Jefferson’s Anti-Slavery Declaration

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approached, John Adams reflected upon his role in drafting that monumental document. Adams was one of five members of the Continental Congress tasked with writing a Declaration on June 11, 1776; the other four were Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert R. Livingston of New York, and thirty-three-year-old Virginian Thomas Jefferson. As Adams remembered it in an 1822 letter, he and Jefferson were initially both chosen to write the first draft, but Adams convinced the younger man to take sole responsibility, giving him three good reasons: “Reason 1st. You are a Virginian, and Virginia ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason 2d. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; You are very much otherwise. Reason 3d: You can write ten times better than I can.” Very well, said Jefferson — “I will do as well as I can.”¹

Jefferson, of course, remembered the drafting of the Declaration slightly differently: “in some of the particulars, Mr. Adams’s memory has led him into unquestionable error.” Whereas Adams took credit for persuading Jefferson into becoming the author, Jefferson recalled that the Committee of Five “unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught,” and Jefferson consented.² Regardless of how he became the draftsman of independence, in the American national memory, Thomas Jefferson remains the one most associated with the document outlining America’s founding principles. And that fact has caused no small amount of difficulty in recent decades, as Americans have become more deeply aware of the ubiquity of slavery at the time of the founding, and more deeply disturbed by the seeming hypocrisy of many members of the founding generation. How could Thomas Jefferson, author of soaring rhetoric in favor of natural rights and against tyranny, also have been the enslaver of hundreds of human beings? Does the very fact of his authorship deprive the Declaration of any moral standing in the fight against slavery?

There are several ways to deal with the problem of a slaveowner’s authorship of an otherwise anti-slavery document: one could argue, for example, that Jefferson was merely tasked with writing the first draft, and several of his compatriots on the Committee of Five had more credible antislavery credentials than he did. Franklin gave the last years of his life to serving as president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, after all, while Adams and Sherman were also opponents of the institution. The full congress also contributed to the Declaration, and many who voted for the final version on July 4 were, or would become, anti-slavery. Moreover, one of the most significant consequences of American Independence was the subsequent wave of emancipation laws enacted by the founding generation. By 1804, slavery had been firmly placed on the path toward extinction in all of the northern states, and by 1807, Congress voted to ban the transatlantic slave trade.³ Although it took almost six more decades (and a bloody civil war) before emancipation reached the entire nation, eventually the proponents of freedom were able to bring the laws into alignment with the founding principle of liberty. Whatever the intentions of the original draftsman of independence, in this line of reasoning, the effect of the document was anti-slavery.

But perhaps we should not be so quick to deny Jefferson himself credit for authoring an anti-slavery Declaration. Most Americans do not know about the content of his original draft: Returning to John Adams’ memories, we learn that Adams was “delighted” with Jefferson’s draft because of its “flights of Oratory,” and particularly with “that concerning Negro Slavery, which though I knew his Southern Bretheren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose.”⁴ The “Oratory” concerning slavery that Adams referred to in this letter consisted of a lengthy paragraph, originally placed in the draft Declaration as the final — most significant? — charge against King George III. Jefferson wrote of the monarch:

He 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 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…he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, and 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.⁵

Modern readers of the Declaration frequently question whether the phrase “all men are created equal” truly was intended to apply to all men, or whether Jefferson had in mind only white males when he wrote those words. After all, in 1776 most women could not own property or vote; most black people had neither the vote nor, in many cases, basic liberty. Surely “all men” was meant in the most limited sense?

But Jefferson’s final charge against King George makes absolutely clear that Jefferson considered slavery a “war against human nature,” a violation of the “most sacred rights of life and liberty.” And lest any speculate that Jefferson had the violation of white men’s rights in mind when he wrote those words, consider that the paragraph is describing violations of the rights of people in “another hemisphere,” who had to be taken captive and then carried a great distance, often suffering “miserable death in their transportation thither”—obviously a reference to the millions who perished during the transatlantic voyages.⁶ Most damning of all, Jefferson emphasized that King George was determined to keep open slave markets — markets where “MEN” were bought and sold. Every reader of the Declaration would know that white males were not the persons bought and sold in transatlantic slave markets; black men, black women, and black children were therefore all encompassed within the meaning of the word “men,” for Jefferson. When he wrote “all men are created equal,” he meant this phrase in the most inclusive sense possible — he meant mankind, not white males.

