I'll Drink To This

"Barack Obama began his Election Night victory speech with a phrase that may have stopped short anyone educated with history textbooks written anytime in the past 30 years. "If there is anyone out there who still . . . wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time . . . tonight is your answer," he said.

"The dream of the founders"? Which founders could Obama have been talking about? Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the Declaration of Independence, was a slaveholder. George Washington, our first President, was a slaveholder, though his will dictated that his slaves would be freed upon his death. James Madison, the drafter of the Constitution, was a third slaveholding founder. He believed that freed slaves should be sent back to Africa.

The Constitution with which these founders created America counted slaves as three-fifths of a person and included a 20-year prohibition on Congress banning the slave trade. The only dream these founders would have had of a black President would have been a nightmare.

There's no record of Samuel Adams dreaming of a black President, either. But of all our founding fathers, he is the one perhaps most likely to have done so. In researching my biography of Adams, I discovered that Adams refused to accept a slave he had been offered as a gift - and never himself held a slave.

Slaves in Massachusetts petitioned Adams for liberation, using some of the same arguments Adams was using against the British. The Massachusetts House of Representatives that Adams helped lead approved an act banning the slave trade; the British-appointed governor refused to sign it into law. Later, Adams helped draft and win passage of the Massachusetts state Constitution that led judges to outlaw slavery in the state in 1781.

The federal Constitution prohibited until 1808 a federal ban on the importation of slaves. Adams reacted by rejoicing "that a door was now to be opened, for the annihilation of this odious, abhorrent practice, in a certain time." As governor of Massachusetts, he signed a "certificate of freedom" for a black man, William Newton, who he described as being of good character.

Adams has been falsely accused of racism for supposedly discounting the testimony of a Boston Massacre witness because the witness was black. But he was citing the testimony of another witness who was also black, and who he thought was more reliable.

Like many other now-underappreciated whites who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the abolition of slavery, Adams' conception of the human capability for freedom was universal (at least in respect to men). He outlined his philosophy in his 1772 statement of the "Rights of the Colonists" as men, as Christians and as British subjects. He wrote of the rights of all men to life and liberty and property. It was these ideas that made their way into the Declaration of Independence in the statement that "all men are created equal."

It was that statement to which President-elect Obama must have been alluding in his victory speech, and its power testifies to the way the dream of the founders really is alive in our time."

-- Ira Stoll, author of "Samuel Adams: A Life", showing how Barack Obama will warp history to his own ends, in New York's Daily News.

If you never had a doubt there would be a black president in our time - especially because the Republicans had already attempted it with stupid-assed Colin Powell - then you're smart enough to lend your support to: