Author: James

The Clause Removed : That one was against the institution of slavery

In our study of the Declaration of Independence it was pointed out that there were originally 28 grievances though the final draft lists only 27. One grievance was removed. That one was against the institution of slavery.

“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, & 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.”

One fact about the Revolution which is not commonly known was that some colonists joined the Patriot cause due to a desire to end slavery rather than a wish to be independent. Laws made by the colonial legislatures to limit the institution had been blocked by the royal governors. Great Britain had no desire to end the lucrative trade in slaves. They were left with but one recourse to end slavery, independence. With this as a motivation, why was slavery then continued in the new country? Why was the grievance against it removed?

Thomas Paine said,

“It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.”

Because some of the Patriots and Founders had come to the conclusion that slavery was wrong, does not mean that they all had. Slavery was an ancient tradition. During the time of the Founders it was practiced all around the world. The society in which they lived contained multiple class levels from the king and royal family down to the commoner. Slavery was just one more layer. In addition the economy of many colonies was dependent upon slave labor. So is the question really why they failed to end slavery or is a better question how did any of them ever come to decide it was wrong?

Either because not all changed their opinion at the same time or because of the dependence on slavery, during the debates on the Declaration the colonies of the Deep South demanded that the clause be removed. The delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, possibly led by Edward Rutledge, threatened that their colonies would fight on the side of Great Britain if the section remained. This was not an empty threat. The southern colonies had a higher percentage of Loyalists than their northern neighbors, and Georgia was the youngest of the colonies, only 43 years old. Her ties to the mother country had not had much time to loosen. Faced with the possibility of disunited states, Thomas Jefferson had no choice but to remove the clause.

But the demise of the clause was not the end of the idea. Prior to declaring independence all thirteen of the colonies practiced slavery. As the states wrote their new constitutions, many put an end to it within their own borders. Most of the states took a gradual approach. A date was set. Those born after that date were free. That is how it came about that at the time of the Civil War, there were still slaves living in New Jersey, though by then too old to work. Others ended slavery more immediately. When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled slavery to be illegal under a clause in the states’ constitution all slaves were freed. When Vermont was added to the union, its constitution prohibited slavery. By 1804, every state north of the Mason Dixon Line had outlawed slavery. Even those states that did not ban slavery outright, as Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to do in Virginia, placed limits on slavery such as banning the importation and exportation of slaves. And in 1807 Thomas Jefferson signed into law an act finally ending the importation of slaves into the United States.

Other actions revealed the Founders general views on slavery. In 1787, the Second Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. This act dealt with the territory north of the Ohio River. One of the most significant parts of it was the prohibition of slavery in U.S. territories. “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.”

It took 89 years for this particular promise of the Declaration to be fulfilled, but it was. Had the colonies been united at the beginning on the issue of slavery, or had the principles of liberty been followed by the succeeding generations, perhaps the Civil War could have been avoided and emancipation occurred sooner. Disunity and the ignoring of foundational principles had consequences. In our first century as a nation that consequence was war. What is it today?