what two reasons does hammond give to why slavery should continue
With its soaring rhetoric about all men beingness "created equal," the Announcement of Independence gave a powerful voice to the values behind the American Revolution. Critics, nonetheless, saw a glaring contradiction: Many of the colonists who sought freedom from British tyranny themselves bought and sold human beings. By underpinning America's nascent economy with the fell institution of chattel slavery, they deprived roughly one-fifth of the population of their own "inalienable" right to liberty.
What isn't widely known, withal, is that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, in an early version of the Declaration, drafted a 168-word passage that condemned slavery as i of the many evils foisted upon the colonies by the British crown. The passage was cut from the final wording.
Then while Jefferson is credited with infusing the Declaration with Enlightenment-derived ideals of liberty and equality, the nation's founding document—its moral mission statement—would remain forever silent on the issue of slavery. That omission would create a legacy of exclusion for people of African descent that engendered centuries of struggle over basic human and civil rights.
READ MORE: ix Things Y'all May Not Know Most the Declaration of Independence
What the deleted passage said
In his initial draft, Jefferson blamed Britain's King George for his office in creating and perpetuating the transatlantic slave trade—which he describes, in and then many words, equally a criminal offence against humanity.
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 decease in their transportation thither.
Jefferson went on to call the institution of slavery "piratical warfare," "execrable commerce" and an "assemblage of horrors." He and then criticized the crown for
"exciting those very people to rise in artillery amidst us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off quondam crimes committed confronting the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit confronting the lives of another."
This passage refers to a 1775 proclamation by Britain's Lord Dunmore, which offered liberty to any enslaved person in the American colonies who volunteered to serve in the British ground forces against the patriots' revolt. The proclamation inspired thousands of enslaved people to seek liberty behind British lines during the Revolutionary War.
READ MORE: The Ex-Slaves Who Fought with the British
Why was the Declaration's anti-slavery passage removed?
Thomas Jefferson reading the rough draft of the Announcement of Independence to Benjamin Franklin.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
The exact circumstances of the passage's removal may never be known; the historical tape doesn't include details of the debates undertaken by the 2nd Continental Congress. What is known is that the 33-year-former Jefferson, who composed the Declaration betwixt 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 three, congressional delegates debated the document, during which fourth dimension they excised Jefferson's anti-slavery clause.
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The removal was mostly fueled by political and economic expediencies. While the 13 colonies were already securely divided on the effect of slavery, both the Southward and the Northward had financial stakes in perpetuating it. Southern plantations, a key engine of the colonial economy, needed costless labor to produce tobacco, cotton fiber and other greenbacks crops for consign dorsum to Europe. Northern shipping merchants, who besides played a function in that economy, remained dependent on the triangle trade betwixt Europe, Africa and the Americas that included the traffic in enslaved Africans.
READ More than: How Slavery Became the Economic Engine of the South
Decades later, in his autobiography, Jefferson primarily blamed two Southern states for the clause's removal, while acknowledging the Northward's role besides.
"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 opposite still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren as well I believe felt a little tender under these censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, notwithstanding they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."
Many in Congress had a vested interest
The commission which drafted the Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston and John Adams.
MPI/Getty Images
To call slavery a "cruel war against human being nature itself" may have accurately reflected the values of many of the founders, but it too underscored the paradox betwixt what they said and what they did. Jefferson, subsequently all, had been tasked with writing a document to reflect the interests of an assemblage of slave-owning colonies with a profound commercial involvement in preserving the merchandise in human beings. I tertiary of the Declaration'due south signers were personally enslavers and even in the Northward, where abolition was more than widely favored, states passed "gradual emancipation" laws designed to slowly stage out the practice.
Jefferson himself had a complicated relationship to the "peculiar institution." Despite his philosophical abhorrence of slavery and his ongoing legislative efforts to abolish the practice, Jefferson over his lifetime enslaved more than 600 people—including his own children with his enslaved concubine Sally Hemings. On his death in 1826, Jefferson, long plagued with debt, chose to free v of the human beings he claimed as property in his lifetime.
READ More: How Emerge Hemings and Other Enslaved People Secured Precious Pockets of Freedom
Such conflicts didn't go unnoticed. How was it possible, wrote British essayist Samuel Johnson at the start of the state of war, "that nosotros hear the loudest yelps for liberty amid the drivers of Negroes?" American loyalist and old governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson echoed these sentiments in his "Strictures Upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia":
"I could wish to ask the Delegates of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, how their constituents justify the depriving more than a hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in some caste to their lives, if these rights are then admittedly unalienable…."
The legacy of a foundational omission
The signers ultimately replaced the deleted clause with a passage highlighting King George's incitement of "domestic insurrections among usa," 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 testify the most significant deletion from the Declaration of Independence. The founders' failure to directly address the question of slavery exposed the hollowness of the words "all men created equal." Yet, the underlying ideals of freedom and equality expressed in the document have inspired generations of Americans to struggle to obtain their inalienable rights.
Source: https://www.history.com/news/declaration-of-independence-deleted-anti-slavery-clause-jefferson
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