Hi Anne Pemberton.
Yes, I agree. Instead of studying about our leaders who owned slaves while 
acknowledging it was evil, we should be studying about people in the late 
eighteenth century like Robert Carter, Joseph Mayo (who left a will in 1780 
freeing hundreds of slaves before the 1782 law allowed emancipation), the 
Pleasants family, and the hundreds of slaveowners from Sussex, Isle of 
Wight, Henrico, etc. who freed their slaves during their lifetimes with such 
statements as, "Freedom is the natural right of all mankind," or "Agreeable 
to our Bill of Rights and fully pursuaded that freedom is a natural right 
and no law moral or divine gives me a just right or property in any of my 
fellow creatures," or "Seeing such an inconsistency betwixt our Declaration 
of Independence that all men are equally born free and our practice of 
holding a great number of our fellow men in the most abject slavery."

We willl have to assume that Robert Carter's cutting off the toes of at 
least one of his slaves that ran away happened before he "got religion."
Paul 

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