Hitler was actually not bad as a painter, in a rather boardroomish style based on the Romanticism of a hundred years before. WAY better than, say, Thomas Kinkade or Winston Churchill.

There certainly WAS widespread recognition in the late 18th century that slavery was immoral. At least, there was in Britain (I have read a lot of the Scottish sources). It was an issue that the working classes could identify with, since they were being fucked over by successive goverments they had no more say in than a slave did. In America it was doubtless different, since the poor colonists were doing exactly what the Jamjaweed of the Sudan are currently doing only on a vastly larger scale, and no way could they have faced an issue elsewhere that might have turned round and confronted them with the moral implications of their own actions.

A few years ago very few people could have named the author of the words. (It seems nobody here knows the composer of the tune, either).   Maybe the best thing that could be done with this song is to reassign the credit back to Anon.

What other words is "New Britain" used for? What's *its* story? - the tune is now far better known than the words, and the words would have been left in oblivion without it.