AMERICA WAS FOUNDED ON FREEDOM, NOT SLAVERY.

It was the British, the Spanish, the Portugese and the French, not the Americans, who established slavery in their North American colonies. The British rose to slave-trading prominence in the seventeenth century, overshadowing in complexity and scale the participation of all other Northern European powers in the transatlantic trade. Slavery in the Spanish American colonies was an economic and social institution central to the operation of the Spanish Empire. The French were the third largest slave traders.

The Founders, with the exception of those from South Carolina and Georgia, exhibited considerable aversion to slavery during the era of the Articles of Confederation (1781–89) by prohibiting the importation of foreign slaves to individual states and lending their support to a proposal by Jefferson to ban slavery in the Northwest Territory.

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