The Founding Fathers

[Dill]

(07-23-2020, 01:57 AM)CarolinaBengalFanGuy Wrote: What are your opinions regarding the Founding Fathers, the owning of slaves, and the hypocrisy of all men are created equal while many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders themselves?
Do you still consider these men American heroes?
Where do you stand on building names and statues that honor some of these men?
Should we be knocking faces off of Mount Rushmore?

Before I "judge" the Founding Fathers, I ask myself what my views on race and equality might have been if I had been raised during the colonial era as a white man on a Virginia plantation, or a middling home in Philadelphia or Boston.

If, after pondering that, I conclude that I, myself, might not have been arguing against racism, sexism, homophobia and climate change denial back then,  then I am not inclined to judge the Founders as I might my next door neighbor or a politician currently in office.

Further, giving Colonial Dill the greatest possible benefit of the doubt, imagining him BFF with Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, I think he still might have found a "compromise" with slavers acceptable, if that is what it took to found the nation. So he might at once recognize such compromise as in contradiction with founding beliefs, but necessary to founding a state which might eventually realize liberal ideals of equality. Take up the slavery issue AFTER the Revolution is won and the government settled.

I still consider most of the founders "heroes"--including and perhaps especially Washington. First, because after years of following politics and I history, I have come to understand how difficult it was to do what he did. And second, because the bi partisan esteem in which men and women of honor held him. Franklin is easy to admire, even the conservative Adams. Madison is the one FF whose writings and political insight were equal in depth to Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Smith, the founders of classical liberalism, though he did not produce extended arguments to match theirs.

Regarding statues honoring these men, my only question is how are they placed and contextualized. I am very much in favor of the existing monuments on the Mall to Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington because they are honoring civic ideals and not personalities. I would like to see an additional monument acknowledging the contradiction in the founding, and the resolution to address it. (I am visiting the Gettysburg battlefield this weekend, the high water mark of that contradiction; my first visit, I hope to see some statues commemorating the bloodiest battle in U.S. history. I will think it stupid if I don't see Confederate soldiers memorialized there as well, if not especially honored.)

Most of the difficulty people currently have with statues and monuments seems to me to arise from our continued inability to come to terms with slavery, segregation and systemic racism, and an ahistorical penchant for judging our ancestors by contemporary standards.  If local communities want to tear down the statue of a Confederate general erected in 1930 to commemorate the Great War of Northern Aggression, then I say go for it. Tearing down a statue of Washington would not strike me as "calling out " founding hypocrisy and exposing how the nation was built on a "lie. He did not take up arms against the nation, he founded it.