Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution Book

I already knew that Congress deleted Jefferson's paragraph blaming King George III for the slave trade in the Declaration of Independence to placate South Carolina and Georgia. It turns out that those two states, along with other southern states including Virginia, may have been influenced by the "Somerset" legal decision by Chief Justice Lord Mansfield in 1772 essentially declaring that any slave who made it to England would be free.

The book then teases out this idea through the war and into the debates over both the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance in the 1780s. Interesting stuff, written by two civil rights lawyers with an obvious stake in progress on racial justice. Are they too harsh on Virginia and Southern states at times? Not sure. But their judgment on the Founding Fathers, especially the Virginians, seems fair minded. While some historians say that they should have let SC and GA go, others feel that they made Solomonic compromises that laid the groundwork for the abolition of slavery:

"They did settle many principles in their day in ways which we have good cause to applaud. They freed the world from the domination of monarchy, struggled toward a notion of democracy which is till unfolding, embraced principles of intellectual, political, and religious liberty, and made the first inroads on exploitive empire in adopting the "equal-footing" principle for new states. Measured against the magnitude of what they attempted, they succeeded greatly and are to bbe honored for it. Jefferson deserves particular attention for excluding the word "property" from the Declaration of Independence. Had he included it, it might have sanctified human slavery into an indefinite future" (255).