This was the passage South Carolina was the
main instigator to have removed from the Declaration of Independence
before they or two other states would sign it. Some recorded the two
other states would sign this as is if South Carolina did.
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 & 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 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, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying
off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with
crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
Please keep in
mind that slavery of all races was the norm of all of human history. Up
to one half of all peoples born were slaves of others. It was not until
these times, when men armed with the Word of God were finally starting
to throw off the despotism that ruled the world in perpetuity that this
issue of legal human slavery could even hope to be addressed. The King
of England was forcing slavery upon colonies that had banned it. This
was part of the reason for the break from England in the first place.
The founders of the nation simply didn't have the power to fight a war
against a superpower without all the states being allied. If it were not
for another superpower aiding them, France, they would have lost as it
was. Most of the founders wanted to ban it here and now, many of the
leading figures were part of the abolition movement. The issue of
legal human slavery would have to be addressed at a later date. Those,
the majority who wanted it banned simply didn't have the power to do so
at this time. Abraham Lincoln pointed this out in his debates against
Democrats while running for office:
At the seventh
and last debate in Alton, Mr. Lincoln quoted from a speech he had made
in Springfield on June 26, 1857: "Allow me while upon this subject
briefly to present one other extract from a speech of mine, more than a
year ago, at Springfield, in discussing this very same question, soon
after Judge Douglas took his ground that negroes were not included in
the Declaration of Independence: I think the authors of that notable
instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare
all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were
equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity.
They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all
men created equal — equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this
they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all
were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about
to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer
such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right so that the
enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.
They mean to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be
familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even
though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby
constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the
happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.
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