This episode has no editorial position on the founders. It has eleven primary source documents, all linked to the archives where they live, and a commitment to show you what is in them without telling you what to think about it. The documents speak. You decide.
There is a contradiction at the center of the American founding that every serious historian acknowledges and that the primary sources document in extraordinary detail. The founders knew it was there. Several of them wrote about it privately with remarkable candor. And they made specific choices — documented in Madison's Convention Notes, in the text of the Constitution itself, and in the Congressional record — about what to do with it.
This episode shows you those choices. Not in summary. In the documents.
Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in June 1776. The document Congress debated, revised, and adopted contains the words most Americans know. What is less known is that Jefferson's original draft contained a passage about slavery that Congress removed before adoption. Jefferson kept a copy of his original draft. It is in the Library of Congress. Both documents are below.
"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."
National Archives · archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its 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 hemisphere... 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 Original Draft · LOC · loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html
Jefferson blamed the King for the slave trade in his draft. Congress — particularly the South Carolina and Georgia delegations — demanded the passage be removed. Jefferson noted this in his autobiography. The deleted text survives in his papers at the LOC.
Jefferson wrote in his autobiography that South Carolina and Georgia "struck out" the passage, and that delegates from Northern states who profited from the slave trade were content to see it removed. He preserved the deleted text. He never publicly defended its removal. The gap between those two columns is what this episode is about.
The following are not interpretations of what the founders believed. They are direct quotations from their private correspondence — letters they did not expect to become public documents, in which they wrote about slavery with a candor they rarely used in public. Each is linked to its source in the archive.
"The hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come; and whether brought on by the generous energy of our own minds; or by the bloody process of St Domingue... is a leaf of our history not yet turned over."
Edward Coles had written Jefferson urging him to lead the abolition movement — to use his fame and influence to end slavery while he still lived. Jefferson declined. He said the issue must be left to the younger generation. He was 71 years old. Over his lifetime, Jefferson owned 607 people — the largest number of any U.S. president. He formally freed seven in total: two during his lifetime and five in his will. All seven were members of the Hemings family. He allowed several others to leave Monticello without pursuit. Approximately 200 enslaved people were sold at auction after his death to pay his debts. Of the more than 600 people Jefferson enslaved, he freed only ten — all members of the same family. The Monticello archive documents each of them by name.
"The turpitude, the inhumanity, the cruelty, and the infamy of the African commerce in slaves have been so impressively represented to the public by the highest powers of eloquence that nothing that I can say would increase the just odium in which it is and ought to be held."
Adams never owned an enslaved person and opposed slavery consistently throughout his life. He also did almost nothing legislatively to end it, repeatedly subordinating the issue to the goal of maintaining the union. In this letter he predicted that slavery would eventually split the nation. The Civil War began forty-two years after he wrote it.
"There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it — but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is by Legislative authority."
Washington wrote this privately, nine years after the Declaration and three years before he became President. He signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 as President. When his cook Hercules and his personal attendant Ona Judge separately escaped to freedom, Washington used the power of the federal government — including the Secretary of the Treasury — to attempt to recapture them. In his will, he freed the 123 enslaved people he personally owned, to take effect after Martha's death. He was the only major slaveholding founder to free all the enslaved people he personally owned. However, of the 317 enslaved people at Mount Vernon in 1799, he could only legally free 123 — the rest were "dower slaves" belonging to the Custis estate. Those 194 people were divided among Martha's grandchildren after her death and were not freed. Mount Vernon's own records document both groups by name.
"Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities."
Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 — the document that contains the phrase "all men are by nature equally free and independent." He owned more than 100 enslaved people at Gunston Hall at any given time, and more than 300 across his lifetime. He freed none of them. He delivered this speech at the Constitutional Convention opposing the slave trade clause — then went home to Virginia. He refused to sign the Constitution, partly because it did not end slavery. Gunston Hall's own archive documents the names and lives of people enslaved there — that research is linked in the sources below.
LOC — Madison's Convention Notes · memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwfr.html
The following are the three provisions of the United States Constitution that addressed slavery directly. The text of each clause is reproduced verbatim from the National Archives. The debates over each are sourced to Madison's Notes from the Constitutional Convention, available at the Library of Congress.
