In the aftermath of the horrendous terrorist attack in South Carolina at the AME Church I went back into my research on a film project I did about Thomas Paine and the American Revolution. I wanted to find the ORIGINAL draft of Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence.” Paine had helped in the drafting of Jefferson’s plea to end the practice of slavery in the Declaration. This was in the late spring of 1776. The Continental Congress went into a tailspin over the abolition of slavery text in the draft. Here is what Thomas Jefferson wanted for America. This would have ended slavery then..in 1776 instead of allowing the barbaric act of slavery to continue in the land of the FREE? Please read it and share. I also included his original opening, which included the word Independent. Yes, Jefferson owned slaves and we know about his affair, but it does not change what he wrote or what he envisioned for America.
“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness;
(HERE JEFFERSON IS STATING WHY THE REVOLUTIONARIES ARE BREAKING WITH KING GEORGE OF GREAT BRITAIN. THIS WAS TAKEN OUT BY PRESSURE FROM GEORGIA AND SOUTH CAROLINA, WHO SAID THEY WOULD SIDE WITH THE BRITISH IF THE SLAVERY TEXT WAS NOT REMOVED. WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED.)
He has waged 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 & 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.
in every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated injury. a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. future ages will scarce believe that the hardiness of one man, adventured within the short compass of 12 years only, on so many acts of tyranny without a mask, over a people fostered & fixed in principles of liberty.”
storytellerla 