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.
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PinGGG!.....................
Hmm...
I am always in awe of the Founding Fathers.
I’m saving this to pull out whenever I get the usual criticisms of Jefferson.
Bkmk
Those were removed in order to allow its passage as a unifying document.
Many of the influential founders understood what a black mark slavery was on the principle that all men are created equal, but the more pressing need of the day was to create a union.
It was the right thing to do at the time given the realities of the day.
This is nice to see, just to counter the idiots on the Left who decry Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as slave owners, but I despise the practice of impressing the morality of today on the morality of people who lived centuries ago.
Author is relatively late in becoming aware of this, but better late than never.
Bookmark
The leaders of the big states, New York and Virginia (Jefferson included), refused to ratify until ten additions (originally 12) were appended-incorporated into-the Constitution: the bill of rights.
Of course Federalists like Hamilton pooh poohed their concern. “Why do we need to expressly include things we fought and died to defend?”
Because of 2025 New York and Virginia statists.
Have read every decent biography This Guy has been able to find of our Founding Fathers, primary (Washington, Henry, Adams (John and Abigail), Sam Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison (Jemmy and Dolly!), Jay, etc.), secondary (e.g. Gen’s Knox, Greene and Wayne, Ethan Allen, Richard Sherman), and tertiary.
It’s a finite number, for sure, but there’s quite a few worth learning about.
Those were removed in order to allow its passage as a unifying document.
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I believe Beck stated the vote was 11 for acceptance and 2 against. Each paragraph had to receive a unanimous vote to be added to the Constitution.
So much for the charge that the founding fathers were totally racist.
> Those were removed in order to allow its passage as a unifying document. <
Right. And folks should always be judged within the context of their times.
Anyway, it would have been nice if the Founders had devised a plan to slowly phase out slavery. But even that might not have been accepted by the slave-owning states.
This sounds like this Jeff guy was really beefing on that George dude.
But since I do own them, I should bang the pretty ones when my wife is away. And two hundred years later Governor Arnold will do the same but it will be OK with the state because slaves will get minimum wage. But maybe Arnold’s wife will care. That will take another two hundred years to figure that one out. Ethics are trick things.
Great stuff, thanks very much.
Yes…they understood fully the incompatibility between slavery and “all men are created equal”.
I see it as simply necessary for that time. It eventually came to a head 85 years later, as it was destined to do.
The Founders made the conscious choice to put it off in order to achieve union.
Jefferson was 33 when he wrote it, which is simply astonishing. And apart from him, the depth and clarity of moral and political thought, and the ability to express it so eloquently, was something the Founders had in abundance. Kind of embarrassing to think how far we've sunk since then.
The slave trade was recognized early on as being worse and more brutal than slavery itself.
We’re not inclined to separate the two today but they very much saw them as two different things back then.
“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.”
A visit to Monticello will tell you he was a decent man and not some cartoonish whip wielding slave owner. That was the world and labor system he was born into, but he was a truly decent man in a tough world.
I was walking down the path there and an elderly black woman was walking alone the path to Jefferson’s grave. She was having a tough time with her cane on the uneven sloping path and she took my arm, and we walked very slow. Her daughter was meeting her with the car at the bottom of the hill but neither realized how for it was.
She loved Jefferson, and she had spent her life as a history teacher. She regaled me with a lesson all the way to the parking lot.
She was annoyed with idiots who slander him.
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