Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about all the things that make America the country we know and love.

The place of slavery in the American

history is one of the great and enduring questions of American history.

My old friend Thomas West, professor of politics at Hillsdale College,

has a chapter on the theme in his excellent book, vindicating the founders.

It is the best brief reflection I know of on the subject and well worth reading.

This is one of three stories that is greatly indebted to it.

Any errors that slip in are of course exclusively my own.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one anti-slavery revolution.

Slavery has been around since the beginning of human history.

Practice in all kinds of forms, almost wherever you found human beings.

In ancient Egypt, India, China, Greece, Rome, in Asia, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Central Africa, North Central and South America.

Even with the advent and spread of Christianity, in which all are equal in the eyes of God and

should love their neighbors as themselves.

People continue to find it hard to resist the old serpent that said to their neighbors,

you work and toil and earn bread and I'll eat it. Slavery was practiced among the native peoples of North America

before and after Europeans arrived, and it was legal in every American colony in the years

prior to the American Revolution.

Then a great historic change began, a revolution in the hearts and minds of the British

colonists that would eventually make them Americans.

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