The "deleted" Declaration
of Independence
As with President Andrew Jackson’s
Indian Removal document, another president, Thomas Jefferson, provided the
key slavery document—a mere [“deleted”] paragraph.
A call for the abolition of
slavery was part of the original draft of
the Declaration of Independence.
Its final deletion says more about
“America” than
its potential
inclusion might have.
Instead of being a truly revolutionary paragraph in America’s story of Light, it became the third
thread in America’s Dark Story.
“He {King of England} 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 and 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 and 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 for 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.”
From Thomas Jefferson's original
draft of the Declaration
of Independence sourced in his Autobiography.
A good portion of the text was deleted
or changed by the Congressional delegates. The Writings
of Thomas Jefferson, Volume I (Washington D.C.: The
Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Association,
1903), pages 28-38. Source Also, Jefferson's
Writings
Continue—Jefferson and Hemings
