![]() To call slavery a “cruel war against human nature itself” may have accurately reflected the values of many of the founders, but it also underscored the paradox between what they said and what they did. The committee which drafted the Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Northern shipping merchants, who also played a role in that economy, remained dependent on the triangle trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas that included the traffic of enslaved Africans. Southern plantations, a key engine of the colonial economy, needed free labor to produce tobacco, cotton and other cash crops for export back to Europe. While the 13 colonies were already deeply divided on the issue of slavery, both the South and the North had financial stakes in perpetuating it. The removal was mostly fueled by political and economic expediencies. Between July 1 and July 3, congressional delegates debated the document, during which time they excised Jefferson’s anti-slavery clause. What is known is that the 33-year-old Jefferson, who composed the Declaration between 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. The exact circumstances of the passage’s removal may never be known the historical record doesn't include details of the debates undertaken by the Second Continental Congress. Thomas Jefferson reading the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence to Benjamin Franklin. That omission would create a legacy of exclusion for people of African descent that engendered centuries of struggle over basic human and civil rights. So while Jefferson is credited with infusing the Declaration with Enlightenment-derived ideals of freedom and equality, the nation’s founding document-its moral mission statement-would remain forever silent on the issue of slavery. The passage was cut from the final wording. What isn’t widely known, however, is that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, in an early version of the Declaration, drafted a 168-word passage that condemned slavery as one of the many evils foisted upon the colonies by the British crown. By underpinning America’s nascent economy with the brutal institution of chattel slavery, they deprived roughly one-fifth of the population of their own “inalienable” right to liberty. ![]() Critics, however, saw a glaring contradiction: Many of the colonists who sought freedom from British tyranny themselves bought and sold human beings. With its soaring rhetoric about all men being “created equal,” the Declaration of Independence gave a powerful voice to the values behind the American Revolution.
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