Everyone knows the Declaration of Independence: the iconic document that illustrated, in the most eloquent rhetoric, the proclamation of ideas that built the United States. By the same token, very few of us know what the Declaration was supposed to mean. In “American Scripture,” Pauline Maiers analyses the Declaration itself and discusses citizens’ veneration of the text. According to Maiers, Jefferson wrote a draft of the Declaration, but Congress had a significant role in the final wording of the document. Furthermore, the last draft Congress created changed a considerable number of Jefferson’s original statements and deleted an entire paragraph calling for the abolition of slavery. My discovery of this missing passage prompted me to ask, what was it that Jefferson wanted to declare? Was the Declaration changed due to Jefferson’s reasoning or by Congressional omission? Furthermore, how did bowdlerization of the Declaration impact the history of our nation? Such puzzling topics call American citizens to take a closer look at the morals the United States was founded upon.
The missing section regarding the slave trade was initially found in the list of grievances against King George III. The adjacent image from nypl.org shows the draft of this passage.
The passage reads, “He [the king of Britain] 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” (nypl.org). From my reading, Jefferson believes without a doubt that slavery must be abolished to preserve the liberties of all human beings. Furthermore, Jefferson believed that slavery was the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation. If Jefferson abhorred slavery, how could he list King George III’s oppressive rule of the colonies while simultaneously being an oppressor of slaves?
After investigating further, I discovered a critical puzzle piece in the full picture of the Declaration’s hidden passage: Jefferson himself was a slaveowner. With this in mind, perhaps Jefferson feared the possible backfire that would result from him acting upon his beliefs. After all, his views were quite radical at a time when slave labor was the social norm. At the same time, Jefferson may have grown accustomed to this way of life and chose to preserve economic stability instead of promoting positive change. In the Smithsonian Magazine, historian David Brion Davis exclaims, “In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide. The only asset more valuable than the black people was the land itself” (Smithsonian Magazine). In this context, economic stability seems a likely cause for Jefferson to put his moral values on the back-burner.
To continue, I questioned the significance of the omitted passage. Historian John Chester Miller puts its value in context, stating, “The inclusion of Jefferson’s strictures on slavery and the slave trade would have committed the United States to the abolition of slavery” (Smithsonian magazine). Miller displays with shocking clarity the historic change that would have occurred if the omitted passage had remained in the Declaration. Such statements provoke Americans to ask themselves, what would America be like today if the passage was never omitted? Would we still come face to face with such daunting civil rights issues like police brutality and riots?
At this stage in my research, it became difficult for me to refrain from labeling Jefferson as a hypocrite. While Jefferson saw that slavery violated the “inalienable rights” he was declaring, his actions told a different story. Davis suggests, “The most remarkable thing about Jefferson’s stand on slavery is his immense silence.” And later, Davis finds, Jefferson’s emancipation efforts “virtually ceased” (Smithsonian Magazine).
On my interpretation, Jefferson recognized that he could not be economically successful without slavery. By drawing this conclusion, Jefferson and the committee decided to omit the passage in the Declaration that challenged the social norm. On this note, Jefferson said to John Holmes in 1820, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Conversely, Jefferson could have likely given up his goal to abolish slavery due to the political barriers that stood in his way: On July 2, 1776, the members of the Continental Congress edited the draft of the Declaration for three days, removing “Jefferson’s more outlandish assertions and unnecessary words” (American Scripture). Here, Pauline Meiers shows how the final wording of the Declaration was out of Jefferson’s control. Despite this, the editing of the Declaration of Independence promoted systemic hypocrisy and left the document riddled with inconsistency.
Sources
Maier, Pauline. American Scripture. The Easton Press, 1997.
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/07/02/closer-look-jeffersons-declaration
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/
https://psychlopedia.wikispaces.com/Cognitive+dissonance
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/
https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/wolf-ear-quotation
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/american-scripture-by-pauline-maier/
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1324
21st Century Citizenship 