It is scandalous that Thomas Jefferson, the man who penned the immortal declaration of July 4, 1776, that "all men are created equal"(and women, dear!) did not liberate his slaves even at his death, or free even his own slave children by Sally Hemings--who, by the way, was his deceased wife's half sister. It's a miserable historical muddle.

But it is every bit as muddled to believe that American prosperity depended on slavery, as some authors of the 1619 project do when they equate the Southern plantation with capitalism. They are not alone. Slavery and wealth are linked in American lore: In his second inaugural address, on March 4, 1865, another great if flawed president, Abraham Lincoln, declared, "If God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, ... as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

It is a creditable sentiment, nobly expressed by our poet president. Would that he had lived and fulfilled the promise to the freedmen of 40 acres and a mule. Yet Lincoln's lyricism can mislead. The "piled" plunder of the crime of slavery is dwarfed by the returns of the honest commerce that might have been; Jefferson's declaration is an economic opportunity sadly missed. Free and equal Black Americans would have generated far more wealth in America than enslaved ones did. Economic history is unequivocal: Jefferson's slavery wasn't the basis of America's prosperity; Jefferson's liberalism, so beautifully expressed in the document we celebrate today, was.