Did "early Americans consider themselves free"? White Americans probably did. But what about black Americans, and especially the 90 percent of black Americans who were slaves? Slaves made up about 19 percent of the American population from 1790 to 1810, dropping to 14 percent by 1860. (In that period the number of slaves grew from 700,000 to about 4 million, but the rest of the population was growing even more rapidly.) Did Mr. Hornberger really forget that 4 million Americans were held in bondage when he waxed eloquent about how free America was until the late 19th century? I know he isn't indifferent to the crime of slavery. But too many of us who extol the Founders and deplore the growth of the American state forget that that state held millions of people in chains. (I note that I'm not concerned here with self-proclaimed libertarians who join neo-Confederate organizations or claim that southerners established a new country and fought a devastating war for some reason other than the slavery on which their social and economic system rested; I just want to address libertarians who hate slavery but seem to overlook its magnitude in their historical analysis.)I take his point, and the difficulties he brings up are a problem we are still discussing: How far does liberty go? How far does limited government go? Who decides what rights are respected, and by what means?
For my part, I think weighing in against slavery at this point is having the wrong conversation. America has already well and bloodily made up its mind how it feels about the supposed right to human property. The sins of the past are only tangentially relevant to the questions of liberty and limited government that we're having right now. I, for one, don't feel the need to genuflect in the direction of Sally Hemmings when I bring up the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, and regard the insistence otherwise as a fallacy of relevance intended to distract. But read the whole thing, as your mileage may vary.
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