Sunday's New York Times Magazine had a brief article "Loyal to a Fault" that highlighted this statement:

We pride ourselves on the freedom and tolerance embedded in our founding principles. We have also recently begun to acknowledge the discrepancy between the nation's vaunted commitment to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and the gross abuse of these principles in practice - through slavery above all. (Compared with the United States, the British Empire looked like a good bet if you were an enslaved black or a Native American.)