People today do not understand how slavery was perceived by the majority of our Founders. They knew they could not overturn the institution overnight. It was so deeply planted in our soil that it would require being torn out by the roots at a later date. So, adding a few words about it in the Declaration would have had no effect. Thomas Jefferson's first draft tells what he really thought about it.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE DEBATE OVER SLAVERY
(Summary) When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776. Jefferson's passage on slavery was the most important section removed from the final document. It was replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George's incitement of "domestic insurrections among us." Decades later Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Jefferson's original passage on slavery appears below:
"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 & 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 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 on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
Sources:
Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and other Writings, Official and Private (Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Maury, 1853-1854).
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Excellent work, Slyfox! I will use this in the future!
I beg to differ. It had an immediate effect in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 (began in 1775) adopted a variation on Jefferson's words by asserting
"All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness."
Jefferson's words inspired this sentiment in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.
Once the 1780 Massachusetts constitution was approved, activists immediately brought suit on behalf of slaves by arguing that the Massachusetts constitution, by the usage of those words, freed them from bondage.
The Courts agreed. Other states then had the same sorts of lawsuits brought on the same basis, but they were not quite so successful with this approach in states such as Pennsylvania, where they lost.
Never the less, Jefferson's words almost singlehandedly kicked off the abolition movement. They pointed out the hypocrisy between this founding sentiment and the enslavement of people.
Jefferson's words lit the match of abolition.
Imagine that, Jefferson sucumbed to bipartisanship or the nation would have been hopelessly divided with factions switching to the King, and liberals would blame him for that....