We know it was a majority. I seem to recall everyone on the committee of five was against including such inflammatory commentary in the document. It benefited them not at all, and alienated states they would need.
But that Jefferson wrote it and most of the delegates don't seem to have objected indicates that many of the Founders were well aware of the contradiction between slavery and the "most sacred rights of life & liberty."
Well they had Jefferson right there telling them this, but this does not mean that the representatives of the states, or the people of those states had given it any thought until well after the Declaration had been written and signed.
Yes, the committee of five were well aware of Jefferson's view on the issue of slavery, but they also understood the concept of what Lincoln said many years later. "One war at a time."
Their goal was to gain independence, not become embroiled in a philosophical fight that would wreck their chances of independence.
"The principle of self-determination" is an idea whose content and limits have to be worked out by people as new cases come up. If the Founders did not believe that enslaved people had the right to self-determination, then it's already clear that they believed that that principle had its limits.
The ideas of self determination were derived from previous essays on natural law, and many learned men of the time saw the one consequence to be the natural descendant of the original postulates about natural law, as outlined by people like Rutherford, Locke and so forth.
They didn't give much thought of it applying to these people that had been brought to North America from a land they all considered to be backward, savage, and barbaric.
But I don't think you're being serious. The Founders had one thing to worry about: winning independence from Britain.
You don't think i'm serious about this? This is exactly the thing I am serious about. They weren't pondering the philosophy of equality with slaves, they were writing a justification for separating from England, and that is *ALL* they were trying to do.
And for this reason I say citing 1776 and the phrase "all men are created equal" is an attempt to redefine the purpose of the Declaration to be something it was never intended to be.
I.E. Dishonest.
They weren't going to jeopardize that by pursuing other goals
You gotta be kidding me.
Yes, they would very greatly jeopardize that by pursuing any criticism of slavery. The Southern states had to be cajoled into joining the effort to gain independence, because they were relatively satisfied remaining under British rule. It was only through the efforts of Francis Marion provoking the British to run roughshod over the peoples of these states that ever convinced the Southern states to go along with efforts at independence.
I've seen the debates on the slavery issue in the US Constitution, and they flat out admit that if they made an issue of it, there would be no Union, and the British would quickly conquer the un-unified Union.
The Northern representatives *SAID* so, and words to the effect that it would be better to have a Union with slavery, than no Union at all.
I might even be able to find a link to this discussion, but so too might you.
No, the 1776 people did *NOT* want to focus on anything but the single necessity of separating from Britain. Touching slavery in the states where it was profitable at the time would be like touching the third rail of the subway system.
Nobody was dumb enough to do that, except perhaps slave owning Jefferson from a slave owning state. :)
But for two passages in the Committee of Five's draft that were rejected by the Committee of the Whole the work was accepted without any other major changes. One was a critical reference to the English people and the other was a denunciation of the slave trade and of slavery itself.
In other words, the five might have thought the passage ill-advised, but they left it in the draft they submitted to the whole Continental Congress, "the Committee of the Whole."
I don't know how the Continental Congress made its decisions or how the debate went. Do we have anything more that Jefferson's sentence or two about why the passage was removed? He was not without an ax to grind in his later years. Did all the Virginians really agree with him? Were the Northerners who opposed the passage really more concerned about the slave trade than about keeping South Carolina and Georgia in the union? Do we know?
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What the Founders were trying to do in the immediate situation and what they believed, or came to believe, weren't necessarily the same thing. I said that you aren't being serious because you take the immediate concern of the Founders as the whole of their thinking on the subject of human rights, liberty, and equality.
Lincoln has been attacked by modern historians for not being poetic or philosophical in the Emancipation Proclamation. Richard Hofstadter said that the Proclamation "had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading." But the Emancipation Proclamation was intended to fulfill a specific purpose. It's similar for the Constitution. The Declaration was a little more than that. As well as breaking with England and making the case for independence, Jefferson was being philosophical and stating general truths in an exalted and elevated way. You can't just throw that whole side of the Declaration away.
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Can you really say that Jefferson was willing to free the slaves in 1776? He wasn't even willing to free his own slaves when he died 50 years later. But other delegates went back to their states and drafted emancipation laws and emancipation plans. It's true that they didn't want to share the government or the country with large number of African-Americans, but they did take the Declaration's message about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to heart.