(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Hypocrisy of July 4th [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-06

On Friday July 4th we went to the beach in the afternoon and at night we watched fireworks from the walkway outside our 7th floor apartment. On Saturday we had a barbeque with old friends and on Sunday my cycling group stopped at parks honoring Founding Fathers Rufus King and Francis Lewis. Lewis was a member of the Second Continental Congress that declared independence from Great Britain and King was one of the authors of the Constitution. Both Lewis and King were slaveholders and Lewis was also a slave trader. King at least became a prominent opponent of slavery later in his career.

On July 4, 1776, 56 delegates to the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. Next year the United States will be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing. The Declaration, submitted by a committee but written by 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson, famously includes the iconic statement “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Ironically, at least 60% of the men who signed the document, including Jefferson, were slaveholders. Jefferson inherited 52 enslaved Africans at the age of 14 when his father died and another 135 enslaved Africans when his father-in-law died in 1773. During the course of his lifetime Thomas Jefferson owned approximately 600 enslaved people including his enslaved concubine Sally Hemings and their six enslaved children. Hemings may have been as young 14 when Jefferson started his sexual relationship with her. Jefferson at the time would have been 44.

In the September 14, 1769, edition of the Virginia Gazette, Thomas Jefferson, age 26 at the time, advertised for the recapture of a fugitive slave and his return to Jefferson’s Monticello estate in Albemarle, Virginia. Jefferson described “Sandy” as a mulatto “about 35 years of age, his stature is rather low, inclining to corpulence, and his complexion light.” Sandy was a left-handed shoemaker and carpenter and an occasional horse jockey. Jefferson warned potential captors that Sandy was “greatly addicted to drink, and when drunk is insolent and disorderly.” Other problems with Sandy were that “he swears much, and in his behaviour is artful and knavish.” When he escaped, Sandy took a white horse belonging to Jefferson and his shoemakers tools. Jefferson offered a 40 shilling reward if Sandy was captured locally and returned with additional money promised if he was found in other parts of Virginia or in another colony. In 1769, forty shillings was the equivalent of 2 British pounds. Adjusting for conversion and inflation, the reward posted by Jefferson for the recapture of Sandy was roughly the equivalent of $200 U.S. dollars today. In 1769, a skilled African male slave around 35 years old would have been valued at between 80-100 British pounds. Adjusted for conversion and inflation, Jefferson would have valued Sandy at between $8,000 and $10,000 in current U.S. dollars. The price estimates and conversions are based on estimates from the Colonial Williamsburg website and the British national archives.

Frederick Douglass in an 1852 speech famously told members of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/6/2332060/-Hypocrisy-of-July-4th?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/