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.
Isn’t this the paragraph that led to the big stink between John Adams and Edward Rutledge in the last part of the play/movie “1776”?
And yet, he penned the words that contributed to the demise of slavery in the United States. So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Never saw that one..................
We are so lucky to have people like Glenn Beck actively going after & preserving this kind of information. I remember an episode when he was bidding for an item against a person who’s only interest was to destroy something that proved a certain faction wrong.
That may well be, but the fact is, they did vote to include those phrases, probably knowing that South Carolina and Georgia were going to vote to exclude them anyway and that would give them cover.
Politicians have ever been politicians. Then and today.
good. but, even this poor history teacher is infected with the bias of his academe. he can’t quite bring himself to let go of every lie about Jefferson. these people on the left, and some ignorant Christians who call themselves conservative, have mis-construed his views and even slandered Tho. Jefferson for centuries.
so no, he was not a deist, he was a believer in Jesus; no he didn’t rewrite his ‘own’ Bible; or blaspheme God. no, he, just as Geo. Washingtion was not, was not an advocate of slavery; no he didn’t advocate for the strict two-way separation or wall between church and state.
just a simple read of ‘his Bible’ (which was a magnificent excerpt of the moral teaching of Jesus Christ for use in training the heathen of America), imbued with the Spirit of God throughout, was enough to convince me of his belief in God.
The smallest tweak of reality could do so much for this country. How many black school kids ever learn the first man killed in the American Revolution was Crispus Attucks, a black man, former slave who was on the colonists side at the Boston Massacre? No kid learns about Dorie Miller, George Washington Carver, Booker T Washington and other towering giants.
So many good stories to tell, but the world wants them to be angry victims with a grudge.
As a side note, I recently read that the first slaves into the New World to work on the sugar plantations were Irish. Apparently the Crown didn’t like them.
Thank God they included the Bill of Rights. Had Hamilton prevailed, imagine life today without it. The DC Government wouldn’t even pretend we had rights today.
Agree entirely.
The people today who decry our country for an institution that the GOP ended some 160 years ago, one that enslaved black people, applaud a practice today that kills black babies.
“Anyway, it would have been nice if the Founders had devised a plan to slowly phase out slavery.”
They did. An Amendment process. Also, at the time of the revolution, the critical thing was to unify against the horrifying power of England. It is as though we were facing a space alien threat and we HAD to come to an agreement with China and and Russia to face them together. Trade agreements can wait for later in the face of an existential threat.
Not exactly “unearthed”. Well known; I’ve known about it forever
Bookmark.
Exactly.
The people who control what students learn about in school threw their lot in with the likes of the putrid W.E.B Dubois, a leeching student of Marx who thought more victimhood and protesting was the answer rather than the hardworking Booker T. Washington who thought the best inroads for blacks to achieve equality was to engage in commerce, and to do it well.
Booker T. Washington accurately saw that if they could provide products and services that were valuable, people would buy and use them regardless of the color of the skin of those offering them.
So those people who decide how and what students are taught are Leftists themselves, and venerate the likes of Dubois and ignore Washington.
Sad but true.
The draft was reviewed and edited by the Committee of Five (Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston) and then debated by the full Congress from July 1–4, 1776. This clause was one of about 86 changes made to Jefferson’s original text.
Delegates from Southern colonies (like South Carolina and Georgia), where slavery was a cornerstone of the economy, strongly opposed it. They saw it as a direct attack on their livelihoods and feared it would fracture the fragile unity needed for independence. Northern delegates with ties to the slave trade (e.g., in shipping) also objected.
The primary goal was to achieve unanimous approval from all 13 colonies. Jefferson later noted in his autobiography that this section was struck out “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia” and some Northern merchants. John Adams defended the removal, arguing it was necessary to avoid derailing the Declaration entirely.
Booker T already saw the Sharptons, Jacksons, Jasmine Crocketts, Maxine Waters etc. He saw them 100 years ago for what thy were.
“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”
― Booker T. Washington, My Larger Education
I know. It is puzzling that they refuse to see that, or they do see it and choose to ignore it.
I believe they DO see it and ignore it, which sets up even more cognitive dissonance in their pea-sized logic portion of their brains.
It is one reason I am proud and grateful to be a conservative. We attempt as often as possible to build our framework of logic on a supporting foundation that is cohesive and falls together.
The Left has a faulty foundation, and their framework, instead of falling together, falls apart under scrutiny.
Your thing ping.
There is no proof that Thomas Jefferson ever, as you put it, ‘banged’ a slave.
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