Slavery in American and the Declaration of Independence - Essay Example

Slavery in American and the Declaration of Independence The founding document of American liberty, the Declaration of Independence, was written by Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned slaves, about the creation of a nation that would sanction slaveholding. The most famous words from the Declaration of Independence are undoubtedly “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.” It is quite clear from the facts and actions spurred by these words and the battle undertaken in their defense that the men who drafted and adopted the Declaration of Independence did not have the idea of actual equality for all men in mind (Dumbauld 55). The two men primarily responsible for the wording of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson and John Adams, cannot be said to have ever supported the idea of extending quality to those forcefully imported from the African continent regardless of whether they were slave or free. The promise found in the Declaration of Independence that are men are created equal must today be viewed with the caveat that those who conferred legitimacy it were convinced that blacks held no claim to the same rights as whites and so there was no necessity to qualify the promise of universal equality within the document. The draft of the Declaration of Independence that was handed over by Jefferson, Adams, and Benjamin Franklin go the Continental Congress for approval originally contained a quite long passage directly calling to question the very institution of slavery. "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 or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither” (Higginbotham 381). This passage is not to be found on the official Declaration, of course, because representatives to the Continental Congress from the southern slaveholding states quickly colluded to express objection to its potential harm to their economic interests once the shackles of British rule had been successfully thrown off. In the final version of the Declaration, references to the institution of slavery are still expressed, but only in a manner that specifically accuses the British of inciting the slaves to revolt against their owners. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and most of the members of the Continental Congress had historically expressed in no uncertain terms before it came to write a declaration for independence based on the radical concept that all men were created equal their belief that a righteous difference existed between the rights of whites and the rights of blacks. John Adams went so far as to write the God Himself has “never intended the American colonists ‘for Negroes…and therefore never intended us for slaves” (Breen 202). When the phrase “all men are created equal” is found in the Declaration, therefore, it is actually is truer that it may at first glance appear. The intention of the Declaration of Independence was to spur not blacks to fight for independence and equality, but for whites to fight for the suspension of the class rule that had dominated European civilization for centuries. Jefferson and the other founding fathers did not write or approve the Declaration as a means to give hope to slaves that the American Revolution was going to bring them freedom, or that it would endow freed blacks with anything even approaching equality. Jefferson’s incitement of the proposition that all men are created equal was at the time sheer propaganda directed specifically toward white colonists whom the revolutionaries needed to buy the idea that business as usual in Europe for millennia was not the future of the coming new country. Jefferson’s use of the words “all men are created equal” can actually be seen more a threat to the grounded ideals of aristocracy. The very idea of equality among men was anathema to the prevailing power structure of the planet; a power structure dominated by white men and one in which blacks had no say whatever. The principle of equality was indulged by Jefferson and engendered by the passage of the Declaration of Independence as a mean of threatening the status quo and inciting the common landowner to take up arms against the sea of troubles represented not just by Britain but by the fact that the European heritage of those men had never known anything else for over 2,000 years. In that sense, then, Jefferson’s promise of a country based upon the equality of all men is far less beyond reproach. What Jefferson and Adams as the signers of the Declaration of Independence clearly did not intend could not be stemmed by that resistance to temptation, however. Once the Declaration of Independence had been formally signed, copies were made and read aloud around the colonies. Present at these public readings of a document written by the most fertile and brilliant minds in the land and containing the assertion, never before found in any historical document upon which a revolution was based, that all men were created equal were thousands of blacks. As the foremost piece of revolutionary propaganda around, these blacks were destined to hear the Declaration expounded by firebrand Patriots and what these blacks heard was a completely unqualified assertion of their own equality. By refusing to qualify their statement that “all men are created equal” so that it was obvious that their own discriminatory prejudices were in place, the founding fathers essentially assured that misinterpretation was bound to occur. In retrospect, the response should have been expected; Africans forced to immigrate to America against their will would find in the Declaration’s contention that “all men are created” a logical extension to their own state of affairs. Blacks naturally began to apply the concept of equality to themselves, despite what the architects of the Declaration may have intended. In addition, the very assertion of equality began to force many white colonists, mainly those in the North, to confront what would become the primary contradiction of the American experiment: how could the revolutionaries claim to have been fighting for the equality of all men while at the same time implicitly endorsing slavery by doing nothing about it, or explicitly endorsing it by fighting abolition. This seeming contradiction in the spirit of the words had the ultimate effect on white Americans of forcing them to choose the literal meaning intended by the writers of the document or rejecting the very ideological basis of the revolution and, by extension, the country produced by that revolution. This same choice did not apply to black nor Indians nor, in fact, anyone who lived in the colonies who was not white. The contradiction did not exist because there was only one answer. Either “all men are created equal” applied to all, or did not apply at all. Since slavery kept thousands of blacks in bondage and those who were freed were denied most of the rights afford white Americans, clearly the only conclusion that was possible to make is that the Declaration of Independence was an empty promise at best and a cowardly lie at worst. Whether one lives in a world in which a man of color may be just days away from being elected President of the United States or whether one was a person of color being treated as property by narrow-minded backwoodsmen who happened to be smart enough to learn how to make profits using slave labor, the undeniable fact is that taken at its most literal level, the Declaration of Independence makes a grand promise that it had no intention of upholding. Taken as the piece of propaganda directed toward a quite specific audience, however, it becomes more difficult to make the argument that the words “all men are created equal” is not a statement expressing a fundamental Jeffersonian truth. Thomas Jefferson owned slaved and lived in a slaveholding state. Nevertheless, there is much to suggest that under certain conditions Jefferson would have approved of abolition, though it must be admitted that the primary condition seems to an independent and separate state (Sarson). This necessity, along with Jefferson’s contentions toward the idea of an accepted and unquestioned inferiority of the black race, lend even more credence to the argument that the Declaration of Independence was effectively written independently of black equality, rights, or expectations of liberty (Johnson 242). John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the central figures in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and, when combined with the natural antagonism of those representatives to the Continental Congress who had a vested interest in the equality of men by virtue of their ownership of slaves, it becomes impossible to assume that the document was written with the rights of slaves in mind. So while the literal text that all men are created equal may be somewhat truthful, the spirit in which the document was written does not come close to supporting the basic contention that all are created equally and endowed with the same rights as everyone else. Works Cited Breen, T. H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Dumbauld, Edward. The Declaration of Independence and What It Means Today. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. . Higginbotham, A. Leon. In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1980. Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Sarson, Steven. "The Mind of Thomas Jefferson." Journal of Southern History 74.2 (2008): 431+. Read More