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To: ProgressingAmerica
You may not be grasping this, but Jefferson was just the writer. He was not the authority that gave the document force. The authority was the representatives of the 13 colonies. Thomas Jefferson did not dictate to them what would be in the document which would bear their signatures. They tasked him with writing it, and when he showed them his original drafts, they yanked out all the anti-slavery language, because the document was not, and was never intended to be about slavery, it was intended to be about the natural law right for states to be independent.

Trying to drag slavery into the document distracts and waters down it's central focus, and that is why the other members of the committee struck all that anti-slavery language out of the document.

At the time, all 13 colonies were slave states, and i'm confident the document would never have been signed if that anti-slavery language had been left in it.

The civil authority behind the declaration were the States themselves, not Thomas Jefferson, who was only part of the Virginia delegation.

87 posted on 08/30/2019 8:11:13 PM PDT by DiogenesLamp ("of parents owing allegiance to no oither sovereignty.")
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To: DiogenesLamp
I'm aware that Jefferson was just the writer. Why it was struck down is more important though. They needed a unanimous document because they worried that a lack of unity was death. "Join or Die"

You are conflating a multitude of reasons for the top reason and concluding that the other multitude from #2 down must not then be relevant anymore. Try to remember that the "solitary" Declaration is a container for 27 grievances.

It doesn't matter if slavery was #4 on the list or #24 on the list, the fact remains that it was there.

And as for "dragging" slavery "into the document". Not only was that done by Jefferson himself in the original draft, but the British Empire responded in kind. They too recognized that the colonists were upset over it because the colonists spent years lobbying the king to stop the trade.

The British government in 1776 funded a response to the Declaration(which I recently wrote about), titled An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress.

The New York Times uses the British Empire's propaganda in order to smear the US (1619 Project)

Even the king and his men recognized that slavery was somewhere on that list of reasons for the separation.

92 posted on 08/31/2019 6:59:31 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica (We cannot leave history to "the historians" anymore.)
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