Sounds like Jefferson was not a lot unlike modern financial operators. Take the profits and devil take the rest of the world!! Exploitation of others under slavery was not a lot different in practice to the exploitation of the poor across time in all human societies. The difference lay in laws that tolerated the evil of one person owning another, not in the manner of their treatment. Slaves in America had least had economic value which is more than can be said, may I say in shame, for the treatment of Aboriginal Australians by white invaders in the late 18 and early 19C and indeed, in the case of children of mixed race parentage "the Stolen Generation', up into the mid1900s. We need legislators and societies committed to real social justice and not simply symbols.
Ian
(Dr) Ian Welch
Division of Pacific and Asian History
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
College of Asia and the Pacific
Australian National University
Canberra
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