There are a lot of people, many of them POC, who should have statues but don't. But those who were on "the right side of history" were only there at their very best moments. On many other occasions, however, they were just like any regular schmoe of their times, which makes them seem monstrous by modern standards.
Those people who opposed slavery were a small number of heroes who stood against the tenor of the time. They deserve credit and praise for having the courage to stand against the majority view. However, a person who is against slavery today deserves no moral credit whatsoever. So neither abolitionists nor slave owners should be judged by the standards of our time. Some abolitionists (Hamilton and Franklin, for example) owned slaves before they denounced the practice. John Adams never enslaved anyone and spoke out against slavery. On the other hand, he did not specifically ban slavery when he wrote the Massachusetts constitution, and often used a racist obscenity to describe Hamilton. (which Miranda’s Hamilton correctly quotes). Adams also believed that people who didn’t own land should not be allowed to vote. If anyone said something like that today, we would assume that person was a crazed plutocratic conservative, who probably has a basement full of machine guns and camouflage haberdashery.
All-or-nothing moral judgment have often been used to justify colonialism. India supposedly had to be civilized by the British because of the practices of Suttee (the burning alive of widows) and thugee (a religious ritual involving murder). Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto justifies the Spanish Conquest of America by referring to the Aztec and Mayan practices of human sacrifices and torture. These were horrible practices that needed to be condemned and stopped, but they do not prove that the people who created these cultures were mere barbarians and savages. As we do with people who do heroic things, we need to praise these cultures for their virtues, not dismiss them completely because of their vices
The mistakes of our great moral leaders, and what they learned from them, are what created the values we live by today. We are their superiors only because we stand on their shoulders.
https://teedrockwell.medium.com/save-our-imperfect-moral-heroes-e490dced158c
