Date Created:
Place Created: Philadelphia
Year Created: 1776
Historical Theme:
Description: The original rough draft of The Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson, includes a passage that condemns slavery and King George's involvement in it. This draft was very controversial because of the Southern and Northern delegates who represented merchants actively involved in the transatlantic slave-trade, as a comprise The Declaration of Independence that we know today mentions a very vague statement condemning King George and his incitement of domestic insurrections.
Categories of Documents:
"he 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. 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 & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: 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 has 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."
Citation: III. Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence, 11 June–4 July 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0176-0004. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760–1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, pp. 423–428.]