For a great overview of the contradiction of the founding principles with the evil of slavery, how founders reconciled that contradiction (or if they did), why they didn’t take more vigorous steps to abolish something every founder knew to be evil… read The Revolutionary Mind… History… as usual… is much more complex than the loudest people care to admit.
This book is the most intellectually deep analysis of the principles of the Declaration and their effects in America that I’ve ever read. The chapter Equality and Slavery shows just how public the struggle with their hypocrisy was… it was certainly NOT brushed aside.
America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It.
C. Bradley Thompson. 2019.
