American Thinker Reports: There is an important oversight in the scholarship of the 1619 Project that is also implicit in Critical Race theorizing.  Neither the 1619 Project nor Critical Race Theory includes the moral position of important White political thinkers  opposing slavery as contrary to the natural order of our human species.

While drafters of the Constitution found themselves forced to accept the property laws of the sovereign states, each now fully independent of Great Britain, significant thought leaders philosophically opposed slavery.  While thought is less efficacious than action, it is not unimportant.  Thoughts set forth the course of action and bring about the will to act.

James Wilson, for one, believed that "slavery, or an absolute and unlimited power in the master, over the life and fortune of the slave, is unauthorized by the Common Law.  Indeed, it is repugnant to the principles of natural law, that such a state should subsist in any social system."

This invocation of natural law laid the foundation for future reform of state laws abolishing slavery, as happened as the result of the Civil War.



In this view, Wilson followed the teaching of John Locke, who in his treatise concerning civil government, in Chapter IV, insisted that persons must never be "subject to the inconsistent, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature."