Pete Buttigieg’s remark that America’s Founding Fathers “did not understand that slavery was a bad thing” has stoked once more the argument over the relationship between the founding and slavery. This comes on the heels of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which revived the old falsehood that the Constitution’s authors designed it to protect that awful practice forever—an argument thoroughly refuted by myself and others.
Timothy Sandefur is Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute. His book 'You Don’t Own Me: Individualism and the Culture of Liberty' has just been published by the Cato Institute.
