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To: fortheDeclaration
In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson included a statement which bitterly denounced the British for foisting chattel slavery on the American Colonies.

The section, later edited, read:

"[George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. [T]his piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: 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 had deprived them, by 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.

2,766 posted on 02/22/2005 12:05:46 AM PST by capitan_refugio
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To: capitan_refugio

Yes, and it was the howls from some of the slave owners that stopped the passage from going into the Declaration.


2,768 posted on 02/22/2005 12:33:03 AM PST by fortheDeclaration
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