Tuesday, March 15, 2022
We the People
(1776) THE DELETED PASSAGE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
PRIMARY
DOCUMENT
Official
Presidential portrait of Thomas Jefferson (Rembrandt Peale, 1800)
Public
Domain Image
THE
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE DEBATE OVER SLAVERY
When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking
slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it initiated the most
intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and
early summer of 1776. Jefferson’s passage on slavery was the
most important section removed from the final document. It was replaced with a more ambiguous passage
about King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us.” 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.
Jefferson’s original passage on slavery appears below.
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.
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