Words Worth Remembering: Jefferson’s Declaration
He sat in a wooden revolving chair of his design, secluded within the walls on the second floor of a building somewhat away from the deafening noise of downtown Philadelphia. The task of drafting the American colonies’ statement of independence from Great Britain had fallen to a 33-year-old, six-foot-two, red-headed lawyer from Virginia.
In putting pen to paper in the suffocating summer heat of July 1776, Thomas Jefferson’s admitted purpose was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before,” he recalled years later, “but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we [were] compelled to take.”
Jefferson’s Declaration aimed neither “at originality of principle or sentiments.” It wasn’t copied “from any particular and previous writing.” Rather, “it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.” His goal, simple yet extraordinary, was “to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”
That Jefferson, so young and quiet, had been chosen for the task reflected both sectional posturing and literary prowess. As did many, John Adams believed that “a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business” if the radical push for independence were to succeed.
Jefferson also “brought with him a reputation for literature, science, and a happy talent of composition.” Writings of his, such as the famed Summary View of the Rights of British America, in which Jefferson in 1774 laid forth “the united complaints of His Majesty’s subjects in America,” were known by the delegates of the Second Continental Congress as displaying a “remarkable” and “peculiar felicity of expression.”
In Summary View, Jefferson had already written a draft statement of independence. Parliament was a pretentious “almighty power” single-handedly scheming to reduce the American colonies “from opulence to beggary.”
Jefferson even went so far as to proclaim that monarchs “are the servants, not the proprietors of the people,” and that the same “god who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” The rights of the colonies, the Virginian declared, were “derived from the laws of nature” and were not “a gift of their chief magistrate.”
Chosen to join and head a committee to produce a document of American independence on June 11, four days after his fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee had formally proposed the motion for independence, Jefferson set out to reiterate what he had written in Summary View and, after June 12, what had been declared in the Virginia Declaration of Rights.
“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable,” Jefferson wrote in his “original Rough draught, that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Perhaps the most memorable passage of Jefferson’s draft is one of the last charges—and, at 168 words, one of the longest—against George III, who he condemned, ironically, as having “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
Jefferson continued, writing that “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.”
The significance of this passage, though interestingly absent or diminished in both textbooks and most scholarly coverage of the Declaration, should not be lost. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 and 1773 dictionaries of the English language, to date the most influential dictionary in English history, defined “men” as the plural of “man,” which, first and foremost, meant “Human being.”
Although it has long been argued that Jefferson and the founders did not intend to include anyone but white, landed males in the statement “all men are created equal” (a statement not wholly untrue), it is difficult not to notice Jefferson’s clear meaning.
After declaring the natural equality of all men, Jefferson later condemned the slave trade as depraving “MEN” of their natural rights—a “cruel war,” he wrote, “against human nature itself.”
Years earlier, in 1770, Jefferson defended a Black slave in court. “Under the law of nature, all men are born free,” he argued, and “everyone comes into the world with the right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using his will.”
But Jefferson, like most of his contemporaries, could escape neither the racial aristocracy nor the monetary benefit of slavery. Still, that he described it as a crime against nature and capitalized the word “MEN” (a rarity in Jefferson’s writings) when describing Black slaves remains remarkable; they were the same “men” created equal paragraphs earlier.
In final form, the Declaration was much more moderate. The entire clause “reprobating the enslaving” of Africans, Jefferson complained, “was struck out in complaisance with South Carolina and Georgia,” who “still wished it to continue.”
John Adams, for one, “was delighted” by the “high tone and the flights of oratory” in the draft, “especially that concerning negro slavery, which, though I knew his southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly would never oppose.” Abigail Adams, too, praised the “manly sentiments” opposing slavery.
The final Declaration was still an innately anti-slavery document; “all men” were still “created equal.” It put eternal pressure on the slavocracy and ultimately inspired emancipation and equal civil and political rights. But it was Jefferson who gave it its spirit.
“All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln wrote in April 1859, “who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence… had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, 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 re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”