Reply #127: Generally accepted practice?

[mobuto]

By whom? I think you have your history wrong. At the time of the revolution, slavery was a huge issue. The great English writer and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, for example, wrote a wildly influential missive in 1775 that denounced the advocates of American revolution for their hypocrisy. "How is it," he wrote, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" The 1770s marked a period of vociferous debate over slavery, and that only intensified in the years before the Napoleonic Wars.