a note on the Declaration of Independence

A passage from Jefferson's original draft, of the Declaration of Independence, which was excised and omitted from the final version:

he [i.e. the king of England] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium 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 [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: 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 had deprived them, by 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.

Jefferson was amazing. Just consider for a moment this man's capacity for cognitive dissonance. A slave owner himself, whose livelihood depended on the plunder of human beings and the expropriation of not just their labor but the very substance of their lives, he spoke and wrote in historically unparalleled terms about Liberty. Indeed, he is probably the single human being most associated with the word.

This passage provides an insight into the workings of Jefferson's mind, if not his character. He uses the iniquity of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as an item in his long list of grievances against the king. In other words, he is using it as a strong rhetorical point in the larger case that he is making in the Declaration - i.e. that the king is a brutal tyrant who deserves to be overthrown in the colonies. Then, in the latter part of the passage, he goes on to say that the king is not only guilty of establishing an "execrable commerce", but that he is now also guilty of inciting slaves in America to rise up against their owners - i.e. to fight for their own freedom. This is magnificently, dazzingly incoherent! If indeed it is a "self-evident" truth that "all men are created equal", and if indeed liberty is the paramount value - an "inalienable right" - then what is the difference in legitimacy between colonists rising in defense of their liberties against a tyrannical king, and slaves rising in pursuit of their liberties against their owners, whose tyranny, although more limited in scope, is all the more grievous, arbitrary, and absolute?

Of course, this paradox was effaced from the final draft of the Declaration. But the vanished passage reveals an important fact not just about Jefferson himself, but about the nation he was so instrumental in creating. Both he and we as a nation apply liberty and equality selectively. We use the stirring rhetoric of Equality and Liberty when and as it suits us. We do it easily, sometimes gratuitously, eloquently, sometimes glibly, and often in all sincerity, but without bothering too much, if at all, about being consistent in either our reasoning or our conduct.

Slavery is often described as America's original sin, which it no doubt is. In this passage, we have an example of another original - or, let's call it foundational - sin: what Lincoln (who didn't much care for Jefferson, as it happens) would later call "the base alloy of hypocrisy".