Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

Among the most vociferously debated passages was Jefferson’s denunciation of the slave trade. “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself,” Jefferson wrote accusingly of King George III, 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. How Jefferson, who owned hundreds of slaves himself, could have composed such a diatribe is a whole separate topic for discussion, but suffice it to say that certain southern representatives refused to sign the Declaration if this language remained. The section was excised, representing the largest single cut from Jefferson’s Rough Draft.