Slavery and the Declaration of Independence

 

By David K. Shipler 

            A paragraph denouncing slavery, written by a slaveowner, was deleted from the final version of the Declaration of Independence. Yet the remaining language contained a soaring promise that abolitionists put to instant use in their cause. Therein lies the great contradiction of the United States, a nation inspired by ideals and twisted by practice.           

            There is no way to cleanse American history, not honestly. It is torn between morality and reality, a place where fine myths and base cruelty coexist. We see that every day as the country becomes unwelcoming to outsiders, more hostile toward its poor, and willfully blind to racial injustice.

Myths are useful, though; they set high standards and can drive self-correction if—a big if—the problematic past is faced squarely and not sanitized as the Trump Republicans are attempting. Societies that rely on fictions rarely do well.

            The United States has endured a multiple personality for all of its 250 years, beginning with its origin story of liberty alongside the enslavement of Black Africans and the slaughters of Native Americans. Both are elements of national character. And both shaped the Declaration of Independence, so erasing one side of the story or the other falsifies patriotism. Genuine American patriotism lies in what is precious about America: the freedom to embrace disturbing truths, a love for the din of competing ideas.

In the fall of 1775 and the spring of 1776, five men formed a drafting committee to compose the ringing document we Americans now celebrate.

One of those, Benjamin Franklin, owned several enslaved workers and had profited from advertisements in his newspaper by slaveowners seeking to sell their “property” or to capture runaways. He later became an avid abolitionist. Another, Robert Livingston, used slave labor on his New York estate.

 Slavery was opposed by two members of the committee, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and John Adams of Massachusetts. But the fifth, Thomas Jefferson, embodied the cross-currents of his society, holding transcendent ideas larger than he was. He owned hundreds in bondage at Monticello, his Virginia plantation, but excoriated slavery in the draft of the Declaration:

  He [King George III] has waged a cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s 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 and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.

Jefferson’s paragraph was to occupy a prominent place in the Declaration’s litany of indictments against the King. Yet the drafters ran into trouble as they sought unanimity in the 56-member Continental Congress, about one-third of whom were slaveowners. Slavery was still legal in all 13 colonies. The paragraph did not survive, much to the chagrin of Jefferson, who continued to include it in copies he sent with correspondence.

What survived, as is well known, is the famous sentence, with an anti-slavery nuance insisted upon by Adams: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Life, liberty and property had been listed as natural rights back in 1689 by the English philosopher John Locke. But Adams rejected “property” as connoting an acceptance of slavery, according to historian Danielle Allen, and “happiness” was substituted. “Pushing the word ‘property’ out, replacing it with ‘happiness,’ was an abolitionist moment in the Declaration,” she said. “Indeed, the abolitionists used it immediately, in Boston, to submit a petition using that language for an end of slavery in Massachusetts.” (Before the end of the Revolutionary War, Adams wrote the abolition of slavery into the Massachusetts state constitution. Franklin got slavery outlawed in Pennsylvania.)

The Declaration’s soaring promise featured in a stirring 1776 sermon by Lemuel Haynes, the first ordained Black minister in the US, who argued that the natural rights applied to all, that “an African, or, in other terms, that a Negro . . . has an undeniable right to his Liberty: Consequently, the practise of Slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this Land is illicit.”

He continued: “Those privileges that are granted to us By the Divine Being, no one has the Least right to take them from us without our consen[t]; and there is Not the Least precept, or practise, in the Sacred Scriptures, that constitutes a Black man a Slave, any more than a white one.

“Therefore is it not hygh time to undo these heavy Burdens, and Let the Oppressed go free? And while you manifest such a noble and magnanimous Spirit, to maintain inviobly your own Natural rights, and militate so much against Despotism, as it hath respect unto yourselves, you do not assume the Same usurpations, and are no Less tyrannic. Pray let there be a congruity amidst you Conduct, Least you fall amongst that Class the inspir’d pen-man Speaks of. Rom. 2.21 and on. thou therefore which teacheth another, teachest thou not thy Self?”

Slavery did not end with the Declaration’s fine sentiments, obviously. It actually spread and deepened its economic roots. And the strands of our varied histories are still entangled. According to my family lore, which is partially documented, three of my ancestors fought in the Revolution, one on my father’s side at Bunker Hill, and two on my mother’s side in Pennsylvania. But I have also wondered whether any of my ancestors were slaveowners. Some lived in Maryland and Virginia before the Civil War, so perhaps. I am not sure.

            Jefferson once called slavery America’s “one fatal stain.” A stain cannot be blithely washed away.

            “We routinely return to Jefferson and his era in order to discover the glory of America,” wrote a Jefferson scholar, the late Charles A. Miller, in 1992. “We should also be willing to return in order to find early evidence of our distress. . . . I believe that Jefferson was firmly—centrally and emblematically—in the stream of American anguish over slavery and race, and he knew it. I also believe that the present, in altered form, is like Jefferson.”