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The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. For this reason, those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence. The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many. Riker, 1853).Ĭongress proceeded the same day to consider the Declaration of Independence, which had been reported and lain on the table the Friday preceding, and on Monday referred to a committee of the whole. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by H. While Jefferson’s original draft relegated the parts inserted by Congress to the margin, we italicize them and place them within brackets in the body of the text. We have relied on that edition here, including Jefferson’s explanatory note, and underlining, as Jefferson did, the parts of the Declaration deleted by Congress. Riker, 1853), which was authorized for publication in 1853 by Congress.
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This memoir is found in the nine-volume collection, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by H. In Jefferson’s notes on the debate in Congress over the Declaration, he gives a short account of how his draft of the Declaration was amended, afterwards recopying that first draft to show what he originally proposed.
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As Jefferson’s notes (below) report, northern delegates also smarted under the censure of slavery because “tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” We suggest that the inclusion of such an indictment would have had a profound impact on the continuing American conversation about rights. However, in order not to offend the sensibilities of the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina, the Congress elected to omit Jefferson’s denunciation of slavery from the final declaration. The Second Continental Congress received a draft of the Declaration from Jefferson that made the British rejection of the petition submitted by the First Continental Congress to end the slave trade one of the grounds for severing ties. Nowhere were the novel, and transcendental, implications of the Declaration so visible as in Jefferson’s attempt to include a denunciation of slavery.