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The Founders And Slavery, Arthur R. Landever
The Founders And Slavery, Arthur R. Landever
Law Faculty Presentations and Testimony
The point of my talk is that our founders, who our tradition praises profusely of course, as men on Mount Olympus, had moral blinders on. I'm going to talk about key founders. Then I'm going to talk about the key English case, decided in 1772, Somerset v. Stuart. Then I'm going to talk about the Compromises of the 1770s and 1780s. Then I'm going to talk about what we can and can't learn from history. Then I'm going to consider what our generation is doing in the 21st century, considering what might shock our own descendants, two hundred years from …
Lecture: Second Founding: The Story Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
Lecture: Second Founding: The Story Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
All Faculty Scholarship
The story of the Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment is a lost story of American history, covered over by Southern inspiring myth making and an unwillingness to grapple with the central role of slavery in American history. Americans can take new inspiration from that story and use it as an example of how our popular democracy can be perfected. Even today, nearly a century and a half after the Second Founders did their work, their words and example move before us as a people, a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night.