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.