Posted on 08/08/2026 8:25:27 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Two weeks ago, I discussed the committee authorship of the Declaration of Independence and its adoption (after significant edits) by the Continental Congress.
Today, I want to discuss the extraordinary edits concerning the issue of slavery. As is well known, the Continental Congress assigned an editorial committee of five men: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston and Benjamin Franklin.
Thomas Jefferson penned the first draft, which was then edited by the committee and then the Continental Congress in session. As noted before in my July 24th column, they made significant edits. However, the most significant and the most extensive edit concerned Jefferson’s ringing condemnation of the slave trade and slavery.
Historian Holly Brewer, in her forthcoming book, The King’s Slaves, makes a convincing case that Jefferson’s language “all men are created equal” included slaves. Brewer quotes Jefferson’s condemnation of the King:
“He … has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its 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 hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium 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 …” (Brewer notes that Jefferson wrote MEN in all caps and italics.)
When the Continental Congress deleted this segment of the Declaration, after some heated debate, Jefferson was so incensed that he constructed six handwritten copies of his original version of the Declaration of Independence (which included all the deleted passages condemning slavery). In all his copies (which he sent around the world), Jefferson underlined the deleted parts with a note that says, “These are the deleted parts.”
Holly Brewer, Burke Professor of American History at the University of Maryland, summing up her research on the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, concluded the following:
“When I really looked at them and looked at the way the original first draft was echoed in the deleted clauses, I realized there’s no way you can read the Declaration of Independence as not including, at least for Jefferson and the original Committee of Five—which included John Adams and Ben Franklin—that all men are created equal did not include black people. They absolutely thought it did. 100%”
And yet, the antislavery rhetoric was deleted. Why? Forty-one of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. All 13 colonies permitted slavery in 1776, and approximately 20% of the population was of African descent. Clearly, if the Continental Congress had outlawed slavery, the American Revolution would have been stillborn.
However, increasingly people knew it was wrong and that the evil of slavery would have to be addressed at some point in the future. Jefferson did indeed “tremble for his country” when he realized that the Creator intended for the slaves to be free.
However, in 1776 the colonies could not have united around abolishing slavery. It clearly caused some of them real personal anguish.
Jefferson is a classic example of a great man with great flaws. Evidently, he lived significantly beyond his means financially his entire adult life. When he died, he was bankrupt and his estate was liquidated, including 600 slaves. When you consider Jefferson’s multi-decade intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, a slave woman who was also Jefferson’s deceased wife’s half-sister — many of the manifold human heartaches accompanying slavery are testified to in that fact — you get a hint of the cognitive racial dissonance in Jefferson’s life.
Should we excuse Jefferson and his contemporaries for not acting on their convictions? Of course not. Their hypocrisy on the race issue was, and is, profound. And yet, many of them were not blind to their hypocrisy and the injustice of slavery. It troubled them greatly. Eventually, it led the nation to end the national disgrace.
In this 250th year of our independence, let us all pledge to redouble our efforts to finish the job of living up to the truth of “All men are created equal.”
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
Human beings are weak. Yet, slavery was always wrong, but the anti-slavery movement arose for the first time in the 18th century in the lands dominated by Christian belief and thought.
We are subjected to hateful prejudice against us by a group with a chip on its collective shoulder.
I “gave at the office” in many ways. One: Yes, I actually marched with Dr. Martin Luther King once because I thought all citizens should be guaranteed voting rights in elections.
And my great, great grandfather for whom I was named (real first and middle name) fought in the Civil War in battles as one of the Michigan Volunteers. He didn’t have to.
So now I’m supposed to accept being pilloried for being the same race as Thomas Jefferson? I was born with blue eyes and light skin (British, Welsh and Irish forebears who arrived here in the mid 1770s) in the United States.
So I have to live it down?
No.
Well said.
A four decades relationship… that lasted til his death.
“When the Continental Congress deleted this segment of the Declaration, after some heated debate, Jefferson was so incensed . . .”
In his letter to Robert Walsh, December 4, 1818 Jefferson remembers the incident like this: “Although the offensive expressions (against slavery) were immediately yielded, these gentlemen (Southerners) continued their depredations on other parts of the instrument (DOI).”
Jefferson, looking back, didn’t indicate he fought too vigorously. He had bigger fish to fry.
But to answer the larger question, the phrase all men are created equal did not apply to merciless Indian savages. The purpose of the Declaration of Independence was not to make jurors, electors, and university presidents out of merciless Indian savages.
