try doing it. He really was a wily bitch, that guy.
Either that or he was just trying to launch the broadest attack he could muster.
Thomas Jefferson was the first American Social Justice Warrior.
A hypocrite to the bone. Or the boner as Ritmo points out.
Happy 4th of July everybody from the fabulous rainbow state!
I sent Trooper an exclusive photo from my travels.
Don't fight too much. Mahalo
That's awesome, Chickens. Have fun in Ha va eeee!
Today should be a great day. Best to Haz too even, despite everything.
Mountains, Lava, Sea… what more can anyone need? How awesome it is that we got that land.
A little further west even and an overwater bungalow should solve any problem.
Lol. Trooper.
If you must have controversy, try googling thirty meter telescope protest. Native Hawai'ans are upset about the progress of sciencedid you know that native Hawai'ans abandoned their own religion? Now some are actively trying to get it back,
I hope you’ll forgive me for pulling in something from Facebook, but this an update by an old friend—who in all the years I've known her online, has never failed to be the best company you'd ever find on the internet. Her post is mostly a quote from Jefferson. My response follows.
Old Online Friend:
"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." -Thomas Jefferson, 3rd US President (1743-1826)
(Watch out for him: wasn't he the one who clipped God out of the Bible?)
* * * * * * * *
TT’s response:
Whiggery in a nutshell. Jefferson was among the smuggest of prophets of a smug age.
Let anyone who believes in Progress consider Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Subsequent ameliorations, such as the U.N. and the E.U., are not the bland result of enlightenment, but of the stark terror of men staring at the evil they had met and sometimes done. Any more such progress of the human mind would kill us all, clearly demonstrated by the rising stench of the corpse of European Jewry in the nostrils of the terrified powerful of 1945, and the glare of the new bombs over Japan in their eyes.
Civilized society, it seems, does not often remain under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors, so much as their barbarous descendants might be restrained by the memory of civilized ancestors. Jefferson's stupid pronouncement is the forerunner of the dialectic to explain human affairs. Others of us, more taken with the insights of our ancestors, barbarous or not, prefer the clarity of Original Sin, or its like concepts in other religions and philosophies.
Jefferson, of course, would have no God but what the frivolous 18th century could conceive. And his re-writing of the New Testament, making Jesus a calm and dignified teacher of moral platitudes, stands as an embarrassing monument to transcendental incomprehension. In that regard, at least, Jefferson may be viewed on a higher plane than many of his contemporaries.
To which my friend replied, “Truly ahead of his time.”
It's a lot of words. Jefferson was basically an opportunist. Taking the opportunity to advance a cause when he could, or to be mealy mouthed about it when he felt (for whatever reason) that he couldn't. Outspoken abolitionism was apparently not a cause anyone could effectively stomach in 1790, and that's not something we can blame Jefferson for. His failure to follow Washington's example and free his own, however, is a standard by which he can be judged - even if he did end their importation by signing the Slave Trade Act and attempted to do so earlier in VA. I think he guiltlessly accepted that an economy being made increasingly dependent upon slavery could not be fought with just his pen. Hmmm… Any parallels to today?
The rest of the stuff is hard to judge. No one can see the future and he seemed to know that. Few people would call 1st half 20th c. Europe "progress", though. For crying out loud, most of the shit they were up to was just a reinstatement of all the old hatreds and persecutions and tyranny, on steroids. Nazism was a recall of ancient Teutonic mythology. Fascism was a recall of ancient Roman ideals of statehood and even the same damn salute. And the church's role in nurturing the worst of it was undeniable. FFS, are you trying to bait? A preference for clarity doesn't make simpler perspectives superior to the acknowledgment of more complex realities.
Whiggery twinned with the enlightenment ideals upon which America was founded, and was the precursor to Lincoln's republicanism. It's difficult to see what sort of Americanism one would embrace if he's to harbor a grudge against that.
Jefferson was the consummate hypocrite and coward. His record as Governor of Virgina during the Revolution was so bad that they had to ship his ass off to France as soon as they could. There he was in his element. He was the first pajama boy. So to speak.
