Slavery - The Shaming of the American Idea

Of all the sins of our forefathers, slavery, even more than the ethnic cleansing of Indian cultures is the greatest stain upon the American idea. No discussion of the theme of slavery can consider slavery devoid of the morality of the decisions that brought it about, maintained it and finally brought it to an end.

Madison, Jefferson and Washington were all slave holders, though each of them were individually troubled, even tortured, by the hypocrisy of their positions.

Stanford University Panel:
Jefferson and Madison and the problem of Slavery in an Empire of Liberty
(April 7, 2009) Jack Rakove, Caroline Winterer, and Annette Gordon-Reed discuss the politics surrounding American slavery during the 18th century in the first of a series of four lectures on the American Revolutionary era sponsored by Stanford University. Listen

Was slavery a good economic system?
Is the economic strength or lack of economic strength in the South today in any way a reflection of the legacy of slavery?

The Triangular Trade or the Slave Trade?
Some textbooks have engaged in the historic cleansing of the realities of the slave trade. In this description of regional differences in the colonies taken from Jerome Reich's textbook on Colonial History , the author uses the term "The Triangular Trade" to replace the term "Slave Trade." Triangular Trade during this period was not at all an unusual phenomenon. It occurred to some extent in all trading simply because, ships needed to be full in both directions in order to maximize profits and it was unusual to have a set of needs that formed the mirror image of one another where a shipping route between two points satisfied all the needs of the region. The norm instead was that good from one place were traded for goods in another place which were then sold or traded to a third location, meeting the needs of all three (or more) locations. Therefore, there was no single Triangular trade in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s, there we literally thousands of them. Yet somehow the slave trade - which took on the form of this classical trade pattern - has been deemed by certain textbook publishers and authors at THE Triangular Trade. Critics condemn the use of the term as a whitewashing of the slave trade, a denial of the inhumanity of a system of trade that involved the trafficking of human beings as a part of the commerce.

The Terrible Transformation: The Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
Google Books Version - Difficult to read
LibreVox - Text and Audio - Recommended