Author Topic: Anti-slavery Was In The First Draft of The Declaration of Independence  (Read 306 times)

Offline JohnyMac

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Quote
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, 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 on 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. - First Draft of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson

Because the Declaration of Independence had to be unanimous. Two states, South Carolina and Georgia, would not sign the document with the paragraph included, the paragraph was removed. 

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Offline RB in GA

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Though I in no way condone slavery, there was a valid reason for those two southern colonies to say no. And, as in most cases, it's economic.
I'll limit my comments to Georgia, for obvious reasons  ::)
In the years prior to the Revolution, Georgia had barely been settled outside of the coastal zone.  That coastal zone was (and is) an exceedingly swampy, malaria infested and heavily forested area. Even today, with second third and fourth generation planting, coastal South Carolina and Georgia evidences this in the areas that are not overgrown with beachside building. As any Marine will tell you who spent time at Parris Island.
Georgia was founded in 1730. Interestingly enough slavery was originally forbidden in Georgia, though it was chartered as a penal colony for what we would call "blue-collar criminals" today. It was almost impossible to get your average colonists to voluntarily remain settled there- they chose to go further north, or if they were particularly hardy, further inland. Indentured servants and prisoners tended to run away.  It was not a hospitable place.
As a result slavery was legalized in 1749. Slaves and prisoners could be forced into the back-breaking labor of clearing the land for planting. By 1775 (Only 45 years after the founding of the colony), it had become an economically viable area, through massive investment in slavery, with rice, sea island cotton and indigo production being the primary driving factors. These crops are not what you would call-labor friendly, especially in the pre-mechanized age.
Thus when the calls to abolish slavery started up in the Continental Congress, the very real questions of 1) who's going to reimburse the slave owners for their investment if they are emancipated? 2) how do you expect Georgia and South Carolina to survive economically without it? and 3) what's to become of slave population if they are freed? needed to be answered. And they weren't. There were no real, viable answers provided to these questions (though to be fair James Monroe did attempt to answer #3 in later years, giving us the modern-day failed state of Liberia). So without such answers to those questions Georgia said "Ah nope, ain't gonna sign that".

Offline JohnyMac

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Great info RB! Thank you. :cheers:

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