BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Tim Kaine Is Wrong about America and Slavery.

Kaine lays the blame at the feet of the Constitution: “a nation that put a Constitution in place that enshrined the institution of slavery and said that a slave is equal to three-fifths of a person.” But the compromises struck at Philadelphia in 1787 (or before that, during the Revolution) did not create slavery; slavery had existed in the Thirteen Colonies for a century, and the problem faced by the Founding Fathers was what to do with a society where it already existed.

By and large, the generation of the Founding Fathers saw slavery as an evil; they were acutely aware of the charge of hypocrisy laid against the broad principles of universal human rights they declared. At the same time, in an age when indentured servitude was still common, the moral argument that slavery was a fundamentally distinct evil was not as far advanced as it would later become.
…
Kaine, echoing today’s left-wing writers, would damn the Founding Fathers for their optimistic faith in the American promise. But the revolutionaries of France tried to tackle all of society’s ills simultaneously, and ended up on a Reign of Terror. We should not be so quick, from the distance of history, to condemn the Founders for making a world that was better than the one they knew just because the job was unfinished.

Indeed.

Good stuff — read the whole thing.