Slavery And Its Impact On America - 1541 Words

Every day it is becoming more and more evident that our nation is divided. Despite warnings from prominent historical figures like George Washington, we have created a great fissure in our nation that stretches from Maryland to Kansas. Where we should be one nation, united under our Constitution, we are instead the North and the South. Every day, this fissure grows and spreads, and soon, I fear, it will crack our Unites States in half. The driving force behind this rift is a controversial issue: the institution of slavery. It was initially intended by our founding fathers that slavery be slowly phased out, as even in 1775 our budding nation’s leaders had the common sense and moral compass to see that slavery is wrong. Even the proponents†¦show more content†¦Fitzhugh identifies the success and grandeur of empires such as the Romans and the Ottomans, yet fails to mention what happened to these once-great empires. The Romans, for example, met their demise when they expa nded too far, causing the central power and influence to be spread too thin, causing the empire to destabilize and eventually collapse. The Ottomans met a similar end. These are hardly examples to be building a case to support the institution of slavery. However, Fitzhugh claims that the developed countries that exist successfully without slavery are not representative of how a working system would work in a large republic, such as the United States, and therefore their success is not relevant to the success of liberty and equality. While other developed countries are smaller in terms of geographic area, countries like Austria and England – among others – have approximately the same size of population, all around thirty million citizens. A country like Austria can hardly be described as a â€Å"small community†, which makes the success of its confederation very relevant to us. Today, the United States is the only developed, industrialized nation to still insti tute slavery, which does not reflect well on the integrity of our nation. The idea of liberty and equality is still relatively new to a world that has spent most of its history oppressing the majority, so there will be obstacles, and there will be failures such as