Thomas Jefferson

Paragraph from Jefferson’s Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence Eliminated from the Final Draft by the Continental Congress (1776)

The following paragraph was part of Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration. The Continental Congress decided to omit it from the final version. Think carefully about why the Congress chose to exclude this paragraph.

He [George III] 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 hither. 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 and sold, he has prostituted his negative [royal veto] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.... He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by 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.