That many slave owners were also great men formulated the concept of a democratic republic and human rights in ways that inspired much of the world for centuries?
You can’t be a great man and own slaves. The Southern gentlemen That “ formulated democratic republic and human rights” as you put it, did so for themselves. That did not include slaves or even women nor the Native American. They were great if you were a white male plantation owner. It’s the same with the declaration of independents. It applied to the white guys sitting around the table, not to women, American Indians or slaves...
You can't be a man at all if you try to judge generations long past by today's standards. BTW, the American indians, ie transplanted Asians, also held and bought and sold slaves, long before whites ever came to what's now known as North America.
Indeed. The practice of slavery has been recorded on every continent save Antarctica at some point in history, certainly including within Europe.
What differs in this case is specifically
transAtlantic slavery, the practice of capturing humans from one continent and shipping them off in chains to entirely another, a journey which to them might as well be one of us being abducted by interstellar aliens. "Traditional" slavery was part of the spoils of war --- my tribe conquers yours, that means I get your land, your crops, and your people. When your tribe conquers mine, the reverse happens.
But that's simply a social status between neighboring tribes, who are already familiar with each others' land, language and customs. TransAtlantic slavery was much deeper in that in order to justify that human trafficking the victims had to be sold as something less than human, so the merchants who had started that trade, merchants from Spain, France, England, Portugal mainly --- invented the idea of racism. "Savages".
And that ALL started more than 250 years before there were any political parties, or countries as we define them, on either of these continents at all.
Comparing that to the sort of slavery between neighboring Native Americans or between neighboring Europeans, is ultimately dishonest. And speaking of ignorance I love the way the poster above speaks of "the American Indians" ---- as if they're some kind of monolith just because they all have a common race. Broad-brush much?