Quote:
Originally Posted by Voyager
All excellent points made about Washington. It's ridiculous historical figures like him get a pass when it comes to atrocities like slave ownership.
Yeah I'm a guy  
Although I'm 22 and your profile says your 85 so there may be issue there..but who knows love knows no boundaries I always say  |
The world is a different place now than it was a few centuries ago. "Slavery" at that time wasn't as nasty a word as it is now. People had "owned" other people long before colonial America, and it wasn't just blacks that were the victims.
During the early history in America, there were actually very few "freemen". Even many white settlers were "indentured servants", who had to work a number of years on a farm or in a household before they could become free. They could not marry or have children without permission. In Europe, "serfs" (at one time a large class of society) belonged to the lands they worked, and were not permitted to leave. They and the land they worked were owned by someone else.
No one at the time would be so crazy as to say that slavery was a wonderful thing, but few would have called it an atrocity. Washington and Jefferson were both land owners, and slaves worked on their farms.
Times have changed since then, and we have learned a lot, but we have also forgotten a lot as well.