In 1775, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation designed to destabilize the economy of Virginia, strike terror into the hearts of its white population, and add soldiers to the ranks of the English army. His proclamation offered freedom to all the enslaved workers of rebellious Americans who were “able and willing to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this colony to a proper sense of their duty, to his Majesty’s Crown and dignity."⁷ In his final charge against the King, Jefferson first reminded his readers that Virginians had tried to end the importation of enslaved labor into their colony, only to have the king veto their efforts (he had “prostituted his negative,” implying that the king was being corrupted by the slave trade lobby and the revenue the crown received due to slave labor).⁸ Then, Jefferson referenced Dunmore’s proclamation, arguing that the King not only prevented the colonists from ending the slave trade, but that he also incentivized the enslaved workers to take arms against their former masters. England did not offer freedom out of concern for the human rights of the enslaved; rather, Jefferson argued that the king forced the enslaved to commit the crime of murder to purchase their liberty, which the king had taken from them in the first place!

Jefferson perhaps overstated his case against King George; after all, the colonists themselves benefited from enslaved labor, and many slave owning Virginians did not wish to curtail the importation of slaves — certainly, most white southerners did not. And this, according to both Jefferson and Adams, is why the entire paragraph about slavery was cut from the final version of the Declaration. “I knew his Southern Bretheren would never suffer [the grievance against the slave trade] to pass in Congress,” recalled Adams; while Jefferson similarly remembered that “The clause...reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in compliance 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.”⁹

So Jefferson wanted to blame the slave trade on King George. But some colonial representatives wanted to maintain the trade for their own self-interested reasons, and therefore Jefferson’s blatant condemnation of slavery as a violation of the “most sacred rights of life and liberty” was cut. Does this evidence just further prove that the Declaration was not, in fact, anti-slavery?

It does not, for three reasons: first, while the specifically anti-slavery section was removed, the Declaration remains an inherently anti-slavery, pro–human equality and liberty document. It does not, after all, state that “all white men” are created equal; the Committee of Five submitted a draft that included all mankind, and Congress did not see fit to add any restrictions on who qualifies for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These words may be, and have been, read in the most inclusive way, and that is precisely how Jefferson (and the other members of the drafting committee, for that matter) intended them to be read.

Second, lest anyone suspect that Jefferson only included anti-slavery language in the Declaration to make a public-relations attack on King George, it should be noted that before writing the Declaration, Jefferson had already established himself as an opponent of slavery. As a young lawyer, Jefferson took on six different freedom suits, pro bono, attempting to gain his clients' liberty. His efforts, so far as the historical record shows, were all unsuccessful; so was his 1769 effort in the Virginia Assembly to pass a manumission law.¹⁰ In 1776, Jefferson wrote a constitution for Virginia that would have ended the importation of slaves; in 1783, he wrote another constitution for the state that would have ended slavery itself after the year 1800 (neither constitution was adopted). In the years after independence, Jefferson continued to pursue abolition policies: In 1784, he unsuccessfully attempted to ban slavery from all federal territories in his version of the Northwest Ordinance. While the proviso banning slavery failed to pass (by one vote), Jefferson’s language in this document found new purchase as the basis for the Thirteen Amendment. In his 1785 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson detailed yet another unsuccessful effort, this time to get an anti-slavery amendment passed in Virginia, and he also condemned slavery in the strongest terms yet. And as president, Jefferson urged Congress to end America’s participation in the slave trade at the earliest moment allowed by the Constitution, using the same phrase to describe slavery —“violations of human rights”— that he had used in the Declaration’s deleted paragraph.¹¹

In his personal life, Jefferson contemplated importing German laborers to live alongside his own workers as part of a plan to transition them from slavery to freedom, perhaps speculating that immigrants would not be tainted by prejudice and would thus be more helpful to newly freed African Americans. But this plan came to nothing, in part because of Jefferson’s national political commitments, and in part because of his lifelong struggle with debt. By the end of his life, Jefferson was legally prohibited from freeing more than a handful of people (and those only with special permission from the Governor of Virginia) due to his indebtedness. Still, we must note that endorsing universal equality and liberty in the Declaration was not an aberration for Jefferson; it was merely one in a long chain of public anti-slavery actions. ¹²

The final piece of evidence for the anti-slavery nature of the Declaration is that, as we have already noted, the Declaration has been successfully invoked time and time again on behalf of liberty, not slavery. As Lincoln put it, Jefferson deserves “all honor” for having “the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”¹³ Leaders of the Confederacy had to renounce both Jefferson and his Declaration, acknowledging that the draftsman of independence truly believed in the natural equality of all mankind — a belief which, according to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, was “an error,” one that could only be corrected by forming a new constitution based on “exactly the opposite idea…upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”¹⁴

