Yes the founders of America had great vision and developed a radically new kind of country. But I'm not convinced that they had great vision or positive impact with regard to slavery. Weren't they hypocrites to permit slavery while proclaiming proudly that all men are created equal?

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. The thirteenth amendment to the United States constitution abolished slavery in 1865. So a first approximation is that American independence extended slavery on US soil by 32 years.

The British used indentured servitude well into the 20th century. Sure, it’s not the same kind of slavery movies enjoy depicting, but the practice was just as inhumane and brutal in many respects. Indians were particularly affected by it.

America ended all forms of slavery, including indentured servitude, under the 13th amendment after the civil war.

We shed a lot of blood as a country to get that result, the sacrifice of those men and women shouldn’t be so quickly cast aside.

Our Founders knew the fight against slavery was coming, they discussed it extensively in historical records you can look up, but they had bigger fish to fry first when they founded the country. The fact the United States moved so quickly after the ratification of the Constitution to ban slave importation in 1808 shows they had a strong desire to get the issue solved. The country quickly chipped away at it with all things considered.

With all due respect that is hogwash. The war of independence was not quite the glorious thing Americans like to paint it as. 1) The southern states only joined after they learned that the British were freeing slaves. Now the British may not have had ulterior motives, but then don't pretend all Americans did either.

2) The Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbid european american settlers from expanding into native American territory, was a major contribution to resentment towards British rule. Not exactly a very honorable thing.

3) As for slavery. The Convict lease system existed until past the 1900s or so. This was an enormous system. Over 70% of the income of the state of Albama was from convict lease system. This was just black slavery under a new name. Not only that but it was significantly more brutal than the old slavery.

4) My wife's side of the family is from Hawaii so I've been there many times. I know all to well about the extent of involuntary servitude placed upon immigrants there. People were beaten lynched, racist laws preventing e.g. Chinese from doing anything but farm work. The whole island was illegally invaded by the US. Hawaii was recognized as a sovereign nation by all of Europe at the time.

Ok, I am not trying to say the US was the worst ever, one always ends up getting those accusations. I merely asking to stop this incessant American tendency to glorify themselves as so much better than everybody else.

Painting the English as some sort of evil tyrants might make sense in India. But in America people tended to enjoy a lot more freedom and lower taxes than anywhere else. Britain had never promised representation to colonial subjects. The US followed the exact same practice in their own colonies. Did not see the Philippines get any representation in the US. Puerto Rico still doesn't.

I think I agree with the broad thrust of your argument but I am having trouble sourcing the "70% of Alabama's income" stat, and the stats I have found are more like 10%.

>America ended all forms of slavery, including indentured servitude, under the 13th amendmemt after the civil war.

Not entirely... the 13th amendment makes an exception for "punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

Meaning slavery as a private institution is outlawed in the US, but the government is allowed to keep as many slaves as it wants, provided it convicts them of a crime first.

That’s a much larger argument I agree. You could also argue the high level of citizen taxation combined with record deficit spending in our country could be further evidence that the goal posts simply shifted.

I won't go so far as to imply that the American justice system is intended to further the institution of slavery with a racially biased system of laws and law enforcement that results in disproportionate black incarceration.

But... it is telling that the US just couldn't bring itself to let go of slavery entirely.

> America ended all forms of slavery, including indentured servitude, under the 13th amendment after the civil war.

No, it didn't; the 13th Amendment explicitly excluded penal slavery from it's general abolition of slavery, and overt penal slavery continued long after the 13th Amendment, having been radically expanded in its immediate aftermath (and, arguably, penal slavery continues in the U.S. today.)

> Our Founders knew the fight against slavery was coming

They did, which is why several provisions of the Constitution were put into place to protect the institution and stack the deck for the coming fight.

"America ended all forms of slavery, including indentured servitude, under the 13th amendment after the civil war."

See also "sharecropping" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping) and tenant farming.

"The fact the United States moved so quickly after the ratification of the Constitution to ban slave importation in 1808 shows they had a strong desire to get the issue solved."

I seem to recall that the bill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of...) was supported by some in the slave states because it would increase the value of their existing slaves. On the other hand, the Wikipedia article seems to imply that an important aspect of the issue was that Britain was the largest slave trader of the time.

The idea that "they had a strong desire to get the issue solved" seems clearly false; they kicked that can down the road as long as they could.

>America ended all forms of slavery, including indentured servitude, under the 13th amendment after the civil war.

In reality, most slavery moved to sharecropping and expanding the criminal justice system so that prisons became the new source of cheap black labor. There’s a prison in Mississippi which was converted to a prison after being a plantation became unfashionable and business there has been unchanged since the antebellum.

Sure, if you look at numbers in a timeline, but 1) the British couldn't hold on to the colonies in N. America and 2) based on #1, even if they had held on to the colonies, they would have had a heck of a time enforcing abolition in the Southern states area.

That's an interesting point. If the American Revolution hadn't occurred in 1776 (or had failed), the Southern states at least would likely have rebelled if the English had attempted to abolish slavery in the 1830s-40s.

Then you have to wonder whether the northern states would have sided with the South or with the English.

The founding fathers did not develop a radically new kind of country. They observed the inter-national confederacies of the people who had already been living in and around the area that is now called New England. Under the articles of confederation (in which the term "The United States of America" is coined) the country was run in a way very similar to the Iroquois Confederacy. The big difference was that the Articles did make it possible for the central government to develop policies to be implemented in all states; the Iroquois Confederacy did not have anything of the sort.

