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Welcome to the Eric Mitaxas show with your host Eric Mitaxas.

Ding, ding, ding. We enter our two in my conversation with my friend Michael Wilkerson,

the book, really an amazing book. It's called Why America Matters. Okay, so Michael, we left off

talking about the issue of slavery and you write really extensively about that battle in our

history because a lot of times we get the short version of it. To me, this was the foundational

challenge. This was the question that was going to define who would we become as a nation.

Slavery was an aberration. It was inimical to the ideals articulated in the declaration,

in the constitution. And yet we allowed it to live. There was a belief that, oh, it'll just go

away on its own. Later in following the signing of the declaration, a lot of the signatories

and others really begin to rally around resistance to the idea of slavery. But we were in conflict

because half of the nation and the South were very much wedded to it from their economic and

cultural social life. John Quincy Adams, after he left the White House, but the next three decades

in the House of Representatives, haranging about the issue of slavery, Benjamin Franklin, in his

last decade, really devoted himself to abolitionist causes. The rise of the abolitionist movements

in the 1830s to the 50s and 60s really were a catalyst to begin to awaken public consciousness

at a broader level to the evil that was the institution of slavery. The most fascinating person

that I found in this whole period of history was Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass was an

escaped slave who, in his youth, had taught himself to read, taught himself, got all kinds of

books whenever he could, eventually escaped to the North. And long story short, became a leading

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