The Declaration of Independence - Slavery Passage
This excerpt was part of Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence. It would be eventually cut from the finalized version of the Declaration of Independence that was agreed upon by the Continental Congress. It was replaced by the section that talks about King George III’s “incitement of domestic insurrections against us.”
While reading the excerpt, think about how you would answer the following question: Why would Thomas Jefferson have to get rid of this part of the Declaration of Independence for everyone in the Continental Congress to agree on voting yes to the document?
"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, 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 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, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
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