Had he lived to see the Thirteen Amendment, Jefferson would have been pleased that the promises of the Declaration were being fulfilled. As he wrote shortly before his death, two hundred years ago, “may it [the Declaration] be to the world what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all.) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains...and to assume the blessings and security of self government.” He continued, “all eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately…. These are grounds of hope for others.”¹⁵ Obviously, the “palpable truth” of natural equality would not take hold overnight; some eyes had yet to be opened to the rights of man(kind), but Jefferson believed that as education spread, so too would the ideas of the Declaration become increasingly self-evident. He did not predict that the Declaration would only inspire Europeans, but rather “all” parts of the world. And he was right. Although the fight for justice and against unfree labor continues, slavery is now illegal everywhere — thanks, in part, to Jefferson and his anti-slavery Declaration.  

¹ John Adams to Timothy Pickering, August 6, 1822, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7674.

² Thomas Jefferson (hereafter “TJ”) to James Madison, August 30, 1823, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-03-02-0113.

³ See “From Thomas Jefferson to United States Congress, 2 December 1806,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-4616; and the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves (which went into effect in January 1808), National Archives, https://docsteach.org/document/act-prohibit-importation-slaves/

⁴ Adams to Pickering, August 6, 1822.

⁵ “III. Jefferson’s ‘original Rough draught’ of the Declaration of Independence, 11 June–4 July 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0176-0004. Emphasis in the original.

⁶ For the definitive database on the transatlantic slave trade and its human costs (out of the 12.5 million who embarked in Africa, only 10.7 million are estimated to have reached their destinations on the other side of the Atlantic), see https://www.slavevoyages.org.

⁷ John Murray, Lord Dunmore, “Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775)," Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/lord-dunmores-proclamation-1775/.

⁸ See for example “Virginia Colony to George III of England, April 1, 1772, Petition Against Importation of Slaves from Africa,” Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib000054. For the King’s attitudes toward slavery (and profits from the trade), see Suzanne Schwarz, “Royal Attitudes to the Atlantic Slave Trade and Abolition in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” The English Historical Review, 138, no. 592, (June 2023): Pages 497–527.

⁹ “Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Early Career (the so-called ‘Autobiography’), [6 January–29 July 1821],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-17-02-0324-0002. It should be noted that Jefferson also believed some northern congressmen disliked his antislavery paragraph, “for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”

¹⁰ See for example “Argument in the Case of Howell v. Netherland,” April 1770, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leichester Ford (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–5), 1:376. For Jefferson’s account of the unsuccessful 1769 law, see TJ, Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1743–1790: Together with a Summary of the Chief Events in Jefferson’s Life, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 7. There is no official documentation of the bill, likely because the Assembly did not record bills that failed to pass. However, Jefferson’s account is corroborated by the fact that in May 1769, Edward Stabler went to Williamsburg to lobby for such a bill so that he and his fellow Quakers could legally free their own slaves, but as Jefferson recounted, the majority of Assemblymen were hostile to such an effort, and Stabler left disappointed. See Richard K. MacMaster, “Arthur Lee's ‘Address on Slavery’: An Aspect of Virginia's Struggle to End the Slave Trade, 1765–1774,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 80, no. 2 (Apr., 1972): 141–57.

¹¹ For the 1776 Virginia constitution, see TJ, Autobiography, 77; for the 1783 constitution, see “III. Jefferson’s Draft of a Constitution for Virginia, [May–June 1783],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-06-02-0255-0004; for the Northwest Ordinance, see “III. Report of the Committee, 1 March 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-06-02-0420-0004 ; for the antislavery amendment, see Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/notes-on-the-state-of-viriginia-query-xiv-justice/; for the condemnation of slavery, Query XVIII, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/query-xviii-an-excerpt-from-notes-on-the-state-of-virginia-by-thomas-jefferson-1784/; for the address to Congress, see “From Thomas Jefferson to United States Congress, 2 December 1806,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-4616.

¹² For the plan to import German workers, and for Jefferson’s struggle with debt, see Cara Rogers Stevens, “The French Experiment: Thomas Jefferson and William Short Debate Slavery, 1785–1826,” American Political Thought 10, no. 3 (2021): 327–362.

¹³ Abraham Lincoln to H.L. Pierce, April 6, 1859, Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-henry-pierce-and-others/

¹⁴ Alexander H. Stephens, Public and Private, with Letters and Speeches, Before, During and Since the War, ed. Henry Cleveland (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1866), 717–728, https://archive.org/details/alexanderhstephe6114clev/page/n9/mode/2up (emphasis added).

¹⁵ “From Thomas Jefferson to Roger Chew Weightman, 24 June 1826, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-6179

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