I do not doubt that this is true, but it may not necessarily be the complete picture. Others may have, and it would seem to me, likely would have objected as well, but South Carolina and Georgia were simply the first to make their opposition known.
As for the rest of the state delegates, maybe they objected to the passage as such, or maybe the SC and GA delegates were so uncompromising in their objections that the other delegates felt they had to give in or risk losing those two states.
It could be, but the way "Progressing America" portrays it, Georgia and South Carolina were the sole objectors and the sole cause of that language being stripped out.
That does not ring true to me. That seems like wishful thinking.
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.
That is exactly my thoughts on this topic.
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 causes the document to lose focus. The primary intent was to justify independence, not to initiate a debate on the moral issues surrounding slavery.
It would have opened up the Congress to bitter and counterproductive debates.
Exactly. The debate in the larger community would also have been counterproductive because it did not advance, but instead would have hindered, the work necessary to be done to gain independence. They could get into this secondary debate after the war, which is in fact what they did.
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.
I think that was Jefferson's intent, but the rest of the people were oblivious to this idea initially. The vast majority of colonist that read those words, saw them as referring to themselves, without much, if any, thought being given to the slaves.
Jefferson and the Continental Congress didn't have to invoke a universal principle to declare their independence.
They pretty much did. If you read the writings on "Natural Law" during that era, you find that they dealt in broad principles regarding the relationship between God and Man. In order to fit into the framework of natural law which declared they had a right to independence and a right to govern themselves, you had to acknowledge that these rights applied to all men.
You should take a look at "Lex Rex" (Law and the King, Samuel Rutherford, 1644) for a feel of how they looked at natural law.
If voting had to be unanimous, that would explain why Georgia and South Carolina’s objections carried the day. Jefferson doesn’t tell us what the delegates from the other Southern states thought. I believe it was suggested here that Rhode Island may also have objected, and possibly Connecticut did too. In any case, the necessity of holding the country together (before it had even become a country) meant that one can’t draw conclusions about what the majority of delegates thought about slavery or the slave trade. That it wasn’t considered the moment for such a manifesto didn’t mean that delegates didn’t have serious moral qualms about slavery.
Subsequent debate about the Declaration involved who the document applied to. The original focus of discontent in the colonies had been on what the colonists saw as the King’s violation of their rights as freeborn Englishment. They had the example of England’s previous revolutions as an example. That the Founders invoked a general principle meant that the principle could be applied to and invoked in other cases. Maybe they had to turn to natural law principles in order to justify independence, but that doesn’t matter. They had opened the door to different interpretations of what “men” or “a people” were. They had also opened the door to the idea that revolution and violent wars of independence would always be justified, though I don’t believe that they intended that.