As in the child's game of chairs where a tale told at the end and repeated at the beginning of the line changes dramatically, it does so with each person who tells it. Assumptions about slavery passed on to others who embroider their assumptions onto them, distort in a dramatic way the truth of a matter and become even more estranged from it as time and the telling pass by. I've always known it was America that ended slavery here as abhorrent, and tried to stamp it out in other places. But a story promulgated by a gigantic government gets woven into programs to serve mostly those in whose interest is the extension of these programs. Such is the scope of today's "social programs" to cure ills that have no basis in factual history. ---18 Feb 2021 Thur