- Joined
- Mar 7, 2009
OK but, did the signers of the DOE ever say anything like "hey, we're doing this because King George represents a clear and present danger to slavery"? It seems fine to say "we want to govern ourselves" but maybe not so admirable to say "we want to govern ourselves because you guys might take our slaves away".
As a matter of fact they did -- although the final version eliminated it -- but not in the way the Southern states of the secession winter did:
"[H]e 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 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. 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, by 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."
On June 28, 1776 Jefferson's draft of the "Declaration" was presented to Congress and on July 1, Lee's resolution came back up for debate and a vote. Lee's resolution of independence was passed the following day, July 2, 1776 but debate continued on Jefferson's "Declaration." The debate apparently centered around Jefferson's references to slavery in the document and approximately 20% of the text was revised:
"After voting on the Lee resolution, the congress moved immediately to a consideration of Jefferson's draft. In committee-of-the-whole format the delegates spent two days making editorial changes that revised or deleted about 20 percent of the text. They found Jefferson a bit wordy for their taste, some of his language too florid or sentimental, and insisted on removing any reference to the slave trade or slavery itself, even when Jefferson blamed it all on George III. Mostly they focused on the latter two-thirds of the document, the lengthy list of grievances against the king. They cared most about that section because the whole point of the Declaration was to justify independence, which depended upon demonstrating in one conclusive indictment that George III had betrayed their trust."
American Creation, Joseph J. Ellis, pg. 55