Most of the Veterans of the Revolution despised him. His conduct as governor was a scandal and there was a move to investigate him but it never came to pass. It was one of the major factors in his dispute with Hamilton and Knox. Washington included him in his cabinet as a gesture to uniting the various factions so as not to give rise to political parties. But it didn't work.
That doesn't take away from his work on the Declaration of Independence. The founders were not plater saints. They all had their faults and foibles. It is their actions that live on. Not their personalities.
T. Jeff was Lady Marianne herself. Franklin didn't mind getting French attention of course but I think he was less sanguine about it and more practical about what it meant and what to do with it.
My fresher upper on Marianne brought me to these fans. Of course, they'll probably just remind you of little Maoist books but I think I can safely be a sucker for having all my current fantasies replaced by them. If people appropriate Sarah Palin for their naughty librarian fantasies then this is the least I should be able to get away with.
However, the downside is that the whole deal about their stench really is a problem. Maybe more in the winter? However, Paris closes down this late in the summer so maybe that's just as bad. When I really noticed it was on a bus in London last New Year's Eve. My company that evening was of the sort who appreciates when I become a loudmouthed bitch. Anyway, if you speak any of their language, you'll notice an initial rhyme if you're to say, "Les gens, sans desodorisant, sont arrivees en Angleterre." I think our additional company noticed that also.
There is a huge French population in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. You see the local grammar school has a French immersion program where the little kiddies are taught in French. So expats want to send the kids to that school so they will be fluent in French if they eventually go back home.
As a result many of them come into my shop. They are almost without exception rude, cheap and not all that clean. If you want my advice Ritmo stick with the hot Latina's. Just a word to the wise.
Don't let Brazilian just refer to how you manscape. Just sayn'
They all had their faults and foibles. It is their actions that live on.
"Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy."
Advice for which I'm always much obliged.
Keeping a French gurl around for anything longer than a fling is ill advised.
Unless she's your maid.
My problem with Whiggery is the same as Dr. Johnson's or Chesterton's: It's metaphysical. The Whig outlook, derived from Locke, is inseparable from materialism in the philosophical sense. It's contingent and transactional, and refuses to require a moral character of government except in the weakest and most general terms. You know the famous collision (that may not have happened) of Dr. Johnson and Adam Smith over Smith's description of David Hume's very non-Christian last days and death. Johnson: "You lie, Sir!" Smith: "You are a Son of a bitch!"
There you have the difference. Whiggery tells convenient fibs, and old Tories make you feel bad. They say unpleasant things about human nature. Those unpleasant things have resisted Progress for a very long time now. Ritmo proves my point by mentioning all those ancient evils, stirred into a witches' brew and ladled out by 20th century Science & Progress.
A old Tory would rather face the reality of life and not pretend his way around our nature. You can change Man's circumstances, but you cannot change Man. That has unpleasant implications for a lot of politics, not to mention an economics that thinks the world will be better off with even more plastic pieces of junk in everyone's hands to lie to them all the better.
Somebody tell Ritmo Tom's chances of doing Sally Hemings were close to zero and just about every historian knows it. It was no more than a political smear.
BTW, the DOJ confirmed no hate crimes in those black church fires.
All life is contingent and transactional. Which is why science works better than other forms of knowledge - it makes no excuses for being provisional.
I'm not opposed to vague moral traditions or absolutes. I just don't endorse arbitrary decisions on when to apply those over reason.
Technology or the application of science is another matter altogether. Gregor Mendel's discoveries of genetics didn't endorse eugenics. Racist norms, once applied to his understandings and Darwin's, were combined into a new evil. Progress wasn't a lone gunman; its willing accomplices were indeed ancient. So now progress there shifts wholeheartedly toward undermining racism in the first place. It wasn't Darwin or Mendel who yielded, nor did they need to. So TT is right. This is just another way of saying the same thing.
