From Joseph Ellis’ book on Thomas Jefferson: American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
This excerpt discusses the three revisions made by Congress (things to be deleted) that bothered Jefferson most.
Most of the debate in the Congress and most of the revisions of Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration focused on the long bill of indictment against George III, the section that modern readers care about least. When Jefferson much later insisted that he was not striving for “originality of principle or sentiment” but was seeking only to provide an “expression of the American mind”, he was probably referring to this section, which was intended to sum up the past twelve years of colonial opposition to British policy in language designed to make the king responsible for all the trouble. Jefferson had been practicing this list of grievances for more than two years, first in Summary View, then in Causes and Necessities and then in his drafts of the Virginia constitution. “I expected you had … exhausted the Subject of Complaint against Geo. 3d. and was at a loss to discover what the Congress would do for one to their Declaration of Independence without copying,” wrote Edmund Pendleton when he first saw the official version, “but find that you have acquitted yourselves very well on that score.”
As an elegant, if decidedly one-sided, version of recent Anglo-American history, this section of the Declaration has certainly stood the test of time, providing students of the American Revolution with a concise summary of the constitutional crisis from the colonists’ perspective at the propitious moment. As a reflection of Jefferson’s thinking, however, it is missing three distinctive and distinctively Jeffersonian perspectives on the conflict. When Jefferson wrote back to friends in Virginia, complaining that critics in the Congress had, as one friend put it, “mangled … the Manuscript”, these were the three major revisions he most regretted.
First, as we noticed earlier, the Congress deleted the long passage blaming George III for waging “cruel war against human nature itself” by establishing slavery in North America; Jefferson also accused the king of blocking colonial efforts to end the slave trade, then “exciting those very people to rise in arms against us … by murdering the people on whom he has also obtruded them.” Several complicated and even tortured ideas are struggling for supremacy here. One can surmise that the members of Congress decided to delete it out of sheer bewilderment, since the passage mixes together an implicit moral condemnation of slavery with an explicit condemnation of the British monarch for both starting it and trying to end it.
In his own notes on the debate in Congress Jefferson claimed that the opposition was wholly political. Several southern delegations, especially those of South Carolina and Georgia, opposied any restraint on the importation of slaves, he reported, adding that their “Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” Jefferson’s clear implication is that he was trying to take a principled stand against both slavery and the slave trade but that a majority of delegates were unprepared to go along with him.
The truth was much messier. With regard to the trade, Jefferson knew from his experience in the House of Burgesses that many established slaveowners in the Tidewater region favored an end of imports because their own plantations were already well stocked and new arrivals only reduced the value of their own slave populations. Ending the trade in Virginia, in short, was not at all synonymous with ending slavery. With regard to slavery itself, Jefferson’s formulation made great polemic sense but historical and intellectual nonsense. It absolved slaveowners like himself from any responsibility or complicity in the establishment of an institution that was clearly at odds with the values on which the newly independent American was based. Slavery was another one of those vestiges of feudalism foisted upon the liberty-loving colonists by the evil heir to the Norman Conquest. This was complete fiction, of course, but also completely in accord with Jefferson’s urge to preserve the purity of his moral dichotomies and his romantic view of America’s uncontaminated origins. Slavery was the serpent in the garden sent there by a satanic king. But the moral message conveyed by this depiction was not emancipation so much as commiseration. Since the colonists had nothing to do with establishing slavery — they were the unfortunate victims of English barbarism — they could not be blamed for its continuance. This was less a clarion call to end slavery than an invitation to wash one’s hands of the matter.
Second, Jefferson tried once again, as he had tried before in Causes and Necessities, to insert his favorite theory of expatriation, claiming that the first settlers came over at their own expense and initiative “unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britian.” His obsessive insistence on this theme derived from his devotion to the Saxon myth, which allowed for the neat separation of Whiggish colonists and feudal or absolute English ministers. The tangled history of imperial relations did not fit very well into these political categories, but Jefferson found it much easier to revise the history (i.e., claiming there had never been any colonial recognition of royal or parliamentary authority) than give up his moral dichotomies. Once again his colleagues in the Continental Congress found his argument excessive.
Third, the last excision came toward the very end of Jefferson’s draft. It was a rousingly emotional passage with decidedly sentimental overtones that condemned “our British brethren” for sending over “not only souldiers of our common blood, but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us.” It went on: “These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren. We must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends; but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will have it. The road to happiness & to glory is open to us too. We will tread it apart from them …” This was a remarkable piece of rhetoric that Jefferson apparently regarded as one of his better creations. Even at the end of his life he was bitter about its deletion. “The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many,” he recalled, and therefore “those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence.”
What strikes the modern reader is not the timidity of the Continental Congress for excising the passage so much as the melodramatic sentimentalism of Jefferson in composing it. As with the expatriation theory, Jefferson was anxious to depict the separation of teh colonies from the British Empire as a decision forced upon the colonists, who are passive victims rather than active agents of revolution. But here the broken bonds are more affective than political. A relationship based on love and trust has been violated, and the betrayed partner, the colonists, is bravely moving forward in life, wounded by the rejection but ready to face alone a glorious future that might otherwise have been shared together. This is a highly idealized and starkly sentimental rendering of how and why emotional separations happen, a projection onto the imperial crisis of the romantic innocence Jefferson had displayed in his adolescent encounters with young women, an all-or-nothing-at-all mentality that the other delegates found inappropriate for a state paper purporting to convey more sense than sensibility.
