EXTRACT from Jefferson’s NOTES on VIRGINIA, written in the Year 1782.
“THERE must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people, produced by the existence of slavery among us.
The whole commerce between master and slave, is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal.
This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave, he is learning to do what he sees other do.
If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally, it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.
The man must be a prodigy who can restrain his manners and morals, undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriæ of the other.
For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that, in which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute, as far as depends on his individual endeavours, to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him.
With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed.
For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves, a very small portion indeed are ever seen to labour.
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering NUMBERS, nature, and NATURAL MEANS only, a REVOLUTION of the wheel of fortune, an EXCHANGE of situations, is among possible events; that it may become possible by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.
But it is impossible to be temperate, and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of POLICY, of morals, of history, natural and civil.
We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one’s mind.
I think a CHANGE already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution.
The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way, I hope PREPARING , under the AUSPICES of HEAVEN, for a TOTAL EMANCIPATION, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by THEIR EXTIRPATION.”
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The original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a scathing denunciation of slavery. Jefferson’s change declares it immoral and illegal to consider one person the property of another. If you would be unhappy being someone else’s property it follows it is wrong to consider another person your property. If the original draft of the Declaration of Independence had been approved there would have been no slavery after the revolution of 1776. The original draft was not approved, slavery was not abolished, and a civil war was fought leaving a legacy of bitterness in America still felt today.
Jefferson’s original draft states, “he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s 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. 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, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & 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.”
From: Thomas Jefferson, the “original Rough draught,” Declaration of Independence, June-12-27 1776, manuscript collections of the Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE Washington, D.C. 20540 & on-line exhibit
http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/declara1.html
http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html