To persuade them, someone needed to articulate why the Americans were breaking away. Although Jefferson disputed his account, John Adams later recalled that he had persuaded Jefferson to write the draft because Jefferson had the fewest enemies in Congress and was the best writer.
Jefferson would have gotten the job anyway—he was elected chair of the committee. Jefferson had 17 days to produce the document and reportedly wrote a draft in a day or two. The Declaration of Independence has three parts.
It has a preamble, which later became the most famous part of the document but at the time was largely ignored. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence contains the entire theory of American government in a single, inspiring passage:.
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.
If the founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, thought slavery was morally corrupt, how did they reconcile owning slaves themselves, and how was it still built into American law? Two arguments offer the bare beginnings of an answer to this complicated question.
The first is that the desire to exploit labor was a central feature of most colonizing societies in the Americas, especially those that relied on the exportation of valuable commodities like sugar, tobacco, rice and much later cotton. Cheap labor in large quantities was the critical factor that made these commodities profitable, and planters did not care who provided it — the indigenous population, white indentured servants and eventually African slaves — so long as they were there to be exploited.
To say that this system of exploitation was morally corrupt requires one to identify when moral arguments against slavery began to appear. One also has to recognize that there were two sources of moral opposition to slavery, and they only emerged after One came from radical Protestant sects like the Quakers and Baptists, who came to perceive that the exploitation of slaves was inherently sinful.
But the great problem that Jefferson faced — and which many of his modern critics ignore — is that he could not imagine how black and white peoples could ever coexist as free citizens in one republic. There was, he argued in Query XIV of his Notes , Jefferson argued that there was already too much foul history dividing these peoples. And worse still, Jefferson hypothesized, in proto-racist terms, that the differences between the peoples would also doom this relationship.
He thought that African Americans should be freed — but colonized elsewhere. Yet we also have to recognize that he was trying to grapple, I think sincerely, with a real problem. No historical account of the origins of American slavery would ever satisfy our moral conscience today, but as I have repeatedly tried to explain to my Stanford students, the task of thinking historically is not about making moral judgments about people in the past.
Email: news-service stanford. The passage was cut from the final wording. That omission would create a legacy of exclusion for people of African descent that engendered centuries of struggle over basic human and civil rights.
The proclamation inspired thousands of enslaved people to seek liberty behind British lines during the Revolutionary War. What is known is that the year-old Jefferson, who composed the Declaration between June 11 and June 28, , sent a rough draft to members of a pre-selected committee, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, for edits ahead of its presentation to Congress. The removal was mostly fueled by political and economic expediencies. While the 13 colonies were already deeply divided on the issue of slavery, both the South and the North had financial stakes in perpetuating it.
Franklin, though a master at coining aphorisms, would likely have included a joke in the Declaration if he had authored it.
It should be noted that since the resolution of independence had been introduced in the name of Virginia, tradition called for a representative of that colony. Richard Henry Lee, a Patriot leader from Virginia, may have been a natural choice to draft the Declaration. But while Lee was an eloquent public speaker, Jefferson wielded an inspiring pen, and a mind to match. Also it was believed that Lee expected to return home to Virginia shortly.
It seemed appropriate that Jefferson be chosen because he stood next to Lee in the Virginia delegation.
0コメント