Posted on 10/14/2025 11:34:17 AM PDT by Red Badger
Blaze Media pioneer Glenn Beck has apparently been sharing this unearthed paragraph since at least 2020, but I heard it for the first time just days ago.
It's a passage Thomas Jefferson wrote for a draft of the Declaration of Independence - a paragraph I have never encountered. Given that I've taught U.S. History and Government for two decades, that fact stuns me as much as it embarrasses and frustrates me.
Every year, I've made my government students memorize the Declaration's preamble - those immortal words about all men being endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - as a requirement to pass my class.
But this paragraph? I'd never even read it.
Here are Jefferson's banished words about the slave trade:
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He (King George III) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its 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.
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Those aren't the words of a man indifferent to slavery. They are the cry of conscience from someone who recognized its evil for the "cruel war against human nature" it was. This wasn't just a policy criticism, it was an aggressive condemnation of a practice that assailed the very image of God in man.
What's more, Jefferson's accusation was morally piercing.
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This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.
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That is remarkably prescient moral insight and stunning boldness for an 18th-century politician. Jefferson, long caricatured as a disinterested deist, deliberately weaponizes religious language to shame a "Christian" king complicit in the slave trade. His outrage is not merely political, it's moral. He's confronting the British empire's spiritual hypocrisy, revealing that the real corruption lies in a civilization that calls itself Christian while trafficking in human lives.
And he wasn't done:
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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.
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Read that again:
"A market where MEN should be bought and sold." In the original draft, Jefferson capitalized "MEN." In a world where "men" so often meant only landowners or white citizens, Jefferson's emphasis was intentional. He was unequivocally asserting that Africans were men, endowed with the same sacred rights of life and liberty he had already declared "self-evident."
He then closed with a final, haunting sentence:
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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.
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Talk about both prophetic and painful irony. Jefferson was suggesting that moral compromise would always multiply injustice. His words foreshadowed the conflict America herself would face a little less than a century later.
It's fair to acknowledge Jefferson's contradictions. He owned slaves. He struggled against the very evil he condemned. But I'm confident the omission of this paragraph from our public memory isn't about confronting hypocrisy. I believe it's about controlling narrative.
Our modern institutions - from media to academia - have spent decades flattening the Founders into easy villains: elitist, racist white men whose lofty ideals were mere cover for their crimes.
That caricature serves an ideological purpose:
It keeps young Americans from admiring the brilliance and moral wrestling of the men who birthed a free nation, replacing complexity with easy condemnation.
That's why this paragraph - a stunning, soaring moral rebuke of slavery written by one of those "dead white guys" - must remain buried. Because to read it is to admit that Jefferson, for all his flaws, saw and named evil with moral clarity. To acknowledge that truth would complicate the narrative.
Count me as one history teacher who thinks it's high time we do just that. Recovering Jefferson's lost grievance isn't about excusing sin or sanitizing history. It's about reclaiming truth.
It's about offering proof that human beings, and the nations they build, can be both right and wrong, often at the same time.
July 4, 1776 was about justifying our separation from England. It was not meant to be a commentary on the unfairness of the world.
That is all it is remembered for now.
In an effort to start this out with an olive branch I want to say this because it isn't said enough.
This rejected line in the original draft of the declaration is pretty much only relevant due to The 1619 Project.
We would not have to worry about who brought slavery here and who implemented slavery here if The New York Times didn't say the U.S. invented slavery and that the United States is responsible for slavery going back to the U.S.'s actual founding in 1619 and the Founders tried to defend slavery and desperately wanted to keep slavery around.
This whole story line of theirs is so easy to disprove with original sources. It is sad that we who love the Founders are losing the argument. Ask 10 random k12 kids, they all think the U.S. is racist and will state 1619.
Post 1 itself is a history teacher who didn't even know this rejected line was written. That's how badly we're losing to outright lies. The teachers do not know because they too were lied to, and the facts have so few vehicles to come to light.
The Founders did, as colonists.
