Once in a while, I play a game in my mind about what I would change in US history if I could...
What would you change in history, if you could?
There is always some reason NOT to change history... Maybe if only because someone pivotal to the future of that time learned a very a important lesson (or lessons) from the event(s) of the time/incident I would change.
However, I think I've finally identified the point I would change if I could.
The writers of our Constitution did a terrific job. Here we are 227 years later still a nation that can still have a terrific future for however long we allow it. Did they miss here and there? Yes, of course. These men lived in a time when travel, even to visit ten miles away took hours rather than minutes.
I had breakfast in Virginia yesterday morning and was home, four states away, in Florida in time for lunch. In the time it took for me to fly home yesterday, those early Americans would have been just nearing their ten mile away destination. How could the writers possibly have written a Constitution that covered every possiblilty? Yet, for the most part, they did.
But for all of their incredible prescience, they made one huge, fabulously, horribly dreadful mistake.
They allowed slavery to stand.
I realize that the Carolinas and Georgia were adamantly opposed to ending slavery. Their way of life would be ended and they feared what would happen without slavery. But gathered in that Convention Hall were the greatest minds of their time, and perhaps their century (at least in what became the United States). Given the motivation and the willingness to work a change, they could have come up with a solution.
The decision to let slavery stand was, in my opinion, the greatest mistake of our county. It lead to a division in our country from which ensued the Civil War which killed tens of thousands of people, some of them their grand and great grand-children. We are still feeling the fall out from that decision 227 years later.
Other than the Patriot/Tory divide, I believe that this divide is a big part of what is wrong with our country today... We are split down the middle and have been since before the Constitution was written.
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