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons... three fifths of all other Persons."
"All other Persons" meant enslaved people. This clause gave Southern states additional Congressional representation and electoral votes proportional to their enslaved population — people who had no vote, no legal standing, and no voice in the government whose power was being calculated from their bodies. It gave the South approximately 25 additional seats in Congress and additional electoral votes for the next seventy years.
"The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight."
The word "slavery" does not appear in this clause. "Such Persons" meant enslaved Africans. Congress was prohibited from ending the transatlantic slave trade for twenty years from ratification — until 1808. Tens of thousands of additional enslaved people were imported in those twenty years. Congress did prohibit the trade in 1808, the first year it legally could.
"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."
An enslaved person who escaped to a free state had no legal protection under this clause — they were constitutionally required to be returned to their enslaver. This clause passed at the Convention almost without debate. Its silence in the record is itself a document: by August 1787, the accommodation of slavery had become so normalized in the Convention's proceedings that this clause required no argument.
Gouverneur Morris — the man who wrote the final language of the Constitution, including "We the People of the United States" — delivered one of the most remarkable speeches of the entire Convention on August 8, 1787. It is in Madison's Notes. He was speaking against the Three-Fifths Clause.
Morris voted against the Three-Fifths Clause. He was outvoted. He then wrote "We the People" into the Preamble of the document that contained it. Mason refused to sign the Constitution. He went home to Gunston Hall, where he owned hundreds of enslaved people, and freed none of them.
While the founders debated these questions in Philadelphia, other voices were writing about the same questions from the other side — applying the founders' own language of natural rights to the condition of enslaved people. These documents are in the archive. They were written in the same years as the founding documents. They are almost never taught alongside them.
Phillis Wheatley was brought from West Africa to Boston as a child and enslaved by the Wheatley family. She taught herself to read and write, published a collection of poems in 1773 — the first published work by an African American — and corresponded with George Washington, who praised her verse. In 1772, four years before the Declaration, she wrote to William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, who had been appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies. She applied the language of liberty directly to her own captivity.
"I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat: / What pangs excruciating must molest, / What sorrows labour in my parent's breast? / Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd / That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd: / Such, such my case. And can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?"
Phillis Wheatley · "To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth" · 1772 · LOC Digital Collections →
Wheatley was freed in 1773, the year her poems were published. She died in poverty in 1784, at approximately thirty years old. She wrote about liberty while enslaved, before the Declaration used the same word.
Prince Hall was a free Black man in Boston — a leather worker, a Methodist minister, and the founder of African Freemasonry in America. In January 1777 — six months after the Declaration was signed — he and seven other free Black men submitted a petition to the Massachusetts General Court asking for the abolition of slavery. The petition opens by citing the same principles the Declaration had just proclaimed.
"Your petitioners apprehend that they have in common with all other men a natural and unalienable right to that freedom which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all mankind and which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever — but they were unjustly dragged by the hand of cruel Power from their dearest friends and some of them even torn from the embraces of their tender Parents — from a populous pleasant and plentiful country and in violation of Laws of Nature and of Nations and in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity..."
Prince Hall et al. · Petition to the Massachusetts General Court · January 13, 1777 · Massachusetts Digital Commonwealth →
The Massachusetts legislature received the petition and tabled it. Massachusetts abolished slavery by judicial interpretation of its 1780 constitution in 1783. Hall spent the rest of his life fighting for Black civil rights in the new republic.
The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery was the oldest abolition society in the world. In February 1790 — one year into the new Constitutional government — it submitted a formal petition to the First Congress asking for the end of the slave trade. Benjamin Franklin, then 84 years old and two months from death, signed it as president of the Society. It was one of the last public acts of his life. Congress debated it for weeks.
"From a persuasion that equal liberty was originally the portion, and is still the birthright, of all men; and influenced by the strong ties of humanity, and the principles of their institution, your memorialists conceive themselves bound to use all justifiable endeavors to loosen the bands of slavery, and promote a general enjoyment of the blessings of freedom."
