Did 'all men are created equal' always include black Americans?
Two weeks ago, I discussed the committee authorship of the Declaration of Independence and its adoption (after significant edits) by the Continental Congress.
Today, I want to discuss the extraordinary edits concerning the issue of slavery. As is well known, the Continental Congress assigned an editorial committee of five men: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston and Benjamin Franklin.
Thomas Jefferson penned the first draft, which was then edited by the committee and then the Continental Congress in session. As noted before in my July 24th column, they made significant edits. However, the most significant and the most extensive edit concerned Jefferson’s ringing condemnation of the slave trade and slavery.
Historian Holly Brewer, in her forthcoming book, The King’s Slaves, makes a convincing case that Jefferson’s language “all men are created equal” included slaves. Brewer quotes Jefferson’s condemnation of the King:
“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. 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 …” (Brewer notes that Jefferson wrote MEN in all caps and italics.)
When the Continental Congress deleted this segment of the Declaration, after some heated debate, Jefferson was so incensed that he constructed six handwritten copies of his original version of the Declaration of Independence (which included all the deleted passages condemning slavery). In all his copies (which he sent around the world), Jefferson underlined the deleted parts with a note that says, “These are the deleted parts.”
Holly Brewer, Burke Professor of American History at the University of Maryland, summing up her research on the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, concluded the following:
“When I really looked at them and looked at the way the original first draft was echoed in the deleted clauses, I realized there’s no way you can read the Declaration of Independence as not including, at least for Jefferson and the original Committee of Five—which included John Adams and Ben Franklin—that all men are created equal did not include black people. They absolutely thought it did. 100%”
And yet, the antislavery rhetoric was deleted. Why? Forty-one of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. All 13 colonies permitted slavery in 1776, and approximately 20% of the population was of African descent. Clearly, if the Continental Congress had outlawed slavery, the American Revolution would have been stillborn.
However, increasingly people knew it was wrong and that the evil of slavery would have to be addressed at some point in the future. Jefferson did indeed “tremble for his country” when he realized that the Creator intended for the slaves to be free.
However, in 1776 the colonies could not have united around abolishing slavery. It clearly caused some of them real personal anguish.
Jefferson is a classic example of a great man with great flaws. Evidently, he lived significantly beyond his means financially his entire adult life. When he died, he was bankrupt and his estate was liquidated, including 600 slaves. When you consider Jefferson’s multi-decade intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, a slave woman who was also Jefferson’s deceased wife’s half-sister — many of the manifold human heartaches accompanying slavery are testified to in that fact — you get a hint of the cognitive racial dissonance in Jefferson’s life.
Should we excuse Jefferson and his contemporaries for not acting on their convictions? Of course not. Their hypocrisy on the race issue was, and is, profound. And yet, many of them were not blind to their hypocrisy and the injustice of slavery. It troubled them greatly. Eventually, it led the nation to end the national disgrace.
In this 250th year of our independence, let us all pledge to redouble our efforts to finish the job of living up to the truth of “All men are created equal.”
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