Also, the phrase was not to give voting rights to slave women; or to white women.
Black and white women did get the right to vote nationally in 1920 about 144 years later.
If the goal of Jefferson’s declaration was universal equality, it would have been named the Declaration of Equality.
And men would have played on women’s sports teams.
In one of the few photos we have of my great grandmother, she was standing in front of a rather shabby little house next to her laundry washtub complete with a scrub board.
A tiny wizened little woman that died in her 50s after raising 8 children.
She was said to be the great-great granddaughter of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
He also was a slave owner, although it appears that the slaves came to him with his bride.
He fought in the Revolutionary War, was captured and spent some time in a British prison.
Some of the other Declaration signers that fell into British hands were executed, but somehow he survived.
I feel that for his time he was a man of courage and he risked it all for his country.
I am not ashamed of my heritage.
But you used the word "equality", not "sameness". Did you accept the left's terms for debate yet again jeffersondem?
"If the goal of Jefferson’s declaration was universal equality, it would have been named the Declaration of Equality."
In light of the comment about sports teams,
If the goal of Jefferson’s declaration was universal sameness, it would have been named the Declaration of Sameness.
It can be found here.
https://librivox.org/short-nonfiction-collection-vol-066-by-various/
File is in mp3 format.
I’m not touching this...
For a man who was supposedly anti-slavery... He did a very poor job of following his own beliefs.
No, it did not. Jefferson wrote from Enlightenment, and particularly Lockean context, meaning equality in the state of nature. “Men” referred to themselves, White propertied males. They weren’t egalitarians, they were literally the landed aristocracy.
Jefferson was so incensed
But not so incensed to free his own slaves. He had 50 years to do so including a stint as the US President. Washington didn’t free his slaves either...
That is bothersome to me...nothing I can do about it of course, but I am not going to be some apologist for it either.
I often wonder why they didn’t develop a “feudal” system where the slaves became a sort of a [poorly]paid peasantry...
Would that have been better? only marginally in name only...
Because slaves were tangible property, they could be mortgaged. If you inherited slaves for whom mortgages were attached, the debts had to be honored. Default laws were not so lenient back in those days.
I can't remember if it was Jefferson, Washington or both who had to deal with this issue.
I wrote some on this in Post #15.
Beyond that, who here has not hired contractors and adopted a "Don't ask don't tell" policy towards their employees immigration status?
Who here scrupulously refuses to buy products from companies using offshore manufacturing under slave like conditions?
That needs to be repeated more.
Article IV Section 4
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
As James Madison wrote in Federalist #43:
May not a more compact and advantageous position turn the scale on the same side, against a superior number so situated as to be less capable of a prompt and collected exertion of its strength? Nothing can be more chimerical than to imagine that in a trial of actual force, victory may be calculated by the rules which prevail in a census of the inhabitants, or which determine the event of an election! May it not happen, in fine, that the minority of CITIZENS may become a majority of PERSONS, by the accession of alien residents, of a casual concourse of adventurers, or of those whom the constitution of the State has not admitted to the rights of suffrage? I take no notice of an unhappy species of population abounding in some of the States, who, during the calm of regular government, are sunk below the level of men; but who, in the tempestuous scenes of civil violence, may emerge into the human character, and give a superiority of strength to any party with which they may associate themselves.
The section in red is Madison warning that if the slaves were to join sides in a rebellion, they could swing the results of an election. It is part of the larger discussion in section 6 of his essay discussing how the "guarantee to every state of a republican form of government; and to protect each of them against invasion" was an expectation that states would band together in common interest to protect each other from invasion or domestic violence.
I point it out here only to provide another early example of how the slavery issue was still on the minds of the Framers of the Constitution in 1787, since reference to it - albeit couched in obtuse language - made its way into The Federalist Papers, and by inference, into the debates of the Constitutional Convention.
-PJ
Yet slavery is still alive and well today in all regions of the world including religious ones of all denominations.
Current estimates suggest that around 49.6 million people are trapped in modern slavery worldwide, which is significantly higher than the number of victims during the Atlantic slave trade.
The Declaration of Independence was written 250 years ago..it was and is a magnificent document. Jefferson was about 33 when he wrote it.
Thomas Jefferson: 33
John Adams: 40
Benjamin Franklin: 70
Roger Sherman: 43
Robert R. Livingston: 39
Well one thing is for sure... he in no way envisioned 2 out of 3 TV commercials having a black guy and white girl in it!! I’d bet the bank on that one!!
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