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… is from page 244 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 [2] – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay – “The ‘1619 Project’ is filled with slovenliness and ideological ax-grinding [3]” – from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on May 7th, 2020):
The phenomenon of slavery was millennia old in 1776, but as Gordon Wood says [4], “It’s the American Revolution that makes [slavery] a problem for the world.” Sean Wilentz (see his 2018 book “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding [5]”) correctly insists [6]that what “originated in America” was “organized anti-slavery politics,” and it did so because of those Enlightenment precepts in the Declaration’s first two paragraphs.