What is the old folks saying, sweep around your own doorstep before you going sweeping around your neighbors.

Who was most responcible for the French assistance in the American revolution? Was it Lafayette? Or was it Benjamin Franklin? If I understand History the French Fleet was under the command of the King of France, a slave owner, and not Lafayette's. What was Lafayette's contribution to the freedom of the American Colonies that he should gain such position as to be able to dictate policy?

Lafayette was a Marquis wasn't he? That means he was a part of the aristocrat society in France. And therefore a partaker of the wealth and position that slavery under their system had built in France. It was that wealth and position that even made him a part of our history. Or otherwise he would have been nothing more to history than just another musketman in the ranks of the American army if he even got to America in the first place.

It seems like the same argument that our modern day culture uses to condeam great men like Thomas Jefferson. A man who wrote the Declaration of Independance and as President signed the first anti slave trade treaty legislation passed by the Congress in 1803.

But, is villified today because he also own slaves. So if Jefferson's words are worthless, so are Lafayette's by the same standard.

We need to be careful about men like Jefferson and Lafayette who were both visionaries of their times. BUT, they were also victums of their times and its culture. Just as we are today. Who among us can predict what the moral attitudes will be 150 to 200 years in the future. Moral attitudes change with each generation and each social situation.

Will our great grandchildren condeam us for driving fossil fueled vehicles, or making fuel out of foods, like corn and soybeans, while other peoples of the world starved, when theirs are running of water or air? Will they condeam us for preforming abortions when all they have to do is take a pill? Will they condeam us for being obsessed about going to work to earn money when they will have done away with money altogether? Who knows? Who can predict these things?

The point is that the moral attitudes of tommorrow are just as hard for us to predict today, as it was for them to predict and effect changes in their day. You can look back in 20/20 hindsight and say, Oh what a visionary! He knew just the right thing to do. Slavery was bad from our perspective today. But, to accurately understand history one has to look at things from the people perspective who were living it.

One thing that is hard for us to grasp today is that in American there were millions of slaves who lived a good life for their times, social status, and economic conditions and did not want to be free, until they were forced to be.