Ahead of His Time

We consider our world today to be the most liberal of all time. In America particularly, we preach individual liberties and acceptance of others while fully acknowledging the faults of our forefathers. We generally assume that the earliest Americans had the best of intentions for our future nation but no understanding of other cultures and races. I feel like Americans, myself included, have an impression of all of our founders as ignorant bigots, as many undoubtably were based on the countless deaths of Africans and Native Americans. For this reason, I was particularly surprised and impressed by a speech by De Witt Clinton in 1811 in which he addresses the fact that the discovery and settlement of America has led to the extermination of "millions of the red men, and entailed upon the sable inhabitants of Africa, endless and destructive wars, captivity, slavery and death" for which "the Almighty" will one day punish us (Wedding of the Waters, Bernstein, pg. 138-9). The fact that we so quickly condemn our forefathers and are shocked by those who are "ahead of their time" is an indication of the teleological approach to history that we have been taught through grade school. It is necessary for us to take a step back from our present biases in order for us to avoid unfair generalizations about the past.