Listen to Scott Bradford reading this essay.
America’s original sin was chattel slavery. It was a reprehensible, inexcusable, indefensible institution that stained most of our first century as a nation and continued to have repercussions for much of a second century after that.
In the 1770s and 1780s, as we were moving from colonial subjugation into our new constitutional republic, the people that built our nation—the founders—wrote beautiful, timeless words about human rights and freedom. These are words that I live by today. And yet there was an inescapable contradiction: Some of the most illustrious of those founders—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin—owned slaves.
They spoke and wrote eloquently about freedom while claiming to own other human beings.
These men, and others like them, cannot be wholly condemned. Like everyone else, they were products of their time who often failed to live up to their own principles. In the grand Christian tradition, I acknowledge that everybody is a sinner. Everybody is a failure. Everybody falls short of the ideal. My own shortcomings seem significantly smaller than those of the people who thought they owned other people, but they aren’t. I am, in my own ways, as reprehensible as they are. This is the reality of our flawed, broken existence.