Thursday, July 4, 2013

The Lost Paragraph


This Execrable Commerce

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's 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 infidels powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold: 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 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.

Politics & Compromise

The above paragraph appears in what Jefferson termed his "original rough draft" of the Declaration of Independence.  Now original rough draft might be misleading, as there were many previous versions that Jefferson termed "composition drafts".  This rough draft was presented to Congress and this paragraph, this charge was Jefferson's desired closing paragraph to the list of charges against the King. 

The Jefferson Committee wanted to keep this paragraph and it is said that it was John Adam's favorite, this paragraph was struck by Congress and that... is compromise in politics.

Happy 4th

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