So am I left with a hole in the heuristic for when to apply reason or when not to? I suppose. But it's a hole no bigger than what came before. I think the best compromise is just to define reservations, when they exist. That allows progressives and conservatives to at least define the terms of debate for how resolutions to those reservations might be reached - regardless of which side they prove right. It's something that works very well. If there's a moral reservation to a new practice or a scientific reservation to a new finding, ways of answering it are proposed. You allow for additional "fact-finding" periods, and seek opportunities to resolve them.
But it's impossible to deny that at some point a reservation's expiration period will likely be reached. That is also a part of human history and heritage. Discarding unworkable rites, regardless of whether they're old or new. Humanity has its own, very old and ancient, understanding of utility. We just once called it "wisdom," rather than "industry." And we gave it a respect for the fragile but invaluable growth that it required and called for.
"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"
—Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny. 1775
Classic Tory-to-Whig question.
And no, life is neither contingent nor transactional.
That it were, are the Whig simulacra of life.
And no, life is neither contingent nor transactional.
Lol. Really? Everyone's parent's parent's parent's parent's etc. meeting with their other parent's parent's parent's parent was pre-ordained? Millions of happily married couple's recollections of their meetings reject this. No non-whig is clamoring for arranged marriage.
And the meeting of their particular sperm's sperm's sperm's sperm (out of hundreds of millions) with that particular egg's egg's egg's egg? Come on. We might as well say that sports competitions are useless. Perhaps they, too, are pre-ordained. As must have been every sweep of every sperm tail's flagellum.
But then, there are sports fans in Boston and New York who believe as much. But let's not kid ourselves as to what allowed the pre-ordaining. Money. The modern equivalent of power.
We know what Acton said about that.
And there goes the anti-Whig's argument against corruption.
It's, for them, a necessary illusion that they can do this. But I'm being kind and replacing a word with which that one rhymes.
Happy 4th.
To reject the contingent nature of life is to reject the concept of opportunity.
To reject the transactional nature of life is to reject capitalism.
Take your pick. TT is an eloquent writer of a stronger, older and much more respectable conservatism. But how one denies these things is difficult if not impossible to see. Perhaps that's why it's best done with a blanket, (if short), unexplained assertion. The sort of stuff of which great mistakes are usually made.
"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"
A rather odd statement by Johnson, since the British Empire didn't stop its slave trade until 1808 or outlaw slavery till 1833. In fact, if Dr. Johnson lifted a finger - in political action - to abolish slavery I'm not aware of it.
I'll still take Jefferson with all his faults over Hamilton.
One of the funniest things is that way people forget that Jefferson had nothing to do with drafting the Constitution. He was in France at the time, applauding the French Revolution.
The phrase "separation of church and state" wasn't uttered by him until the 19th century.
Boswell’s Life of Johnson has this:
“Upon one occasion, when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, his toast was, ‘here’s to the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies.’”
Moreover, Johnson treated his Black manservant, Frank Barber, as a friend, leaving him the very generous pension of over 50 Pounds a year, and his freedom, and allowing Barber the free use of his house as a meeting place for London’s growing African community during his lifetime.
In fact it was Johnson’s fervent anti-slavery attitudes that gave his biographer, James Boswell, trouble, which is why the quote above is in the context of an embarrassed defense of slavery Boswell felt oblliged to include in his Life.
Much as he might argue with Burke, Johnson, despite being a famous literary figure, was not in the Government. But, as a writer and pundit, Johnson never lost the opportunity to hold the British Establishment's feet to the fire on the issue. That the slave trade wasn't stopped until 20 years after his death cannot be blamed on an author who did his best against it while alive.
Thanks for the response TT. Dr. Johnson was a better man than I thought. I remember reading Boswell's Life of Johnson in College and thinking how well-written it was. Unfortunately, I was then more interested in Co-eds than great literature - and never got past page 100.
Hopefully, I can finish it now that I have more time and am less easily distracted.
Great points on Jefferson trooper. Washington didn't write much about evils of slavery but freed all his slaves in his will. Jefferson wrote quite about the evils of slavery but freed only a handful of his slaves.
Jefferson did talk a good game though.
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