Life, Liberty and the Fact of Slavery
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Andrew Councill for The New York Times
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Andrew Councill for The New York Times
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Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History.
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Andrew Councill for The New York Times
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Andrew Shurtleff for The New York Times
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Andrew Shurtleff for The New York Times
A sculpture of Thomas Jefferson and names of his slaves greet visitors at the National Museum of American History in Washington.
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: January 26, 2012
WASHINGTON — The astounding thing about American slavery is not that it existed — the enslavement of one people by another may be one of history’s universals — but that it persisted. It lasted into an era when its absence could be imagined and its presence could become an outrage.
Andrew Councill for The New York Times
The headstone of Priscilla Hemmings, member of a slave family.
That was one of the chilling peculiarities of slavery in the United States: As revolutionary ideas of human rights and liberty were being formulated, slavery was so widely accepted that contradictions between the evolving ideals and the brutish reality of enslavement were overlooked or tolerated.
We look back now, shocked at the cognitive and moral perversity. And that is one reason why a prevalent reaction has been to assert that the champions of those revolutionary ideals were hypocrites, including 12 of the first 18 American presidents, who were slave owners.
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