by Nancy Spannaus
[The following is part 3 of a series on the American Revolution, which begins with a serialization of chapter 7 of my book Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way. Click here for part 1 and here for part 2.]
The Committee which was entrusted to compose the Declaration text was comprised of five delegates to the Second Continental Congress: John Adams (Massachusetts), Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania), Thomas Jefferson (Virginia), Robert Livingston (New York), and Roger Sherman (Connecticut). They began their work on June 11 and submitted their draft to the assembled body on June 28. A look at their histories on slavery indicates the likelihood that they would be sympathetic to Hopkins’ argument.[1]
John Adams’ record shows that he was unequivocally opposed to slavery, although avowedly cautious about the means to be taken to eradicate it. He was the author of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, which stated “all men are born free and equal, and have . . . the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.” It was this declaration which led to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts through judicial review in the early 1780s. Adams never owned or employed a slave, but was never active on the issue, to our knowledge.
Benjamin Franklin’s views have already been reviewed; he was an active collaborator with abolitionists, and intellectually opposed to the institution. Franklin, however, held a slave family for most of his adult life, not freeing the last two family members until 1781.[2]
Thomas Jefferson’s case was more complex. We have already cited his 1774 document attacking slavery; he subsequently took some actions legislatively to try to curtail the evil. But Jefferson’s ambivalence, especially on the actual equal humanity of Blacks and whites, comes through in his Notes on Virginia, which was written in early 1782.[3] The contrast between his words and actual practice was ultimately glaring, as he continued to hold hundreds of slaves to his death.[4] (I’ll have much more to say on Jefferson later.)
Robert R. Livingston came from a prominent slaveholding family in New York State and held slaves (reportedly 15) himself. While his views on slavery in 1776 are not clear, by a decade later he was known as a “radical abolitionist,” not only agitating for the freedom of slaves as a member of the New York Manumission Society, but also insisting that freed slaves should have the right to vote.[5]
Roger Sherman, a judge in Connecticut, called the slave trade “iniquitous,” and expressed his philosophical opposition to it throughout his participation in all the major revolutionary bodies of the early United States: the Second Continental Congress, the Confederation Congress, and the Constitutional Convention. He never held a slave but is known for having sought compromise on the slave trade during the Constitutional Convention on the basis of states’ rights.[6]
So, our committee, one could say, was likely inclined to oppose slavery, and when Jefferson included a condemnation of both the trade and the practice in his draft, his fellow committee members kept the paragraph. It read as follows:
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.
According to documents[7] held by the Library of Congress, the Committee and Congress made 86 changes in Jefferson’s text. It was after the edited Declaration was submitted to Congress that the paragraph on the slave trade was omitted. No direct testimony on the debate has surfaced to my knowledge.
Jefferson’s condemnation of the slave trade and of the monarch’s suppression of “every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce,” has come in for much ridicule lately. Yet, as I have documented extensively, his statement was absolutely accurate. Again and again, when anti-slavery Americans attempted to legislate against the trade, and slavery itself, the King’s representatives overruled their efforts.
So why was this paragraph removed from the final version of the Declaration? Our only first-hand testimony comes from Jefferson himself, who wrote in his Autobiography in 1821:
The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with still haunted the minds of many. For this reason, those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offense. The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures, for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.[8]
There is another section in the Declaration’s list of grievances which obliquely refers to slavery, specifically:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Critics of the Declaration excoriate the Founders for opposing “domestic insurrections,” which they assume refers to uprisings by the enslaved, but I fail to see how deploring violent uprisings implies support for slavery.
Next installment: What Next? Plus some enlightening commentary by Frederick Douglass and Alexander Stephens
[1] See part 2 for a report and excerpts of the appeal by Rhode Island minister Samuel Hopkins to the Second Continental Congress, calling for an end to slavery.
[2] See “Slavery and the Abolition Society” on the website of the Benjamin Franklin Historical Society.
[3] See Notes on the State of Virginia, https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html
[4] Jefferson had 130 enslaved persons at the time of his death; he freed five in his will. By contrast, George Washington provided for freeing all 123 of his slaves upon the death of his wife.
[5] See Liao, Sharon, Columbia University and Slavery Project, chapter 3, Livingston and Watts. https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/3-livingstons
[6] Collier, Christopher, All Politics Is Local: Family, Friends, and Provincial Interests in the Creation of the Constitution, University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 2003.
[7] See “Jefferson and the Declaration” by Gerard W. Gawalt, Library of Congress, July 1999.
[8] See Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress, 7 June-1 August 1776, Founders Online, U.S. National Archives
Tags: Declaration of Independence, Nancy Spannaus, slavery, Thomas Jefferson