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Aug 10, 2009 · 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.
Jan 18, 2022 · Though the Declaration of Independence states all men are created equal, one-fifth of the population were enslaved people, and one-third of the Declaration’s signers were personally enslavers. The final document does not mention slavery and, through its silence, condones enslavement, but the first draft includes a condemnation of slavery.
- What The Deleted Passage Said
- Why Was The Declaration’s Anti-Slavery Passage removed?
- One-Third of The Signers Were Enslavers
- The Declaration's Most Significant Deletion
In his initial draft, Jefferson blamed Britain’s King Georgefor 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," Jefferson wrote, "violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant ...
The exact circumstances of the passage’s removal may never be known. The historical record doesn't include details of the debates undertaken by the Second Continental Congress. What is known is that the 33-year-old Jefferson, who composed the Declaration between June 11 and June 28, 1776, sent a rough draft to members of a pre-selected committee, i...
To call slavery a “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. Jefferson, after all, had been tasked with writing a document to reflect the interests of an assemblage of slave-owning colonies with a profound com...
The signers ultimately 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—leaving the original passage a footnote to what might have been. Indeed, removing Jefferson's condemnation of slavery would prove the most signi...
- Yohuru Williams
Feb 25, 2016 · The Declaration of Independence’s deleted passage on slavery, 1776 The deleted words — beginning with “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 …” — were a condemnation of George III, “the Christian King of ...
Twelve of the first eighteen American presidents owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration and called slavery an “abominable crime,” yet he was a lifelong slaveholder. Fearful of dividing the fragile new nation, Jefferson and other founders who opposed slavery did not insist on abolishing it. It took 87 more years―and the ...
Feb 15, 2022 · The deletion of Thomas Jefferson’s slavery passage in the Declaration of Independence had powerful and far-reaching consequences. Little did the Founding Fathers know that that we would still be feeling those reverberations today. Donna R. Braden is Senior Curator and Curator of Public Life at The Henry Ford.
The anti-slavery clause in Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence, 1776. In June 1776, the United States and Britain had been at war for over a year, and the Second Continental Congress was nearing agreement to issue a formal declaration of independence.
