The problem with judging the past is that people always look at it through the prism of the present. In other words, we judge things that happened in the past based on our understanding today and not their understanding back then. In order to truly understand the past you must understand how the people of the past thought, believed and understood at the time in history you want to judge. You cannot judge the actions of people in history by your understanding of things or your personal beliefs today.
Another problem with judging the great achievements of the past, is that people wrongly expect the people that made these great achievements to be perfect people without any flaws, and if they find a character flaw in any indevidual, they believe this is cause to degrade the greatness of their achievement. Instead of looking at the intent of their life and what they hoped to achieve, they are judged by the personal weaknesses or isolated mistakes they made throughout their life.
In this regard, if we view history in this manner, then we are no different then the Jewish Pharisees of biblical New Testament times. Who, if they could find a single character flaw in person, would use that flaw to invalidate everything that person said, wrote or achieved, regardless of the correctness or authenticity of that person's statements or the greatness of their achievement. In the New Testament, there is the book of Hebrews, which nobody had any idea who wrote. The reason no one knows who wrote it is because the author intentionally hid who they were, so that the Pharisees would have to judge what they wrote by the validity of their statements alone. Who ever it was that wrote the book of Hebrews knew that if they, the Jewish Pharisees, disagreed with what they wrote, they would seek to invalidate it, not by trying to make an intellectual argument against it, but by attacking the character of the writer.
So when judging the history of this great nation; please do not be like those Pharisees. Do not expect the founders to live by a belief system or an understanding of the world that did not exist in their day and/or culture. Do not expect them to be people without faults or that never once made a mistake. Judge them for who they were in their time and for what they knew and understood in their days, not your day. Most importantly, judge them for what the intentions of their hearts were and what they achieved, in spite of their weaknesses and mistakes.
