"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
Even though Thomas Jefferson and our founding fathers believed that "all men are created equal," a large amount of the founding fathers that built this county and stand revered, owned slaves. We must be careful to judge people of the past with our perspectives from today, but how can we continue to sing the praises of men who owned human beings, and worst of all: knew it was wrong?
When I think of our founding fathers, I think of freedom. These men were the champions of liberty and justice for all. If they truly practice what they preached, how could people like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington own slaves?
The answers to these questions came to me as I was walking through Thomas Jefferson's home of Monticello. As I was learning about the 600+ people that Jefferson had owned in his lifetime, I realized that there was one thing that all of these people had in common: fear. We fear what we do not know and we fear what we do not understand. Founding fathers like Jefferson were brilliant enough to understand that slavery was wrong but continued to hold slaves. Conceptually, they understood that a change needed to be made, but fear of the unknown was what had stopped them.
If you ignore any financial ties and obligations and just look at the moral situation at hand, you can see what held them back. None of these men had known a life that did not have slaves in it. While some were kinder to their slaves than others, slavery is still slavery. Thomas Jefferson even said that "we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
All of the reasoning aside, what should we be left to think when we know that the men we revere were hypocrites? In the end, what matters is that America forgives, but that it should never forget. We are all taught to believe that our founding fathers stood tall and fought for the truths and justices that they wanted to see in the world. We treat these men like Gods and teach all of our children that these men are our heroes. But, this is why we shouldn't put people on a pedestal. Our founding fathers knew that they weren't perfect, and almost all of them would hate to see that we worship them like Gods. When we put people on a pedestal, we expect certain things from them, and when those actions do not look like what we want them to, our images of them come crashing down. We should all be teaching our children and reminding America that our founding fathers were human beings. They were human, just like you and me. They made their mistakes, they feared the unknown, and they all were just trying their best.
Our founding fathers built this country on the backs of slaves, and we should never forget that.
