You are then interpreting the alleged silence of 11 other slave state reps as promoting your anti-slavery message, when that interpretation stretches credibility.
You are also equating an opposition to further importation of slaves as the same as opposition to slavery in general.
You are painting your own views onto the faces of those long ago dead reps, and doing so without presenting any evidence (beyond their silence) that this is what they thought.
Not very objective thinking you present here.
It is ridiculous to think that representatives of the 11 other slave states would be fine with verbiage portraying themselves as bad people. This runs contrary to human nature, and in any case, they agreed to remove the language, so that says a lot more about what they thought than Jefferson's assertion as to what happened.
"You are also equating an opposition to further importation of slaves as the same as opposition to slavery in general."
I can't help what early abolitionists wrote. But it is clear that the problem is with me because I don't disregard original sources.
"It is ridiculous to think that representatives of the 11 other slave states would be fine with verbiage portraying themselves as bad people.
It's ridiculous to think that there were 11 of them who would've taken issue with it in any way. There were easily 4 of them that were attempting to get rid of slaving only to be met with a big fat no from the crown, especially when that clause made it clear that the King was the villain. Who knows how many saw the crown vetoing and realized they had no point to go down that road if the law would be denied or unenforced anyway.
This is what I mean about you failing to commit things to memory, unless it's CW trivia. That's alright. Just don't try to convince me you have all this massive love and respect for the Founding of the country when you're treating it like a salad bar.
You have too big of an investment in the Critical Race Theory version of history.
Jefferson's passage may have been regarded as too inflammatory and too likely to lose the revolution support even (or especially) in Jefferson's Virginia. Delegates may also have thought that blaming George III for slavery and the slave trade was going too far and ultimately nonsensical. Some might have disliked the implied threat to the slave trade in the passage, but there were many other possible grounds for objection.
And there were other changes presented to the draft. Maybe they were all presented together in an "omnibus" motion and people who had no objection to the slavery passage voted for the motion because it included other changes that they thought were important.
The Committee of the Five didn't take the condemnation of the slave trade out, but they may have toned it down a bit. Here is Jefferson's original "rough draught":
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & 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 to 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, & 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.
That made slavery and the slave trade more prominent a part of the document than it was in the draft submitted by the Five. It would have opened up the Congress to bitter and counterproductive debates. The objections of Adams, Franklin, Livingston, and Sherman were likely to the language and prominence of the passage. Their objections weren't strong enough to have them entirely delete Jefferson's condemnation of the king for enslaving Africans.
Jefferson's verbiage put the blame on the king and his ministers. It didn't portray his fellow delegates or fellow colonists as bad people. The Founders didn't think of themselves in that way. Jefferson didn't think of himself that way either. The Founders were doing what they thought was right and focusing on what was necessary at the time, but they articulated a general principle that had other applications as well as the immediate one, and many went on to act on that principle in their own states.
Secessionists claimed that the Continental Congress didn't mean Africans or slaves when it asserted that men had a right to liberty. I'd say that the Founders were thinking of themselves, and they meant "us," the colonists, but the Declaration didn't explicitly exclude Africans or slaves. It articulated a general truth that was true for other peoples around the world and true for slaves at home.
Jefferson and the Continental Congress didn't have to invoke a universal principle to declare their independence. They could haver relied on their rights as British subjects, or specifically restricted rights to White, property owning, English-speakers, or explicitly excluded Blacks or slaves from having any rights. They didn't. They asserted a general principle and people would have to work out who it applied to.