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97 Foreign Aff. 2 (2018)
America's Original Sin: Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy

handle is hein.journals/fora97 and id is 12 raw text is: America's Original Sin Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy Annette Gordon-Reed T he documents most closely associated with the creation of the United States-the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution- present a problem with which Americans have been contending from the country's beginning: how to reconcile the values espoused in those texts with the United States' original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country's creation, warped its prospects, and eventually plunged it into civil war. The Declara- tion of Independence had a specific purpose: to cut the ties between the American colonies and Great Britain and establish a new country that would take its place among the nations of the world. But thanks to the vaulting language of its famous preamble, the document instantly came to mean more than that. Its confident statement that all men are created equal, with unalien- able Rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, put notions of freedom and equality at the heart of the American experiment. Yet it was written by a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson, and released into 13 colonies ANNETTE GORDON-REED is Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and Professor of History at Harvard University. that all, to one degree or another, allowed slavery. The Constitution, which united the colonies turned states, was no less tainted. It came into existence only after a heated argument over-and fateful compromise on-the institution of slavery. Members of the revolutionary generation often cast that institution as a necessary evil that would eventually die of its own accord, and they made their peace with it to hold together the new nation. The document they fought over and signed in 1787, revered almost as a sacred text by many Americans, directly protected slavery. It gave slave owners the right to capture fugitive slaves who crossed state lines, counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a free person for the purpose of apportion- ing members of the House of Repre- sentatives, and prohibited the abolition of the slave trade before 1808. As citizens of a young country, Ameri- cans have a close enough connection to the founding generation that they look to the founders as objects of praise. There might well have been no United States without George Washington, behind whom 13 fractious colonies united. Jefferson's language in the Declaration of Independence has been taken up by every marginalized group seeking an equal place in American society. It has influ- enced people searching for freedom in other parts of the world, as well. Yet the founders are increasingly objects of condemnation, too. Both Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. They, along with James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson, the other three slave-owning presidents of the early republic, shaped the first decades of the United States. Any desire to celebrate the 2 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

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