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.
