There were 87 edits to Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence. Most were trivial, shortened phrases here or word substitutions there, but there is one glaring omission. One entire paragraph highlighting perhaps the greatest CRIME committed by King George, Parliament, the various “companies” (like the East India Company) and other agents of British government was stricken by the South Carolina delegation.  Jefferson blamed King George for his role in creating and perpetuating the transatlantic slave trade—which he describes, in so many words, as a crime against humanity:

“he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.“

Now its easy to say this was Enlightenment thinking by Jefferson but the reality is that Jefferson is responding directly to Lord Dunmore’s 1775 Proclamation which offered freedom to any enslaved person in Virginia who volunteered to serve in the British army against rebellion.  Even though Thomas Jefferson was publicly a consistent opponent of slavery. Calling it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” and even though Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. His motivation for accusing King George of “piratical warfare” through the institution of Slavery was much more about winning political support for Independence than it was a social commentary on the keeping slaves.

Jefferson was, very conflicted on the subject.  In theory, he opposed slavery and sought to eliminate it.  At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was actively involved in legislation that he hoped would result in slavery’s abolition.  In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans.  In 1784, he proposed an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories.  Yet, when it came to his own slaves, he saw owning a vast plantation managed with slave labor as one the necessities of life and what he deserved. For him, slavery remained an essential reality of his time and place. The land possessed him, he possessed the land, and his slaves were inseparable from the land.

The removal of Jefferson’s clause from the Declaration of Independence was mostly fueled by political and economic expediencies. The 13 colonies were deeply divided on the issue of slavery, both the South and the North had financial stakes in perpetuating it. Southern plantations, like Jefferson’s, relied on slave labor to produce tobacco, cotton and other cash crops for export.  So long as America remained dependent trade with Europe, America needed slaves – or so the delegations from colonies like North Carolina and Georgia believed.Calling slavery “cruel war against human nature itself” may have accurately reflected the values of many of the founders, but it also underscored the paradox between what they said and what they did. One-third of the Declaration’s signers held slaves.  Even some of the signers from northern colonies.  How could they castigate the King and Parliament for slavery and not abolish it as part of the Revolution; and if they abolished it, what would be the cost?  The Revolution already represented a huge financial loss for many in the Americas, could they add the loss of their slaves and the product of their work to this toll?

Ultimately Congress replaced the deleted clause with a passage highlighting King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us,” for stirring up warfare between the colonists and Native tribes and pushing the debate over slavery into the future.  Removing Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery would again foment disagreement and debate in the 1787 Constitutional Congress and then a hot war between the states in 1861.  This simple yet significant deletion from the Declaration of Independence, hollowed out the words “all men created equal” and caused generations of Americans to struggle to obtain their inalienable rights.

See Noah Lewis and I debate this clause — https://colonialbrewer.com/2020/07/06/all-men-are-created-equal/

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