We today, therefore, can do without them. There is something decidedly cheap about such charges. They reek of ingratitude and imprudence. But they are being made by historians who want to substitute their own authority for the Founders', and it's necessary for someone to take them seriously enough to provide a refutation. What looks like grown-up sophistication by the critics he shows to be childish petulance based on misrepresentation and misunderstanding.
Slavery is the foremost charge in the indictment.
Mr. West is able to quote all the Founders strongly denouncing slavery for blacks. If they did not abolish it, they must not have thought it wrong. Nor was the compromise based on mere amoral calculation. Mr. West points out that the principle of equality itself has two parts that often conflict. So the principle of equality requires an effort of persuasion, even if it may ultimately fail, as in the period leading up to our Civil War.