The Declaration of Independence is 1,320 words. Most Americans have read the second sentence. Almost no one has read the rest. The document that launched a nation contains a deleted slavery passage, 27 specific legal charges against a named king, and a closing line that most people have never encountered. The primary sources are open. Here is the record.
The Continental Congress appointed a Committee of Five on June 11, 1776, to draft a declaration of independence: Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. Jefferson did the writing. He produced a draft in approximately 17 days, working in rented rooms on Market Street in Philadelphia. He submitted it to the committee, which made minor revisions. The committee submitted it to Congress on June 28.
Congress debated and revised the draft from July 1 through July 4. By the time they voted to adopt it, Congress had deleted approximately 480 words and modified the text throughout, removing roughly a quarter of what Jefferson had written. Jefferson was not pleased. He sent copies of his original draft to friends for years afterward, including the parallel text alongside the final version so the deletions were visible. His original draft is at the Library of Congress.
I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never expected that he would have been obliged to leave out.
The most substantial deletion Congress made was a passage near the end of the charges against the king in which Jefferson indicted the slave trade. It is the most forceful language in Jefferson's entire draft and the passage he most regretted losing. Congress removed it entirely. It does not appear in the final Declaration.
Jefferson's draft blamed the king for the slave trade and then blamed him again for arming enslaved people against the colonists, a reference to Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation offering freedom to enslaved men who joined the British. The passage contained a direct contradiction: Jefferson himself enslaved hundreds of people. He blamed the king for the institution while participating in it. Congress removed the passage. Jefferson wrote in his notes that it was deleted "in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it." He also noted that Northern delegates whose merchants were involved in the slave trade were not sorry to see it go.
The second paragraph of the Declaration is the most quoted passage in American political history. Jefferson did not write it from scratch. George Mason had written a near-identical formulation six weeks earlier in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted June 12, 1776:
Jefferson later wrote that the Declaration was not meant to express original ideas. Writing to Henry Lee in 1825, he stated its purpose directly:
Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.
The Declaration is not primarily a philosophical document. The second paragraph is 110 words. The charges against King George III that follow it are more than 600 words, nearly half the entire document. They are a legal indictment, specific and documented, listing the king's violations of the colonists' rights under English law as the founders understood it.
The Declaration of Independence is a statement of separation, a legal indictment, and a statement of political philosophy. It is not a governing document. It established no government, created no laws, and defined no rights in enforceable terms. Those functions were left to the state constitutions already being written in 1776 and to the federal Constitution that would follow eleven years later.
What it did establish, in terms that would be argued over for centuries, was the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that when a government ceases to secure the rights it exists to protect, the people have the right to alter or abolish it. That principle was not new. Jefferson drew it from Locke, Mason drew it from the English constitutional tradition, and the English constitutional tradition drew it from centuries of argument about the relationship between rulers and the ruled that runs back, through Coke's interpretation, to Magna Carta.
The Declaration said all men are created equal. It did not define who counted as men in the political sense. That question, who the document included when it said "all men", was the central unresolved argument of the next ninety years of American history. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were the nation's answer, written in the aftermath of a war fought over it. Jefferson wrote the phrase. He enslaved 600 people over his lifetime. Both of those facts are in the primary record. The archive holds both.
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