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An Omission from the Declaration

Thomas Jefferson, who in 1801 became the third President of the United States, was born in Virginia of a slave-holding family and himself owned slaves. But he was a cultivated man whose political convictions were influenced by his study of the great liberal philosophers, Rousseau, Locke and Montesquieu.

As chairman of the committee which drafted the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote into his first rough draft a paragraph condemning human bondage in which he denounced George III for his propagation of slavery in the colonies and said of the English sovereign:

[hand-written manuscript with first portions struck through and overlaid with the following text] 
"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 and 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 and 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 face of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which He 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."

But slavery was too profitable a business in the colonies, and this paragraph was not acceptable to the Southern delegation. It was omitted from the final version of the Declaration as adopted by the Continental Congress of the United States on July 4, 1776. So, from the beginnings of the new nation's history, the voteless Negro bondsman influenced the policies and documents of the new republic.
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