First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

and most troubling, was their acceptance of human bondage, which would prove disastrous to the nation they designed. Often seeing it a natural part of the social order, they wrote it into the fundamental law of the nation, and so sustained a system that was deeply inhumane and rested on a foundation of physical and sexual abuse, including torture.