Founders who were slave owners employed externalized blame to quiet conscience

Evidence

Some of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners and had to justify to themselves their holding of Black people in servitude as property. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson blamed British slave traders for bringing enslaved Blacks to America but tacitly absolved Americans of responsibility for owning them. Some slave owners had the toughest time justifying the very behavior they regarded as “disgraceful to mankind,” as George Mason, one of the “fathers of the bill of rights [ sic]” called the slave trade (Pavao, 2014). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 117

Categorization

• XREF: Jefferson’s displacement of blame onto British slave traders is a textbook instance of Bandura’s externalization/displacement mechanism, useful for the argument on rationalization.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 117