"It's been five years since the New York Times published the 1619 Project, which among other things brought mainstream attention to the protracted debate over the meaning of the American Revolution. Many fans of the 1619 Project have accepted its characterization of the nation's founders as defenders of slavery. Conservatives, with the support of several well-respected liberal historians, have fired back that patriot leaders hated slavery and did their best to set it on a path to extinction. Both characterizations are wrong.
Fueling our ongoing inability to agree on the founders' relationship to slavery is our stubborn insistence on stuffing them into our own moral categories. Since the days of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and John Brown, history has been written as though slavery were an issue that cleaved the public into just two camps: those who wished to end it and those who worked to preserve it. Those who expressed a hatred of slavery have been deemed "abolitionists," and those who at least tolerated it are denounced as being "pro-slavery." But while such a division of political life may hold for the fiercely polarized decades leading up to the Civil War, it is dangerously misleading to apply to the time when Americans fought for independence and struggled to design a workable national government. In that chaotic time, disgust and hatred for slavery could coexist with a belief that the safest and surest way to extinguish human bondage was to uphold it while gradually strangling it with restrictive laws.
Many founders did express their hope that slavery would be abolished, while simultaneously exerting themselves to defend it. Thomas Jefferson frequently expressed his hatred of slavery while using his presidential powers to protect it. George Washington seemed sincere when he wrote in 1786 that "there is not a man living, who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it," while trying to force the British to return thousands of fugitives from slavery to the retributions of their former masters. There is no reason to question John Adams when he remarked in an 1819 letter, "I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in … abhorrence" — or his sincerity in negotiating the Treaty of Paris, which protected enslavers. James Madison didn't sign the newspaper article he wrote in 1788 that called slavery a "barbarism of modern policy" and noted his hope for the "happy" day when it would end, but that does not mean he was lying. Nor was Madison a hypocrite when, after the Battle of Yorktown, he hunted down escapees from slavery…"
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Armand
paints his first three ships from the starter set.