A Rutgers political historian and former AG asks how New Jersey's statesmen and America's founders could espouse such lofty principles while living a contradictory reality.
John Farmer, Jr., the former attorney general and current director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, writes, " I cannot reconcile the good deeds of the Neilsons, or for that matter the good deeds of the likes of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or other founders, with their willingness to countenance enslavement with all of its inhumane, if not murderous, implications.
Their slaves. It is no surprise, I suppose, to learn that like many of the founding families, the Neilson family owned and trafficked in slaves. It is another thing entirely, however, to get a glimpse into the daily reality. The biography does not shrink from mentioning the family’s involvement with slavery; neither does that involvement affect the biographer’s glowing appraisal.
There, in that harrowing description, is a snapshot of the daily casual brutality of the era. The humanity of the enslaved, if recognized at all, is sublimated to their value as economic units. Business inventories reproduced in the biography list slaves along with livestock and crop amounts as elements of value, nothing more. Cruelty is recounted as an instrument of production.
Distilled to its essence, Douglass’s message was simple and stark: the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence were mocked by the American reality made clear in the correspondence quoted above: Black lives simply didn’t matter, and haven’t for most of our history.
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