By Larry Kenneth Alexander
George Washington was revered for his honesty for confessing to chopping down a cherry tree and never telling lies among many accolades, honors, and tributes bestowed. This is contrasted, as it was Washington who first claimed in May 1783 to British General Guy Carleton that Revolutionary War-era blacks were owned by Americans based upon “colonial statutes.” But the truth was that “colonial statutes” were legislatively rendered “utterly null and void” … “in all cases whatsoever” by Parliament’s Declaratory Act of 1766, and all black colonials suffering as slaves to white colonials were returned to status quo ante. There was no organized response from slaveholding Americans opposing because they knew colonial slavery was extralegal and that it violated the rule of law.