The Declaration of Independence and Slavery

 

In 1776, Jefferson was chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence, putting forward the arguments of the colonies for declaring themselves free and independent states.

The Declaration is regarded as a charter of universal liberties, proclaiming that all men are equal in rights, regardless of birth, wealth, or status; that those rights are inherent in each human, a gift of the Creator, not a gift of government, and that government is the servant and not the master of the people.

Although slavery, practiced in all thirteen colonies at the time, made a mockery of Jefferson’s poetic vision, no less a figure than Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, wrote:

 “All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to 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 reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

Murder in Colonial Virginia

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800