With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it.53 The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a further consolidation of whiteness across class, religious, and ethnic lines, and a hardening of the racial caste system. American democracy had been created on the backs of unfree Black labor.54 Blackness came to define whiteness—and whiteness defined American democracy prior to the Civil War.
