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.
Sounds like you are confusing the Declaration with the Constitution.
The quoted paragraphs are from the Declaration draft...
Lol, historicism.
I believe that is in the old musical 1776, it’s a part of the debate before ratification and Jefferson is shown scratching out that portion of the Declaration.
Ping!
Hahahaha...this is the kind of thing that makes the give and take in an online discussion confusing.
I was definitely referring to the Declaration. I think where the confusion may have originated was another poster (yulee) at post #12 who described a process where the declaration had to be a unanimous vote, and various passages were voted on.
That wasn’t my recollection, but I made the invisible switch in my response at #17 to the Constitution where elements were voted to include or not, or changed or not, and ran. with it in post #17!
So, I am completely at fault for running with it! My apologies.
My understanding was Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin (mostly Jefferson) worked on the draft of the Declaration, and presented it to all the states to sign off, where it had to be unanimous...
I had to go back through the thread to figure out how I got there!
“The Brit’s simply outlawed slavery and pragmatically bought out the slaveholders. This could have been done in the U.S. but I don’t see where it was seriously considered”
Actually, it was.
Jefferson (and several other Founding Fathers) proposed it.
The American Colonization Society, advocated for compensated emancipation paired with colonization (relocating freed slaves to Africa).
Lincoln proposed multiple bills as a Congressman and then had several “buy-out” plans as president, including for Union slave states, like Delaware.
As the war progressed, these were abandoned.
Not exactly zero evidence. But zero 100% proof. I had forgotten what a deep controversy this was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson%E2%80%93Hemings_controversy
It’s kinda like the brits institutionalized the sme kind of systemthe dems are condescendingly foisting on us with illegal immigrants who do “jobs we wont.” This has veritably the same effect as slavery in that it softens a people and indulges their inclinations towards laziness. In the end, given the left believes we need illegal immigration to keep costs down, the left (the democrats) are continuing their tradition as the party of slavery..
Yes. Right out of their mouths, too.
Up until 1861, they said “Who will pick our cotton?”
Now, they say “Who will clean our hotel rooms?”
Different Times, Same Democrats.
Disgusting.
Thomas Jefferson was a widower and Sally Hemmings was treated like a queen
I’ll split hairs and say that for me to agree that it was “seriously considered” it needed to get beyond the proposal stage. Was unaware of The American Colonization Society. Interesting. I agree it would have been futile to send that large number of people back to Africa. The powerful Abolitionists in the North opposed anything other than freeing all the slaves freed immediately regardless of the consequences and pretty much roadblocked any other solution.
One of my major gripes about modern people's views of the Declaration is that the document has become the "Declaration of all men are created equal."
The focus on this bit of flowery language has overshadowed the actual purpose of the document.
"All men are created equal" seems to be about the only thing most people know about the document, and yet those words could have been left completely out of it without changing it's purpose.
What was its purpose again?
Two other interesting factoids are that high definition scanning and imaging revealed that Jefferson initially wrote the word “subjects” in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence then scratched out and obliterated that word and morphed it, writing the word “citizens” right on top of where it was, and that Washington’s administration checked out a copy of Vattel’s Law of Nations from the New York Public Library, which never got it back until Mount Vernon gifted an original replacement copy to it about ten years ago or so.
If they had done that, abolition would have happened much quicker.
Because England would have remained in control of the colonies, and slavery would have been outlawed by Parliament in the 1830s.
Not really. When the US Government voted for the Corwin amendment in March of 1861, had the South simply remained in the Union, slavery would have likely been permanent.
Yes. The United States government voted for permanent slavery in March of 1861. President Lincoln supported this amendment.
Thanks to Progressing America, I was recently made aware that the Virginia constitution of 1776 specifically mentions they didn't want blacks brought into their communities.
""those very negroes whom, by an inhuman use of his negative, he hath refused us permission to exclude by Law"
It was the slave trade (with New England ships) bringing them into their communities.
This is a point I have made in the past. Just because Jefferson says South Carolina and Georgia objected, it doesn't mean the other slave states would not have objected had South Carolina and Georgia not done so.
Besides, the topic was distracting from the main issue, which was justifying Independence from England.
This. The document was about Independence. Not slavery. Not equality. *INDEPENDENCE*.
And nothing else.
Actually, I have to disagree with you in one way.
I view it as fundamental.
But I agree with you in another way, that it is problematic in that it should have specifically said:
"All Men are created Equal Under the Law
That single oversight has been the flawed intellectual interpretation for many evils we see today, so in a way, I agree with you.
"Under the Law" is clearly what the Founders meant, because only an idiot would make the statement "All men are created equal" when clearly, even to the densest intellect, it is easy to see that all men are NOT created equally.
But in this Republic, we should all be equal in the eyes of the law.
Obviously (and I can see that you recognize that as well) the Left has leveraged that to cause all forms of mischief.
I do have to disagree with your assertion. The republic could not exist forever with slavery. It was fundamentally incompatible. If it hadn't come to a head in 1861, it would have come to a head 10, 20, or 50 years later. It would have eventually come up, and the same strife would have ensued, in my opinion. Obviously, slavery could exist in a totalitarian society as long as that society lasted, but even then, eventually the government would be overthrown.
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