Declaration of Independence

By: Paul Finkelman

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Declaration of Independence

In 1776 Congress appointed a committee to draft a statement declaring American independence. The chief draftsman was Thomas Jefferson, a young Virginian, who at the time owned about 150 slaves. The Declaration's preamble contains a clarion call for fundamental equality. This credo of American life provides the basis for subsequent claims to liberty and equality for African Americans from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century. The Declaration is also connected to the African American experience because of provisions related to slavery in the final document—as well as a famous provision that was deleted from it.

The most obvious connection between slavery and the Declaration is in the preamble's assertion “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.” These sentiments undermined the morality of slavery and its legitimacy under natural law; they would later also be used to undermine segregation. From David Walker to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., African American activists have quoted the Declaration in their assaults on slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Antebellum opponents of slavery as diverse as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln relied on this language to bolster their opposition to human bondage. In dedicating the nation to the dismantling of slavery and to a “new birth of freedom,” Lincoln harked back to the Declaration, which “brought forth … a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” David Walker ended his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) by demanding of white Americans, “See your Declaration,” and asking “Do you understand your own language?” Indeed, after quoting the preamble he asked white Americans to “compare your own language … from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us … men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!”

In his famous speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass agreed that “the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny” and that the “principles contained in that instrument are saving principles.” He urged white abolitionists to “stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.” But he could not embrace the Declaration. He rhetorically asked,

"What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?"

(Blassingame, vol. 2, p. 367) Thus, for Douglass the Declaration remained a broken promise, a goal unmet, and a lie when presented to African Americans. A century later the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. asked Americans “whether they believe that the framers of the Declaration of Independence intended that liberty should be divided into installments, doled out on a deferred-payment plan.”

While the Declaration generally remained only of theoretical value to most slaves, some white Americans took such documents more seriously. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 also declared that all men were born free and equal, and the state's courts eventually interpreted this clause to have ended slavery. The preamble to Pennsylvania's 1780 gradual abolition act ended with a reference to the Declaration and the American Revolution, noting that slavery was ended in the new state “in grateful commemoration of our own happy deliverance from that state of unconditional submission, to which we were doomed by the tyranny of Britain.” In the years after the Revolution many people, such as Jefferson's neighbor Edward Coles, freed their slaves because they took seriously the language and ideology embodied in the Declaration itself.

In its main body the Declaration dealt with slavery indirectly and in a way that is inconsistent with the assertions of equality and liberty in the preamble. Before turning to the Declaration itself, however, it is instructive to examine a clause on slavery that Thomas Jefferson proposed but that was left out of the final document. This clause has often been misunderstood as an attack on slavery itself or even as a call for abolition; in fact, it is neither. In his original draft Jefferson complained that the King had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty” by perpetuating the African slave trade. Calling the African trade “piratical warfare,” Jefferson complained that “a CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain” was so “determined to keep open a market where MEN” were bought and sold that he suppressed “every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” While condemning the King for supporting the African trade, Jefferson also denounced him for encouraging slaves to enlist in the British army:

"exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges to commit against the LIVES of another."

(Jefferson, pp. 25–26)

The background of this paragraph was Virginia's attempt to stop the African slave trade before the Revolution. The Virginia legislature had, in fact, passed laws to end the trade, but the King had vetoed them. The Virginia law was not antislavery; the legislature simply wanted to regulate the number of slaves entering the state for economic and prudential reasons. New slaves were a drain on the colony's economy, sending valuable resources to England, which financed most slave-trading operations. In addition, Virginians were beginning to feel they had a surplus of slaves. A temporary end to the trade would raise the value of existing slaves in the colony. Finally, freshly imported slaves were more likely to revolt than those born in the colonies. Thus, reducing the number of new slaves was a prudent move.

Although this “vehement philippic against negro slavery,” as John Adams called it, never made it into the final version of the Declaration, it has made it into the public mind as proof of Thomas Jefferson's opposition to slavery. But Adams's characterization of the clause is misleading. Congress deleted this clause for a variety of reasons, including the complaints of Georgia and South Carolina, still active participants in the transatlantic trade. Yet, even without the specific complaints of those states, “the charge,” as Jefferson's biographer Merrill Peterson suggests, “simply did not ring true.” More to the point, Jefferson was attacking the African slave trade, not slavery itself. The arguments against the African trade were humanitarian but also, again, economic and prudential.

Jefferson certainly fit into the slaveholding class of Virginians. Because he sold human chattel throughout his life, the African trade threatened him economically by undermining the value of his surplus slaves. Similarly, Jefferson always argued for curbs on the growth of America's black population. He almost always tied any discussion of manumission or emancipation to colonization or “expatriation.” Ending the African trade would slow the growth of the nation's black population. Thus, the attack on the King dovetailed with Jefferson's negrophobia and his interests as a Virginia slave owner and did not necessarily indicate opposition to slavery itself.

The final Declaration did contain one clause that directly related to slavery; in his very last charge against King George III, Jefferson raised the issue of the institution—the only such mention incorporated into the final document, which is rarely discussed by either biographers of Jefferson or historians of the Declaration. There, Jefferson complains that the King “has excited domestic insurrections against us.” For southern slave owners “domestic insurrections” had only one unmistakable meaning: slave revolts. In fact, this clause was a direct reference to Lord Dunmore's proclamation. As the royal governor of Virginia, Dunmore had offered freedom to any slaves who would fight for the British cause—the “domestic insurrection” Jefferson condemned and feared. Ironically, in his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson complained that the King had enslaved people “against human nature itself,” but in the final document he condemned the King for enabling those people to fight for their freedom. Also, Jefferson failed to consider the irony of Americans rebelling against the King while complaining that slaves were rebelling against Americans.

This irony, of course, illustrates the contradiction inherent in both the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. All men may have been “created equal” in Jefferson's mind, but clearly black slaves were not entitled to the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Thus, despite the Declaration's proclamations of universal liberty and equality, slaves were used as mere objects in the propaganda war against the King. Not a few Englishmen read the Declaration and wondered, as did the English Tory and literary figure Samuel Johnson, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

See also American Revolution; Civil Rights; Constitution, U.S.; David Walker's Appeal; Discrimination; Emancipation; Jefferson, Thomas, on African Americans and Slavery; Laws and Legislation; Military; Murray, John (Lord Dunmore); Segregation; Slave Rebellions and Insurrections; Slave Trade: Eighteenth Century to Revolution; Slavery: Lower South; Slavery: Upper South; Virginia; and Walker, David.

processed xml | source xml