Thomas Jefferson helped to create a new nation based on individual freedom and self-government. His words in the Declaration of Independence expressed the aspirations of the new nation. But the Declaration did not extend “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” to African Americans, indentured servants, or women. 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 Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment―to end slavery. Show Early in his life, Jefferson was exposed to the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, who stressed that liberty and equality were natural human
rights, drew upon their philosophy when he wrote the Declaration of Independence Jefferson spent much of his life wrestling with and proposing various solutions to this national problem. But slavery was not abolished, and he remained a slaveholder throughout his life. Slavery made the world Thomas Jefferson knew. Though he came to abhor slavery, his livelihood depended on it. Jefferson was one of the first statesmen anywhere to take action to end slavery. Yet, after 1785, he was publicly silent on the issue. Education | Politics and government | Research | UW and the community February 25, 2016  The latest installment of Information School professor Joe Janes’ podcast series Documents that Changed the World discusses the 168 powerful words condemning slavery that were removed from the Declaration of Independence. In his Documents that Changed the World podcast series, University of Washington Information School professor Joe Janes explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents, both famous and less known. But in his latest installment, Janes might make you wonder how differently American history might have unfolded, had 168 powerful words not been excised from the Declaration of Independence at the last minute. “I wanted to tell the story of the passage itself and the great void its absence left,” said Janes, “and dig a little deeper into the process of its removal by the Second Continental Congress in 1776 and how little we know about it.” 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 Great Britain,” and his participation in and perpetuation of the slave trade. “Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold,” the lost passage continues, “he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.” In his podcast, Janes takes the listener through what’s known — and still unknown — about the removal of the passage, which was but one of dozens of edits to the Declaration. Jefferson himself, years later, claimed the words were “struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves.” Janes, long interested in doing an episode on the idea of deletion, was reading the website Blackpast.org when he was reminded of the lines cut from the Declaration. The site, the creation of UW history professor Quintard Taylor, is a 13,000-page online reference center dedicated to providing information on African-American history, “and on the history of the more than one billion people of African ancestry around the world.” Janes also notes Jefferson’s own “deeply conflicted position” on the subject, as the founding father owned 180 slaves at the time, and 87 more by 1822 — none of whom were freed upon his death. “There are few clean hands here,” Janes writes; “at least a third of the signers (of the Declaration) were slaveholders and even in northern states abolition was gradual.” He said, “It’s not an original thought, but it has always struck me as a dark bargain: Leave the clause in and the Declaration fails (though perhaps not independence itself; that was agreed to two days earlier), take it out and it succeeds but at the cost of a quarter of a millennium of kicking the can down the road — as we still are today.” The Documents that Changed the World podcast series is also available on iTunes, where it has now passed a quarter of a million downloads so far. ### For more about this or any of the Documents that Changed the World podcasts, contact Janes at . Previous installments of the “Documents that Changed the World” series
Tag(s): Blackpast.org • Documents that Changed the World • Information School • Joe Janes • Quintard Taylor Did the Declaration of Independence mention slavery?The existence of American slavery at that time is well known to all of us, yet the Founding Fathers did not acknowledge it in the published document. In fact, Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration did recognize the issue of slavery.
What did the Declaration of Independence do for slaves?His words in the Declaration of Independence expressed the aspirations of the new nation. But the Declaration did not extend “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” to African Americans, indentured servants, or women. Twelve of the first eighteen American presidents owned slaves.
What did the original draft of the Declaration of Independence included?We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, ...
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Original draft of the declaration of independence slavery
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