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William Kyle as the eldest known son of Robert Kyle was born two years after Thomas Jefferson and likely before Jefferson inherited his father Peter Jefferson's fortune and began building his fabled Monticello with slave labor and paid White carpenters, ... William was likely seeking to build his fortune and well-being in nearby Botetourt County, possibly via his or wife's inheritance of slaves by which to do so. Within the culture of the period, at age 24 in 1769, ... he married Sarah Ann Stephens who was obviously a hearty White woman who would give birth to eleven children between 1771 and 1786 as freeborn of love. Novel writers like Washington Irving, born after the war, writing about White goodness and might in the era would never suggest they were not all conceived and born of love between man and woman. But any story written about life of Phyllis Wheatley or any other African-American born or giving life during the same period would be certain to emphasize births in lustful sin and squalor with the mother as victim in environments of evil Black men. It was the children of men like William Kyle who would reap the benefits of Jefferson's Declaration for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, ... interpreted to exclude non-Whites in the constitution to be written by neighbors such as James Madison, and eventually ratified as "the law of the land giving them permission to buy, sell and otherwise propagate and own slaves." Following the revolutionary war that officially ended in 1783, ... huge numbers of slaves were imported by American slave traders until year 1807 when the British government declared the African slave trade to be illegal.
In morality terminology, the new legal environment meant a young man like William Kyle could sell his mother's hand-maiden or even offspring of the woman who wet-nursed him as an infant when his mother's breast were too dry. It meant in functional terms that men like William could be expected to punish and sell their former boyhood playmates in the name of justice or profit. And, of course buy young comely women to be in the vineyards of a man of means to reap the fruits thereof. Slavery had been made legal that which was simply "immoral."
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