Fat hurts wrote:
Republican senator Tom Cotton thinks slavery was a "necessary evil".
From interview with the Arkansas Gazette"
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.
I can't find any founding father who described slavery as a "necessary evil". Even if George Washington had said it, it takes a very warped person to agree with that today.
Tom Cotton is an unnecessary evil and he should not be in the US Senate.
I don't see anything wrong with the statement Cotton made but I'm open to persuasion if there's qualified historians lurking to set the record straight. Unifying the nation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was the highest priority and most of the anti-slavery Founding Fathers knew they would never get the South on board with full blown abolition in the Constitution even though they knew slavery was contradictory to the main tenants of the articles themselves (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and property and all that). Most of them also understood it would almost certainly lead to massive conflict and no one had the appetite for that. This was pretty much in line with what John Adams thought as well. Benjamin Franklin and John Jay both sought to end slavery legally and gradually afterwards.
This topic comes up in the spotlight about every 5 years now since probably 1950 or so.