The Founding Fathers and Slavery - William Freehling

Source: Excerpt from The Founding Fathers and Slavery, a book written by historian William Freehling and published in 1987. The financial cost of abolition, heavy enough by itself, was made too staggering to bear by the Founding Fathers' racism, an ideological hindrance to antislavery no less important than their sense of priorities and their commitment to property. Here again Jefferson typified the age. As Winthrop Jordan has shown, Jefferson suspected that blacks had greater sexual appetites and lower intellectual faculties than did whites ... These suspicions, together with Jefferson's painfully accurate prophecy that free blacks and free whites could not live harmoniously in America for centuries, made him and others tie American emancipation to African colonization.

Question:

1. According to Freehling, why didn't the authors of the Constitution abolish slavery?

Question

Alexis Swanson

History

23 June, 11:56

The Founding Fathers and Slavery - William Freehling

Source: Excerpt from The Founding Fathers and Slavery, a book written by historian William Freehling and published in 1987. The financial cost of abolition, heavy enough by itself, was made too staggering to bear by the Founding Fathers' racism, an ideological hindrance to antislavery no less important than their sense of priorities and their commitment to property. Here again Jefferson typified the age. As Winthrop Jordan has shown, Jefferson suspected that blacks had greater sexual appetites and lower intellectual faculties than did whites ... These suspicions, together with Jefferson's painfully accurate prophecy that free blacks and free whites could not live harmoniously in America for centuries, made him and others tie American emancipation to African colonization.

Question:

1. According to Freehling, why didn't the authors of the Constitution abolish slavery?

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Answers (1)

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Esperanza Downs · Answer 1

Many of the Founding Fathers such as Jefferson, although some understood slavery was an evil, believed that freeing the slaves was impossible because blacks and whites could never live harmoneously together.