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Isabel Adams Research Paper

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In the beginning I was disillusioned and disheartened. I am a proud and patriotic American and I could not reconcile my love of country and admiration for the Founding Fathers with the fact that so many of 
them owned people who had been kidnapped from their homes in Africa, or were descended from people who had been kidnapped.
Because it wasn’t just Franklin. Decade of our first twelve presidents owned slaves, the notable exceptions being John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams. Interestingly, Abigail Adams grew up in a slave-owning family. Her father, Rev. William Smith, owned at least two African Americans: Pheby and Tom. Aaron Burr was a slave owner, as were generals Philip Schuyler and Horatio Gates, first chief justice of the United States John Jay, the famous artist Charles Wilson Peale, and one-third of the members of the Continental Congress.
In 1776, while the rhetoric of freedom and liberty was thick in the gentle wind of Boston, Providence, New York, Albany, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Charleston, fully 20 percent of the population of the newly christened United American States — one in five — were owned as property and sold like 
Cows. Uncovering this bewildered me and got me queasy to my tummy.
As I researched I began to discover my main role, Isabel, whispering to me. She was chained between two countries. The …show more content…

My melancholy about the vicious effects of slavery lifted as I realized that people like Isabel and her friend Curzon were the real Americans, the quiet ones who fought battles every day and grew harder in the facial expression of opposition. They were willing to gamble everything for liberty, recognizing that it is more honorable to die fighting than to be in chains. Merely it is best to dwell free, in a world where we are all valued, in the world that our Founding Fathers and Mothers dreamed of, even if they weren’t hardy enough to make the journey in their

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