http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LAMHOW.html

Not everyone bought into slavery, Washington, Jefferson, and especially Franklin, didn’t. Washington and Jefferson did what they could, I presume. Jefferson wrote the “all men are created equal” paragraph in the Declaration of Independence. Washington was president of the Constitutional Convention which made the three horrible compromises to keep the slaveholding South in the union. But he said, in a letter to his nephew, Bushrod, that there were “imperfections” in the Constitution and that “evils” would flow from them, and that future generations would have to correct them.

Franklin, in his last public act in 1790, submitted a petition to Congress calling for the abolition of slavery. A furor was set off which led to particularly reactionary speeches from congressmen from GA and SC. These two gentlemen uttered the most offensive remarks imaginable on the floor of Congress in which they set out the reasons, as they saw them, that the slaves could never be, should never be, freed.

In 1850, I think, John C. Calhoun gave his last public act in which he wrote a speech for presentation in the Senate. He was to ill to read it himself, so it was read for him. In it he called for changes to the Constitution which would make the slaveholding South free from congressional acts that might keep slavers from doing as they pleased, he called for slavery to be permitted in half the new states and territories and he called for vigorous enforcement of the fugitive slave law. In effect, he and his southern brothers were intransigent. The Constitution could not reconcile good and evil, what government can? They insisted on being freer than those they enslaved and freer than the rest of the nation’s citizens.

The pace quickened as other slavers, sensing that the end was near, Great Britain has abolished slavery, sought to fight off any real or imagined threats to their institution. But the words of Jefferson, “all men are created equal,” could not be denied. People knew, and they always knew, what was right. Circumstances prevented action, or at least transformative action.

All any of us can do is the best we can do, no matter the age. But that does not mean that we don’t know how to do better than we do.

My friend, Buddy, majored in agriculture at Texas A&M many years ago. One day I was having lunch with Buddy and his dad in a local cafe in our small agricultural town. It was the Thanksgiving holiday and Buddy was peppering his father with questions and ideas. For a time the old man would respond with his reasons for not being able to comply. But Buddy kept on. Finally the old man barked, “Dammit, Buddy, I’m not farming as good as I know how even now!” He had a point.