On the December 21 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, "1776 commission" member Charlie Kirk defended the United States from critical analysis of its slave-owning past by claiming that we should focus on things like “a year after the founding of our country, in 1777, Vermont abolished slavery on their own. That it's our country that is founded on freedom and liberty, and the pursuit of a better nation.”
What Kirk didn't make clear is that Vermont declared independence from both the British Empire and the United States in January 1777, prior to abolishing slavery. Vermont didn't join the United States until 1791, eight years after the Revolutionary War.