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Also I didn’t say they were nothing more than terrible people. That’s what you’re saying. I’m saying they are bad people for what they did. Could still be good leaders or good parents etc
But you can't have a play about them that includes black and brown people, and if you do you are glorifying the bad things that they did?
Listen, slavery was clearly awful. I don't think that's open for debate. I'm simply saying that despite our imaginings, it was not the dominant social issue (except for its victims, obviously) of most of the era during which it was legal. The horrors of slavery only became a hotly debated issue in the core society (as opposed to then fringe groups like the Quakers) in England in the ~1820s and in the United States in ~1840s.
It is important for us to understand the society of the time, and to accept that the founders were not the "All-American Heroes" that the traditional American Exceptionalism narrative would have us believe. But it is also inappropriate for us to demonize them for not being enough ahead of their time (with the exception of Benjamin Franklin) to be abolitionists in a time when those were very rare. "Terrible people" is a lazy and presentist judgement, and it is definitely one that you made.
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the terrible people many of them were. If you were pro slavery and owned slaves I think it means you were a bad person. If your teeth are made from slave teeth I think you’re prob a bad person.
It's more complicated than that. Jefferson, for example, was against slavery in the abstract, but kept slaves himself. He rationalized it, as so many people do when they participate in things they consider "generally wrong." Washington had dentures partly made from the teeth of black people, who were likely slaves, as free blacks were not common in Virginia at the time, though there's no record either way. But he paid them for the teeth. Does that make it fine? No. But it's less bad than just taking them since the victims were likely his property under the laws of the era.
Nuance is harder than staking out a claim of hero or villain, but it's much more valuable than a bumper sticker view of history.
As for Hamilton, the play actually makes slavery more of a point of contention than it really was in the era, and that's sad. Sad that the history is inaccurate in the play and even sadder that slavery just wasn't that controversial yet.