Defending his efforts to censor the history taught in Florida’s schools, GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis made the wildly inaccurate statement at left.
In fact, British courts were questioning slavery well before the American Revolution, and the British Empire abolished slavery decades before America did (read details here).
When American colonists wrote the preamble of the Declaration of Independence (see text here), they conferred “inalienable rights” on themselves, not the slaves some of them owned.
Slavery in America survived both the revolution and the drafting and adoption of the U.S. Constitution.
It was effectively abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and legally abolished by the 13th Amendment in 1865.
Every schoolchild outside Florida and Texas (and perhaps some of the other former Confederate states) learns this by sixth grade. But DeSantis apparently didn’t, maybe because he want to Catholic schools (I wouldn’t know what they teach).
Wikipedia says (here) that “DeSantis studied history at Yale University.” Yale doesn’t teach this kind of “history,” so he got it somewhere else. Maybe he just forgot everything he learned at Yale, and is making things up as he goes along, like people do on exams who don’t attend class or read the textbook assignments.
And the slaves questioned it. Evidently he regards them as “no one,” i.e., nobodies.
This guy wants to be president.