The+Declaration+of+Independence

Read some interesting stories about period copies of the Declaration by clicking below! [|NY Times article about the find of a lifetime] [|Declaration Found!]

...and another copy recently discovered in the UK! [|Declaration found in London]

Obviously, the Declaration of Independence is an inspiring document that Americans base their freedom on today, yet it did not deal with slavery. Most of the founding fathers did have strong feelings about it and wrestled with this institution existing side by side with statements like "All men are created equal".

See some examples below:
 * Benjamin Franklin** thought that slavery was "an atrocious debasement of human nature" and "a source of serious evils."

**John Jay**, believed: "... the honour of the states, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused".


 * John Adams** opposed slavery his entire life as a "foul contagion in the human character" and "an evil of colossal magnitude."


 * James Madison** called it "the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man."

In 1786, **Washington** wrote of slavery, "there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it." He devised a plan to rent his lands and turn his slaves into paid laborers, and at the end of his presidency he quietly freed several of his own household slaves. In the end, he could take it no more and decreed in his will that his slaves would become free upon the death of his wife. The old and infirm were to be cared for while they lived, and the children were to be taught to read and write and trained in a useful skill until they were age 25. Washington's estate paid for this care until 1833.

During his first term in the House of Burgesses, **Thomas Jefferson** proposed legislation to emancipate slaves in Virginia, but the motion was soundly defeated. His 1774 draft instructions to the Virginia Delegates for the First Continental Congress, //A Summary View of the Rights of British America//, called for an end to the slave trade: "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state." That same year, the First Continental Congress agreed to discontinue the slave trade and boycott other nations that engaged in it. The Second Continental Congress reaffirmed this policy in 1776. Jefferson's draft constitution for the state of Virginia forbade the importation of slaves, and his draft of the Declaration of Independence-written at a time when he himself had inherited about 200 slaves-included a paragraph condemning the British king for introducing slavery into the colonies and continuing the slave trade: 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 & 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 a 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. These words were especially offensive to delegates from Georgia and South Carolina, who were unwilling to acknowledge that slavery went so far as to violate the "most sacred rights of life and liberty." So, like some of Jefferson's more expressive phrases attacking the king, these lines were dropped in the editing process. Nevertheless, Jefferson's central point-that all men are created equal-remained as an obvious rebuke to the institution. From very early in the movement for independence, it was understood that calls for colonial freedom from British tyranny had clear implications for domestic slavery. "The colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white and black," James Otis wrote in 1761. "Does it follow that it is the right to enslave a man because he is black?" In the wake of independence, state after state passed legislation restricting or banning the institution.

The above sections are taken from a great article discussing the founding fathers and how they viewed slavery in light of the Declaration and liberty! []

Here are some links below also dealing with slavery and the Declaration! [|Slavery and the Declaration 1] [|Slavery and the Declaration 2]