Christopher Columbus

"To the modern complaint that Columbus brought slavery to the New World and that the Europeans' diseases wiped out indigenous peoples, a response is due. Slavery was a pervasive fact of life among the Europeans, but also particularly among the Arabs, the Africans, and the Indians themselves. In Asia, slavery had always existed. It seems hard to credit an attack on Columbus that singles him out for what was then a fairly universal practice. As much as we deplore slavery today, we cannot ignore the moral development of the West from our present vantage point outside the context of history. It was from the very experience of administering a far-flung empire that Spanish scholars began to elaborate universal doctrines of human rights that led, eventually, to the abolition of slavery in the West. A counter-challenge might be offered: Who, in Columbus’s time, did not practice slavery? One might conclude that far from being slavery’s worst practitioners, westerners led the world to end the practice.”

Excerpt from America: The Last Best Hope by William J. Bennett