In Defense of Our Founding Fathers

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of our nation, Netflix is streaming a five-part docuseries that delves into the history of America’s founding. Utilizing a conventional historical documentary style, the presentation includes commentary from historians and academics, accompanied by voice-over reenactments of events surrounding and following the American Revolution right up to the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Director Brian Knappenberger, while offering intriguing insights, also presents a skewed portrayal of historical facts, particularly regarding the reality that some of the most influential Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution were slave owners. Subsequently, men like Thomas Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of Independence and highlighted the fact that “all men are created equal,” and the Father of our nation, George Washington, are depicted as hypocrites. Such criticisms are trivial, at best.

In stark contrast, Jarrett Stepman, in his 2019 book titled The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past, asserts that Americans “have lost touch with the immense accomplishments of this esteemed American whose greatest fault is that he dared to criticize an institution as ancient as mankind while failing to eradicate it within a single generation.” Throughout his political career, Jefferson, for example, consistently opposed institutional slavery. For instance:

• in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), he articulated: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.”
• in a Letter to Brissot de Warville dated February 11, 1788, Jefferson expressed: “You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery: and certainly nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object.”

Jefferson not only denounced institutional slavery, but he also took measures against it:

• in 1783, he proposed a bill to Congress aimed at liberating all slaves by the year 1800;
• in 1807, during his second presidential term, he enacted legislation that abolished the Atlantic slave trade, effectively prohibiting the importation of African slaves into the United States. While this did not eradicate slavery, this crucial legislation underscored Jefferson’s opposition to the institution of slavery.

The lingering question is, if Thomas Jefferson opposed the practice of slavery, why did he not emancipate his own slaves?

In his New York Times Bestseller The Jefferson Lies, David Barton notes that George Washington freed his slaves upon his death in 1799, whereas Virginia law prevented Thomas Jefferson from doing the same. Jefferson, along with his parents and father-in-law, had accumulated significant debts following the American Revolution, which amounted to $107,000 at the time of his death (equivalent to over $2 million today). According to Virginia law, slaves were classified as property, allowing creditors to seize them from debtors to settle outstanding debts. Consequently, Jefferson leveraged the growing number and value of his slaves to achieve two objectives: to enhance his access to capital and to safeguard his slaves from being sold.

It is accurate that Jefferson, in his idealistic vision, believed that relocating black Americans to places like Sierra Leone would grant them a sovereign and independent homeland. He reasoned that “expanding the institution to the West would increase the number of taxpayers, who would finance the costs of deportation.”

However, Jefferson chose to remain largely silent on the matter of slavery in the latter part of his life. Author M. Andrew Holowchak suggests that his hesitance to address slavery further stemmed from his conviction that acting at that time would be premature for effective change. He believed, like most of his colleagues, that premature action on slavery could lead to greater harm rather than benefit—such as the disunion of the states, which ultimately occurred.

Undoubtedly—akin to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., which wrongly accuses many Founding Fathers, like Benjamin Franklin, of being racists and anti-immigrant and asserts that Alexander Hamilton was a slave owner—such racist implications reflect revisionist publications, such as The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2019) by Nikole Hannah-Jones. This work characterizes slavery not simply as a form of forced and unwanted labor for economic benefit but as a representation of white racism.

To this, the White House Domestic Policy Council, after President Trump’s March 27, 2026, Executive Order 14253 (“Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”) and the current review of the Smithsonian Institution, produced “Saving America’s Story.” The administration does not seek to try to cover up some of our nation’s dark history, but rather, to set the record straight—such as the crucial fact that, aside that Hamilton abhorred slavery and the revisionist claim that he was a slave owner—and this does lack foundation—he “was a vocal critic of slavery and helped found the anti-slavery New York Manumission Society in 1785, which worked to end the slave trade.”

All things being equal, individuals like Knappenberger and Hannah-Jones fail to note the phenomenon that blacks in colonial America owned other blacks as slaves.

In R. Halliburton’s work Free Black Owners of Slaves: A Reappraisal of the Woodson Thesis, it is stated that free black individuals owned black slaves in all 13 original states and, subsequently, in every state that permitted slavery. This practice extended further.

Moreover, for a certain period, free black individuals were also able to “own” the labor of white indentured servants in Virginia. Halliburton further notes that free blacks had ownership of slaves in Boston as early as 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, there were 48 black individuals in Maryland who owned a total of 143 slaves. A particularly infamous black farmer from Maryland, Nat Butler, was known to “regularly purchase and sell Negroes for the Southern trade.”

Revisionists argue that when black individuals owned slaves, they did so solely for humanitarian purposes, which they argue legitimized the “technical” slave status of those who were bought. This historical perspective was documented by Carter G. Woodson in his 1924 publication, Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830. The truth of the matter is that free blacks utilized slavery as a means to exert pressure or impose punishment on others.

This is not an attempt to obscure our nation’s complexities or its challenging moments, as with the disenfranchising Jim Crow laws, which constituted a formal, codified system of racial segregation that persisted for 75 years starting in the 1890s. Rather, the aim is to present a comprehensive history of the nation, including both its favorable and unfavorable elements, in order to understand the evolution that has formed our country into its current state.

The history of America is indeed complex. However, despite the reservations held by our Founding Fathers, the challenges, the conflicts, and the profound intellectual and moral determination required to create a society reflected the “self-evident truth” that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights grounded in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” As a result, throughout this journey which shaped the essence of our nation, religious convictions served as a continual source of inspiration and motivation, as evidenced in the fight against slavery and the civil rights movement. Even in our present day, especially during periods of crisis, Americans persist in drawing strength from this legacy of common ideals and ambitions.