At the recent opening of his presidential center in Chicago, former President Barack Obama paused to acknowledge the American founders in his uniquely Obama way. As a jubilant nation honors those founders and their extraordinary achievement 250 years ago — July 4, 1776 — Barack Obama offered a less celebratory take.
“In forming our union, the founders fell terribly short of the Declaration’s promise,” stated Obama, “leaving slavery intact, allowing states to restrict the franchise to white men who owned property.” Obama did concede that “in drafting a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, they did have the foresight, the genius, to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect.” They did indeed.
Two wars were fought to advance the ideas of the Declaration: the American Revolution and the Civil War. Both were necessary for achieving full liberty for all Americans.
Oddly, the organizers of Obama’s ceremony instead pointed Americans to Native Indian tribes for inspiration. The ceremony opened with a bizarre “land acknowledgment ritual” honoring various tribes. Not surprisingly, there was no mention of slavery among American Indians, some of whom were brutal slave masters, fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and refused to honor the Emancipation Proclamation. They whipped and owned blacks. (READ: Indigenous Slavers: American Indians Who Whipped and Owned Blacks; Indigenous Peoples’ Day: Cherokee Leader Stand Watie)
Barack Obama has never been a big fan of the American founders. At a July 4th commemoration during his presidency, Obama summed up the founders as “men of property and wealth.” It was a sentiment he echoed again in Chicago at the opening of his $850 million presidential center. That center is highlighted by a 225-foot-tall museum tower, over 100,000 square feet in buildings, and traverses nearly 20 acres of land.
Talk about property and wealth!
Obama will say what he wants about the American founders. But in truth, the reality is much more complicated. Some owned slaves but others certainly did not, and nearly all felt it was morally wrong. “All of the Founders,” writes historian Thomas G. West, “even those who defended slavery, knew well that blacks are human beings. Hardly anyone claimed that slavery is right in principle. Each of the leading Founders acknowledged its wrongness.” West said that “all of the leading Founders affirmed on many occasions that blacks are created equal to whites and that slavery is wrong.”
As for Obama’s criticism of the founders “leaving slavery intact,” the reality is that the institution of slavery could not be abolished in 1776, least of all because the southern states would have seceded from the very American republic being conceived and attempted at the time. The founders would have found themselves in a civil war amongst themselves rather than a revolution to break free from the British. The abolition of slavery in 1776 was not possible.
But even then, the founders made attempts to limit slavery long before 1865. On January 1, 1808, Congress passed legislation outlawing the slave trade. That was not all — even before the Declaration. Here again is Tom West:
Official actions aiming at the abolition of slavery began in 1774, before independence was declared, and this movement achieved substantial victories over the next thirty-five years.
The growth of slavery was quickly limited by reducing or abolishing the slave trade. Delegates to the First Continental Congress in 1774 pledged to stop the importation of slaves into America. By 1798 every state had outlawed slave importation. South Carolina renewed the slave trade in 1803, but Congress abolished the trade altogether in 1808.
During the founding era, eight states proceeded to abolish slavery, either gradually or immediately.
Of course, abolition came quickest in states where few slaves were held. The first to forbid slavery outright in its constitution was Vermont in 1777. Thereafter, in states like Massachusetts and New Hampshire, court cases and town governments ended slavery in the 1780s. It was in Pennsylvania in 1780 that the first legislation was passed for gradual emancipation, with Rhode Island and Connecticut following in 1783 and 1784, and New York and New Jersey doing the same in 1799 and 1804.
State legislatures and the U.S. Congress alike were often doing the best that could probably have been expected. The process toward abolition was uneven and difficult. Unfortunately, abolishing slavery entirely, nationwide, would require dramatic, bloody action.
It would take a man named Abraham Lincoln — and a literal Civil War — to fully extend the Declaration’s equality principle to every single American, including black Americans. It was the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history, with more dead than in all other conflicts in American history combined, including World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam.
Abolishing slavery in America took much time and pain. The American Revolution in the 1770s, and its promise of liberty and independence, would require a second phase, a horrible one, in the 1860s.
The young republic conceived in liberty needed Lincoln and an entire dominant political party to make abolition possible. The Democratic Party was the party of slavery, secession, and what came to be known as Jim Crow. Those who desired abolition joined the new Republican Party, formed in 1854 on an anti-slavery platform. Republicans would pass — against staunch and complete Democrat opposition — not only the 13th Amendment but the 14th and 15th Amendments granting slaves citizenship and the right to vote. Republicans championed all civil rights laws, while recalcitrant Democrats resisted them every step of the way.
Lincoln fully understood the founders’ vision. Here’s how he eloquently explained it at Gettysburg: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal.’ Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
In a February 1861 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, given during his inaugural journey to Washington, D.C., Lincoln said that the Declaration “gave liberty not alone to people of this country but hope to all the world for all future time.” He affirmed that this was what motivated him politically: “This is the sentiment in the Declaration of Independence. I would rather die than surrender it.”
He would die for it.
Two wars were fought to advance the ideas of the Declaration: the American Revolution and the Civil War. Both were necessary for achieving full liberty for all Americans. We celebrate that this July 4, 2026.
On July 4, 1776, the founders put forth a proposition that “all men are created equal.” They established a principle for slavery’s eventual end. And already in their lifetimes, well before Lincoln, they were passing such legislation. Most of what they did is neither taught nor known today, including by recent presidents.
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Editor’s Note: For an extended analysis, we here offer a video presentation on the founders and slavery by our editor, Paul Kengor, given at Grove City College this past April for the conference America at 250: What 1776 Was All About. The lecture is drawn from his 2023 book, The Worst of Indignities: The Catholic Church on Slavery. Please watch and share.
