Congress cut off about a quarter part of it, as I expected they would, but they obliterated some of the best of it . . .
—JOHN ADAMS, 1822
In his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson wrapped up his list of grievances against King George III with a powerful finale, which deserves to be quoted in full, and in its original form:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & 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 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, & murdering the people upon 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.1
That “cruel war against human nature itself” was, of course, the African slave trade. Jefferson sought to list this among King George’s wrongdoings, in language that asserted the humanity of enslaved people and stood up for their rights, despite their not being remotely represented in the Continental Congress.
Jefferson was a product of and a participant in the slave system. He owned slaves himself and even traveled to Philadelphia with the aforementioned Robert Hemings, his enslaved half-brother-in-law. But this screed against the slave trade was not the first time Jefferson had taken a stand against at least some aspects of the slave system. He records in his memoirs that in his early political career, as a young member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, he “made one effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected.” “Indeed,” he grumbled, “during the regal government, nothing liberal could expect success.”2 Thus, in the original Declaration, he made sure to call out the King for “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”
This passage also marked some of the most overtly religious language in Jefferson’s original draft. Though “the laws of nature and of nature’s god” were invoked by Jefferson’s hand, reconciling Enlightenment and religious thinking, the phrase “endowed by their Creator” was not present in the first draft but added later. Jefferson originally stated that our rights were a result of our “equal creation” without mentioning the Creator Himself. But when he contrasted the “infidel powers”—an apparent reference to Muslim slave traders from the Middle East and North Africa—with “the Christian King of Great Britain” he argued in no uncertain terms that the slave trade was not only unwelcome in North America but against the Christian God, who had created not only the slave trader but also the King and the slave.
The editing contributions made by the whole Congress to the work of Jefferson and the Committee of Five should not be discounted. Indeed, Boyd argues, “it is difficult to point out a passage in the Declaration, great as it was, that was not improved by their attention,” citing the involvement of such “keen minds” as James Wilson of Pennsylvania and John Witherspoon of New Jersey.3 There is certainly a case to be made that, rhetorically, sections of Jefferson’s wording benefited from the streamlining efforts of his colleagues, which produced some of the memorable phrasing that is known around the world today.
But Julian Boyd, though a preeminent Jefferson scholar, originally wrote his analysis in 1943, and changing times can bend the arc of consideration of the Declaration’s editing stage back toward the position staked out early on by Adams—that “some of the best of it” had been removed. This impassioned argument against the slave trade remains a painful reminder of a tragic missed opportunity.
Even at the time, however, John Adams knew that portion wouldn’t last. When he first read Jefferson’s draft at a meeting of the Committee of Five, he commended “the flights of Oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro Slavery,” a clause “which though I knew his Southern Bretheren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose.”4 Jefferson himself also blamed his Southern colleagues for striking out the antislavery language: “The clause . . . reprobating the enslaving [of] the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it.” But the Northern delegates did not get a pass in Jefferson’s final judgment: “Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”5
But how does this effort to strike a blow against the slave system with the Declaration, and the evident bitterness when that effort failed, factor into Thomas Jefferson’s overall legacy on the issue of slavery? This is a question that is still being debated and no doubt will be for decades to come. Numerous people were enslaved by Thomas Jefferson to work his land. His relationship with one of them, Sally Hemings, has been well studied. His view of people of color in general was certainly not especially enlightened, and even in the draft passage denouncing the slave trade he argued they have been “obtruded”—imposed—onto the white colonists by the King’s voracious economic appetite. This was a rhetorical stretch to say the least. Nobody was “obtruding” enslaved workers onto Jefferson at Monticello—nobody was forcing him to keep them in bondage.
Dr. William Rasmussen of the Virginia Historical Society writes that “Jefferson’s relationship with slavery was torturous as he wrestled with this evil for all of his adult life.”6 His efforts to dilute its effect continued well after his work on the Declaration—as a member of Congress in 1784 he was narrowly defeated in an effort to keep slavery out of new states admitted to the Union.7
That failure came back to haunt him in 1820 during the debate over whether Missouri should enter the Union as a free or slave state. “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” Jefferson wrote then. “We have the wolf by the ear,” he said of the slavery question, “and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” With his talk of “self-preservation,” Jefferson was expressing his fear that black people, if freed from slavery, would turn on the whites who had oppressed them for so long, because the slave system had continued unchecked. He saw the free state versus slave state debate as “the knell of the Union,” and tragically observed: “I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of ’76, to acquire self government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.”8
The Union did not dissolve in Jefferson’s lifetime, but the slavery question did indeed tear it asunder a few decades later. In the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln invoked Jefferson’s words at Gettysburg, reflecting that our nation was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and that this war was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It has endured, and it will continue to do so as long as we remain dedicated to its founding principles. One American who understood that was Frederick Douglass, who had experienced the worst of America as a slave before claiming his God-given freedom and becoming a leading abolitionist. Asked to give a Fourth of July speech in 1852, he delivered a surprising assessment to his largely white audience. “What have I,” he asked, “or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” His answer, of course, was no, and he proclaimed: “This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”9
But despite all that, Douglass felt that the simple truths in the Declaration of Independence would be the tools with which true freedom would be eventually extended to all. Later in the speech, he called the Declaration “the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny.” “The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles,” he said. “Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”
He ended with a powerful prediction that days of slavery in America were numbered. “While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”10 Douglass expressed his confidence that the timeless principles of the Declaration, solidly grounding the technological and cultural advances brought about by American ingenuity and changing times, would clear the path to freedom.
And so they did, but it took time. In some ways, this is reminiscent of the simple prayer popularly attributed to St. Augustine: “God, make me good, but not yet.” As St. Augustine understood that individual humans need time to develop into more moral and better—but never perfect—versions of themselves, so perhaps Jefferson understood that American society needed time to shed the immoral fetters of slavery. By attempting to mitigate the slave trade in the original Declaration, Jefferson expressed a will to start the process earlier than it would have otherwise.
And yet, there remains an undeniable tension between what the Founders believed and the way they lived. Modern minds remain boggled by the fact that Jefferson could write about the equal rights of man while his fellow human beings—wholly owned by himself and his family—worked without pay back at Monticello. Think what a shining example Jefferson might have set had he freed his slaves—or even if, upon his death, he had made provisions for their eventual freedom, as Washington did. He would have shown the superiority of the moral argument against slavery over the soulless economic argument in favor of it. Instead, the tension between moral and economic forces increased over nearly another century before they exploded into bloody war. Had more of our society been guided by conscience rather than by profit, perhaps the slave system would have been abolished earlier and the Civil War avoided.
But sometimes the generation that sparks a monumental change will not be the one to carry it out. Change sometimes depends upon generations that come after. Courage is required in the moment, however, to set the course that other generations can follow to eventually fulfill their promise. By expressing his disapprobation of the slave trade, and enshrining what Frederick Douglass called the “saving principles” of our society in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson set that course for future generations of Americans.
Before the new nation could continue on this course, however, it had to fight to keep from being reabsorbed into the British Empire. Across the Atlantic Ocean, His Majesty King George III was incensed at his subjects’ disloyalty to the Crown and personal insult to himself. He was not about to lose his American colonies without a fight.