In the course of my research on a website by the American Intercontinental University, I found interesting information in one of John Adams’ letters to a Timothy Pickering responding to Pickering’s questions about the writing of the Declaration. That’s when I picked up on a comment made by Adams when he reflected on his critique of the Declaration when Thomas Jefferson showed him his original draft.
Adams wrote: “I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose.”
That passage certainly made my ears perk up because I had never before seen a reference to a passage regarding slavery in the Declaration of Independence.
My research Kthen led me to a website called BlackPast.org where I found the passage written by Jefferson in his original draft, but which indeed had been removed from the final document before it would be passed by the delegates gathered at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776.
Here is that passage wherein Jefferson railed against King George III for creating and sustaining the slave trade, describing it as "a cruel war against human nature."
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and 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 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 on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
Jefferson was referring of course to Lord Dunmore, the former royal governor of Virginia, who on November 7, 1775, proclaimed freedom for all slaves (or indentured servants) belonging to Patriots, if they were able and willing to bear arms, and joined the British forces. Within a month of the proclamation, more than five hundred slaves left their masters and became Loyalists.
However, many slaves fought on the side of the Patriots, too, in the hopes of earning their freedom when the war was over with a victory for the patriots. Wikipedia quotes one historian as saying that “Two revolutions went on at the same time - the Patriots against the British, and a second one fought by blacks for their freedom.”
According to a website hosted by PBS entitled “Revolution, Africans in America”, when the document was presented to the delegates, both northern and southern slaveholding delegates objected to its inclusion, and it was removed. The only remaining allusion to the original paragraph on slavery is the phrase "He has excited domestic Insurrections among us," included in a list of grievances against the king.
Decades later Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Of course, this column would not be complete without my reminding you of the rest of the story. Thomas Jefferson, in spite of his intense hatred of the slave trade conducted under the auspices of King George, was himself a lifelong slave holder.
Comments