Independence Days news

MANIFESTO

The recent discovery that Jefferson emended the Declaration of Independence is kind of interesting, I suppose.

Nevertheless, I've always been more struck by the fact that one of Jefferson's drafts included the following criticism of George III:

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, captivatng 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, 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, by murdering the people for 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.

Needless to say, the agrarian states of North and South Carolina, et al, couldn't stand to have this rebuke included, and so it was expunged.

Funny how that particular emendation is rarely discussed.