BORROWED WISDOM

 Did it ever strike you that our great country got started on a very hypocritical note?  Check this out.  

Our Congress, made up of representatives of  the 13 states, approved and published the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.   They approved the wording that I quote here from the Preamble:  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The 13 original states were:  Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and Delaware.  A majority of the representatives from each of those states agreed to approve the document; it passed on July 2, 1776; New York abstained.   56 representatives from those states signed the declaration.  

Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, was a slave owner before and after writing the document.  He was still a slave owner while serving as the third President of our Country from 1801 thru 1809.  

Granted, not everyone was excited about the wording of the Declaration; especially the Southern States which used slave labor for their very valuable cotton crop. How Jefferson and these Southern States justified continuing with slavery is purely selfishness.  It couldn't be be that they thought that slavery was not diametrically opposed to liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  

It was 89 years before slavery was actually abolished and that happened at the cost of over 600,000 lives and as many more maimed for life.  The lesson here is "no matter what people say, pay more attention to what they do."