Walter, you sort of gave the game away with this last post when you wrote 'It is wrong that Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington kept slaves.' It was wrong, but by whose standards exactly? Not the standards of the time as half the colonies, by your own account, thought it was fine. So you're judging them by a fixed standard that sits above the mores of 1787 and is the exact thing you spent the entire thread insisting people shouldn't do.

Not only that, but you just did it again when you said that they 'rose above the accepted norm' by abolishing nobility and the dominance of religious institutions because 'rose above' only means something if there's a fixed height to measure against. You can't say "they rose above the norm" and 'don't judge them against anything but the norm' in the same paragraph. So I wouldn't say that the position you're taking is one of historical relativism but more of a universalist with a conspicuous discontinuity on at least this specific issue.

As someone who is fond of American history but is relatively unknowledgeable about the pre-civil war era this thread and previous conversations that we have had on George Washington have piqued my interest, so I did some digging.

Even if we provide the most charitable interpretation of your argument that the American founding fathers were a 'product of their time' that kind of defense only works when someone is blind to a wrong because nobody around them has conceived of or articulated an objection to slavery but that certainly isn't something that can be said in this situation. So, let's use the examples of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to see why that isn't the case.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Thomas Jefferson enslaved roughly 600 people over his lifetime, holding about 130 at any given moment across his numerous properties. He initially inherited his slaves from his father and in far greater numbers from his father-in-law. Despite being an owner of hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime Jefferson was critical of the practice and advocated for restrictions on the practice.

His draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a passage [0] criticizing King George III over the British slave trade which was struck by the Congress. The passage read as follows:

"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & 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 to restrain this execrable commerce..."

At the time he wrote this Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three and he owned about 175 people.

Somewhere between 1781-1785 (I'm seeing a lot of different publishing dates for this and I'll leave it to someone else to pin down the exact date if they're interested) in Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson wrote of slavery: "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other"[1] and argued that it corrupted the slaveholders' own children, who learned tyranny by imitation. Jefferson even wrote "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever."[1]

The Virginian abolitionist Edward Coles[2] who in his youth had been neighbours with Jefferson wrote to him in 1814 asking him to lead an emancipation movement. Jefferson replied that he was too old to do so and he counseled Coles to stay in Virginia and keep his slaves rather than free them. Coles ignored him, moved to Illinois and freed his.

So what motivated Jefferson to hold these incompatible views and maintain his abhorrent practices while counselling others to do the same? Why the thing which you value most Walter -- money.[3] Thomas Jefferson lived beyond his means his entire adult life and died owing more than $100,000.[4] The people that he enslaved were his collateral and capital. In an 1820 letter to his son-in-law John Wayles Epps Jefferson wrote, "having scruples about selling negroes but for delinquency, or on their own request. but your proposition gets me over these scruples as it is in fact to keep them in the family." and went on to tell Eppes, "I know no error more consuming to an estate than that of stocking farms with men almost exclusively. I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. what she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption."[5] Keep in mind that Jefferson wrote this six years after he told Coles that he was too old to lead an emancipation movement.

This doesn't read like a man who was oblivious to the consequences of his actions or his financial motivations. This reads like a man who knew what he was doing was abhorrent but wasn't willing to stop because it would have led to his financial ruin and suffering.

[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0...

[1] https://archive.org/details/notesonstateofvi1787jeff/page/27...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Coles

[3] https://youtu.be/5V6GHnxEJjg?t=108

[4] https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/debt

[5] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Jefferson/03-16-02-0052

(My full comment was too large so I have had to split it into two comments)