Slaveholders in Chief

Benjamin Franklin owned slaves too, though he later became an abolitionist. George Washington's dentures weren't wooden — they included human teeth, and his records show enslaved people at Mount Vernon were paid for teeth for his dentist. Whether they were forced is not recorded, but in slavery, real consent was never simple. These men built a nation on ideals they personally violated every day.

Jefferson drafted the phrase "all men are created equal" in 1776 while more than half a million enslaved people lived in the colonies he was supposedly liberating. The contradiction wasn't invisible at the time — Abigail Adams, Thomas Paine, and some Southern delegates wrestled with it — but the compromise held the coalition together long enough to win independence.