The king used his veto to prevent its implementation.
That is precisely the story that the rejected line in the Declaration is trying to teach us. That rejected line is trying to teach us that slavery is not the fault of the United States.
Slavery was inherited against our will.
I believe that was Ceasar Rutledge, but the confrontation was with Dickenson from Pennsylvania. I will admit, 1776 was a long time ago and I might be misremembering.
Caesar Rodney was a signer from Delaware.
Edward Rutledge and John Rutledge were from South Carolina. One a signer, the other a framer.
That said, it wasn't just a declaration of independence, though, it was a treatise on injuries and injustice inflicted by the crown and the rational foundation of why the colonists viewed them as injuries and injustices.
They felt it was necessary to justify the declaration.
When one looks at the list of injuries and injustices that are forgotten or viewed differently through the prism of today's world such as sending "swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance", "quartering large bodies of armed troops among us", and constraining "our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country" they seem somewhat obscure to this modern society.
We might understand the "swarms" of officials who take the fruits of our labors from us, but we don't really have any kind of institutional memory or resentment of foreign troops being quartered in our homes against our will, and we most certainly don't understand the impressment of sailors who are forced to fight against their countrymen.
Those kinds of things seem almost quaint and obscure by today's forms of statement.
But the underpinnings and foundation are clearly understood and felt 250 years later. Thinking people can easily absorb this immortal statement:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
It is brilliant, concise, and wonderful to read. But most of all, it is understandable to rational people, even today.
I have to say, DiogenesLamp, that I fully appreciate your discourse on this. You have made me think again about why this document goes hand in hand with our Constitution. It really does. That opening statement, that timeless Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, is something I don't think about every day.
Discussing it rationally with you has made me understand again why I love this country and what it stands for, and renews my desire to do what I can to preserve it.
I thank you for that.
My real name behind the keyboard is not Nikole Hannah-Jones.
We are in an existential crisis. We cannot afford to lose the fight that The 1619 Project created. Our Founding Fathers already won this fight, we just have to follow their lead.
"Race hustler."
You meant to say Abolitionism hustler. But that's alright. I'm not going to join you in being cowardly. You can be a coward alone.
I wrote this guy.
Excellent point, 100%.
To say what? -- capsule summary for your fans?
We created this “original version” of the Declaration as a word-for-word audio book, it was released just two months prior to the publication of The 1619 Project.(Not knowing it was coming)[Though the recording itself was completed probably in the spring]
https://librivox.org/short-nonfiction-collection-vol-066-by-various/
entry number #13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-XJcYxRziE
This full audio is free and open source in the public domain. Being as its part of a collection it is easy to miss its existence and its a good recording.
The Founders meant “In the eyes of God”, not “under the law”.
But since I do own them, I should bang the pretty ones when my wife is away
That accusation against Jefferson has been pretty well de-bunked. It was very likely his brother or another member of the family.
Also, check out my reading and analysis of the Dec, Bill of Rights, Articles of Confederation, and some articles of the Constitution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlA2COo4maE&list=PLfQCIndyMj4_uJmOqRUDze3VMe7f3YKcY&index=5
This was a wonderful video, thank you. The closing section with Limbaugh’s discourse about the price the Signers paid was especially touching.
Our Founders gave so much for us and in return we don’t give back nearly so much to them.
Thanks.
Bumping your post for later reading. Thank you! I appreciate your work.
I'd like to maybe collaborate on a project with you in the future perhaps a little bit after the new year.
I appreciate that you are probably listening to many of these.
Who is your favorite Founding Father who does not yet already have their own free open source audio book? You don't have to immediately answer, perhaps its best if you think about it for a while.(?) This year end is looking hectic but maybe we can leave the door cracked open just a little bit, it can be a "no" at the conclusion.
I would only need around an hour of your time.(no audio) I would be doing the heavy work.
No matter how many times or from which authors I have read of the fates of the Founders, none has brought tears to my eyes until hearing you read those ghastly stories of heroism aloud in that video. Thank you.
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