The federalist influence came later, but the Constitution we live under now did not require such a huge amount of creativity as we like to teach in our American History classes.

By 1804 all northern US states had abolished slavery.

For those not into the whole American exceptionalism thing, you could go with Haiti, whose revolution started in 1791 and where independence and the end of the slavery were fought for at the same time.

> that beget the end of slavery in the developed world.

Where did you learn this? This is absolutely wrong. Most developed nations had abolished slavery before the US did. A few, like the Ottoman Empire and Brazil was later, but to frame the US as a front-runner is absurd.

Didn't the British empire ban slaves and slavery on English soil at the start of the 19th century?

> Didn't the British empire ban slaves and slavery on English soil at the start of the 19th century?

Depends on your meaning and what dates. The British did NOT ban slavery "at the start of the 19th century" (meaning 1800s). They banned only the buying of slaves using English vessels and even then it was nominally enforced. In 1833, the English compensated approximately 3000 slavers for "loss of business assets" (yes, that's right, they compensated the slavers, not the slaves) including the ancestors of David Cameron, the Bazalgettes and other wealthy families.

Almost instantly after the passing of the 1833 act, the British used indentured labour to replace slavery. Indentured labour was found to be equivalently cruel. The historical record shows death rates as high or higher than the slavery period for indentured labourers brought from South Asia to the West Indies and South East Asia. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/dec/12/thefor...

1835 "To finance the compensation (for slave owners), the British government had to take on a £15 million loan (40% of its budget) with banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore. The money was not paid back until 2015."

This is a very interesting timeline about the abololition of slavery in different places and peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... i think it is also good to see things in the larger context

> yes, that's right, they compensated the slavers, not the slaves

That seems fair: the slave-owners had undertaken obligations that by the standards, mores & laws of the time were normal, ethical & legal; changing mores & laws nullified those obligations, and hence they were compensated.

You'll find that it's a lot easier to change someone's mind if you say, 'I want you to do something which is right, and I'll pay you to do it!' than if you say, 'I want you to do something which is right, and I'll punish you for doing it!' What's more important in your mind: freeing slaves or punishing slaveholders?

Are you sure that fair is the word you're after?

Of course you compensate the slavers. You want them to buy in to the process. That way you don't have to fight a war with them over it. That's just pragmatism in politics.

It's stuff like this that reveals why some organizations like the NAACP are successful and others are not.

Looks like I got two completely different answers. Any thoughts on the sibling reply? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17462423

The British banned slavery on the British Empire at the start of the 19th century. But the slave trade was banned on English soil way before that, in 1102. However, there were imported slaves in England, which got their freedom in the mid 18th century (via some court cases because slave trade etc was banned on english soil in the common law), effectively ending slavery as a whole in England. Then 50 or so years later, as the anti slave trade movement grew, this extended to the colonies and the whole empire.

It did:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833

It even pressed other countries to abolish it (not only for pure reasons, also for commercial ones, but they'd still make Machiavelli proud).

When the Union blockaded the Confederacy, cotton workers in Lancashire, England (who were out of work without raw material) rallied against the Royal Navy breaking the blockade though it would have been in their economic interest at the time. Solidarity forever.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-21057494

The Royal Navy, which had historical links to slavery, even ended up positioning ships in the Atlantic specifically to stop slave ships:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron

Some people have pointed out some similarities between the Declaration of Independence and the much earlier Declaration of Arbroath:

"As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."

;-)

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jul/05/declaration-indep...

> The founders of America truly had a great vision, and created the foundation of a radically new kind of country that beget the end of slavery in the developed world.

This is just bad history. What on Earth possessed you to write this? One could refute it but it's so made up it's practically fan fiction of the history of the world.

My reading of the U.S. Civil War is that tensions began when the federal government wanted to accelerate to the development of high tech industries in the northern states by increasing tariffs on manufactured imports. This hit the southern states hard because their agricultural economies require a consumption of manufactured goods to produce raw material; equipment bought from Britain would be used to make cotton which is shipped back to Britain to be manufactured and exported again. This dynamic explains why the British elite were in favor of the south (possibly hoping they would regress the entirety of the U.S. to an agricultural economy), while the British public were more often sympathetic towards the north. This action, among other things the federal government did, resembled the old English tyranny that everyone's parents and their parents' parents had fought and died to be rid of.

Slave-plantations are unsustainable. A workforce must be free before it can be trained to farm in such a way that does not rapidly deplete the land; this is one fact which contributed to the idea of white supremacy, as free workers were white, and free workers were taught more skills. With the rapid expansion of U.S. territory this would not become a problem in any single man's lifetime. I believe that those slave owning people who backed secession may have seen slavery driving the U.S. expansion, rather than the other way around, but that's just an opinion.

Anyway, coming back to emancipation, the Lincoln administration had a much clearer view of the relationship between capitalism and slavery since they were outside of the southern thought bubble. Plus anyone could see the potential in having former-slave armies: radicalized fighters with unlimited morale. "Freeing the slaves" is always a good idea when one is at war with slave owners.

Lincoln is one of the greatest presidents my country has ever had but in my view, the Civil War had almost nothing to do with asserting the equality of all people. When viewing it on paper it seems to me to have been about solidifying the authority of the federal government, as well as industrializing the U.S. economy to replace and eventually compete with foreign manufacturing.

Also, the U.S. is not a new kind of country. There were already several confederations of independent nations, living in the area when the Europeans arrived and began colonizing. I will concede that having a central government which can create and apply policy to all members of the confederation was "new" it was not "radically new" as it was only a remix of other, well-established models of government.