Pennsylvania Abolition Society Petition to Congress · February 3, 1790 · Signed by Benjamin Franklin · LOC — American State Papers →
Southern delegates — led by James Jackson of Georgia and William Loughton Smith of South Carolina — responded with fury, warning that any legislation on slavery would fracture the union. The National Archives holds the petition and the congressional record of the debate. The committee reported that the Constitution restrained Congress from prohibiting the importation of slaves until 1808 and from interfering with emancipation in the states. The petition was tabled. Franklin died April 17, 1790. The petition and the congressional debate are at the National Archives — linked below.
In June 1772, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield of the English Court of King's Bench ruled in the case of James Somerset — an enslaved man brought to England from the colonies — that slavery had no basis in English common law and that Somerset could not be forcibly returned to slavery on English soil. The ruling did not abolish slavery in England. It said that English law did not support it, and that no one could be forcibly removed from England to be kept as a slave.
The ruling spread through the colonies immediately. Colonial newspapers reported it. Slaveholders understood its potential implications: if the principle were extended, slavery under English law might eventually be dismantled through common law rather than legislation. Several historians — including those associated with the 1619 Project and scholars such as Patricia Bradley and Simon Schama — have argued that this ruling was among the factors that made Southern slaveholders more receptive to independence. Their argument: some who feared that remaining British subjects might eventually mean the abolition of slavery under English common law had a specific, economic reason to support separation.
Primary source evidence that some founders were aware of this dynamic includes a letter from Patrick Henry in 1773 — one year after the Somerset ruling — in which he acknowledges the "general inconvenience" of slavery while declining to do anything about it. More directly, the deleted passage from Jefferson's Declaration draft blamed the King for "captivating and carrying them into slavery" — a framing that positioned slavery as a British imposition rather than an American institution, which some historians read as a strategic argument designed to separate American slaveholders from British legal liability for the institution.
Other historians — including Gordon Wood and Alan Taylor — argue that the evidence for Somerset as a cause of independence is weak and that most colonial slaveholders did not believe the ruling threatened American slavery. The debate is ongoing. The documents are linked below. Read them and form your own view.
Is it not a little surprising that the Professors of Christianity should be so forgetful of their Religion as to imitate the Example of it so little, and countenance and act in Face of it so much? Would any one believe that I am Master of Slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general Inconvenience of living without them; I will not, I cannot justify it.
On July 5, 1852 — seventy-six years after the Declaration — Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Rochester, New York, at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. He had been born into slavery. He had escaped. He had become the most prominent Black intellectual in America. He was asked to speak on the occasion of the Fourth of July.
What he delivered is one of the most extraordinary documents in American history. It is not a rejection of the founders. It is an application of their logic — taken seriously, without compromise, to its necessary conclusion. The full speech is at the Library of Congress. What follows are the passages from this speech relevant to this episode.
Douglass opened by honoring the founders — explicitly, without irony:
"Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too — great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration."
Frederick Douglass · "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" · July 5, 1852 · LOC · loc.gov/item/mfd.25003
Then he turned to the question he had been asked to address:
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."
Frederick Douglass · "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" · July 5, 1852 · LOC · loc.gov/item/mfd.25003
And then — this is the passage most often left out — he made his argument about the Constitution:
"Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery... interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither."
Frederick Douglass · "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" · July 5, 1852 · LOC · loc.gov/item/mfd.25003
Douglass's argument was not that the founders were right and the country had simply failed to live up to them. His argument was that the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution, honestly applied — taken at face value, read without the accommodations and compromises that surrounded them — demanded abolition. He used the founders' own words as the instrument of their indictment. And he did it while honoring them as great men.
The speech is 5,500 words. It is in the Library of Congress. It is public domain. It is linked below. Read it in full.
This episode has no conclusion. The documents above are the record. Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal and owned over 600 human beings across his lifetime. Adams called slavery a foul contagion and did nothing legislative to end it. Mason called it the curse of heaven and freed no one. Washington wished privately for abolition and signed the Fugitive Slave Act. The Constitution encoded slavery in three separate clauses without using the word. Wheatley wrote about liberty while enslaved. Prince Hall cited the Declaration to demand abolition one year after it was signed. Franklin petitioned Congress to end the slave trade at eighty-four years old and died two months later having failed. Douglass read the founders' words without compromise and concluded they demanded freedom.
Those are the facts. The archive holds them. Every document above is linked to the source where it lives. Go read them yourself.