27. “How Is It That We Hear The Loudest Yelps For Liberty From the Drivers of Negros?“
In 1775, Samuel Johnson summed up one of the greatest contradictions of the Patriots’ fight for freedom: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negros?” Many of the American colonists’ foremost advocates of liberty and equality owned hundreds of other human beings as chattel slaves.
Some, such as Thomas Jefferson, lived lavishly off the sweat and blood of hundreds of bondsmen and bondswomen, who toiled for their benefit, driven by the lash and the threat of extreme violence. That contradiction at the heart of the United States would continue to plague the country through the following centuries and into the present.