Liberty & Slavery (2016) on Netflix

Plot summary

Revolutionary America held a paradox at its center. The men who led the colonies toward freedom from England wanted a nation of individual liberty, and several of them owned enslaved people. Thomas Jefferson put the promise of equality into the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the documentary examines what he and the other Founders meant by it: whether the phrase covered only white men or also blacks, women and Native Americans. George Washington, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Samuel Adams are among the Founders considered, along with the world of enslaved people at Jefferson's Monticello and Washington's Mount Vernon. Interviews with historians, theologians and professors also weigh whether the Founders left a mechanism for later generations to abolish slavery, and whether abolition in the 1780s would have cost the Constitution.