Slavery Was Not America's Original Sin

Getting on the right with history.

This piece was published on February 9th in the Hillsdale College paper, the Collegian. I published it in response to a piece written by an undergrad entitled “Hillsdale Students Should Celebrate Black History Month.” The author made a number of incorrect claims regarding our national past that I found it worthwhile to address.

In the Feb. 2 edition of the Collegian, “Hillsdale students should celebrate Black History Month”, Elizabeth Troutman claims that slavery constituted America’s “original sin.” But as every school child now knows, the first African slaves permanently arrived in America in 1619—well over 150 years before the colonies declared their independence from the British empire. Therefore, her claim is false. 

Before the United States of America existed as a legal entity, a quarter million slaves had already been transported to the original colonies. The Founding Fathers did not have a choice in the matter of African slavery and a sin must be an act of the will. Therefore, slavery was not the original sin of the American regime.  

It was, however, a practical political problem the Founders wished to solve. 

They took efforts to curtail and ultimately eliminate the practice. The Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in the upper Midwest. The Constitution made provision for the complete future abolition of the slave trade and neutered the use of slaves in measuring representation in Congress. Prominent early American politicians including Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln worked to eliminate slavery by colonizing blacks elsewhere. Those efforts did achieve some measure of success. 

To call slavery America’s original sin is to falsey damn the whole country for the acts of a small minority. This blanket assertion leads to dangerous notions of collective guilt. At the least, the claim does not encompass a Christian understanding of sin. It does, however, reflect a fundamentally leftist view of justice. 

The modern American academy, following the Soviets, castigates America as a fundamentally racist, imperialist, and colonialist power. America, in this framework, can only achieve absolution by, in the words of Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-GA, repenting of the “worship of whiteness.” This is the dominant view of our time, shared by all institutions of corporate, political, and media power.  

America’s real civil religion is anti-racism, decolonization, and opposition to antisemitism. Our real heroes are not Abraham Lincoln and George Washington but Barack Obama and George Floyd. ABC plays John Lennon’s “Imagine” at the New Years Eve ball drop in NYC—not the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” 

“Wokeness” has been around a lot longer than the last decade. Former President Franklin Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of the treasury, Harry Dexter White, intentionally passed classified information to Joseph Stalin’s agents. During World War II, the American government gave money and weapons to Ho Chi Minh and Stalin alike. During the Cold War, American diplomatic and economic pressure helped the Zimbabwean African National Union—Political Front take power in Zimbabwe. ZANU-PF proceeded to install Robert Mugabe, a brutal communist dictator.  

In the face of the American elite’s overt favoritism for the global Left, it is little wonder then to hear conservatives parrot narratives slandering the American character. Hillsdale students, however, should aim to be better than this.