First draft of Declaration: abolish slavery

[smithers599]

In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, among the list of complaints against England, Jefferson included a call for the abolition of slavery. (Because that's what racists do, right?) However, approval of the Declaration required unanimous consent by all 13 colonies. Georgia refused, so it was 12-1. Jefferson was forced to delete that section. How many people know those white racist colonies voted 12-1 to abolish slavery?

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html

for suspending our own legislatures & declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever:

he has abdicated government here, withdrawing his governors, & declaring us out of his allegiance & protection:

he has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns & destroyed the lives of our people:

he is at this time transporting large armies of foreign merce naries to compleat the works of death, desolation & tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty & perfidy unworthy the head of a civilized nation:

he has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence:

he has incited treasonable insurrections in our fellow-subjects, with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation of our property:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its 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.

 

[Pinetop]

Thanks for posting this Smithers.

This was certainly news to me.....but then I grew up and went to high school in California. What a terrible shame that Georgia did not bend to the wishes of the other 12 colonies.

Pinetop

 

[Pinetop]

Thanks for posting this Smithers.

This was certainly news to me.....but then I grew up and went to high school in California. What a terrible shame that Georgia did not bend to the wishes of the other 12 colonies.

Pinetop

 

[smithers599]

Clarification:

https://www.history.com/news/declaration-of-independence-deleted-anti-slavery-clause-jefferson

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, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, for edits ahead of its presentation to Congress. Between July 1 and July 3, congressional delegates debated the document, during which time they excised Jefferson’s anti-slavery clause.

The removal was mostly fueled by political and economic expediencies. While the 13 colonies were already deeply divided on the issue of slavery, both the South and the North had financial stakes in perpetuating it. Southern plantations, a key engine of the colonial economy, needed free labor to produce tobacco, cotton and other cash crops for export back to Europe. Northern shipping merchants, who also played a role in that economy, remained dependent on the triangle trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas that included the traffic of enslaved Africans.

"The clause...reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in compliance 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. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under these censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”