He Has Waged Cruel War

Thomas Jefferson's Lost Paragraph

Happy Independence Mean solar day? My friend, colleague, and swain intellectual saboteur Alex Tabarrok has brought to my attending this deleted paragraph from an early typhoon of the original Declaration of Independence. I accept likewise cut-and-pasted Jefferson's lost paragraph below:

[Rex George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and freedom in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & conveying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of heathen powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of United kingdom. Determined to proceed open a market where Men should exist 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 desire no fact of distinguished dice, he is at present exciting those very people to rise in arms among the states, and to buy 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.

Kevin Kallmes, a law student at Knuckles, explains hither why this paragraph was deleted from the final version of the Declaration of Independence (or "DOI" for short). Regardless of why this remarkable anti-slavery passage was removed from the final typhoon, what should nosotros make of this strategic deletion–a deletion all the more distressing and dreadful since it reflects our nation'due south "original sin" of slavery? After all, Jefferson'due south cute preamble refers to "all men" and those words encompass persons of all races, genders, and immigration status, right? But what almost children, illegal immigrants, and non-human animals, though? In many ways, nosotros are withal fighting over the meaning of this pivotal preamble!

In curt, every bit I never tire of explaining to my students, all legal texts crave some level of interpretation, and the DOI is no exception. Should nosotros, for example, read the phrase "all men" in the preamble literally or metaphorically? Either way, one of the things I love the most about the DOI is that it is not only whatsoever ol' legal text, i.e. one that only judges get to interpret. The Declaration of Independence–like the original Constitution and Bill of Rights–is a popular legal text, part of our legal scriptures. That means that all public officials (State and federal)–and even private citizens–become to determine what these words mean to u.s.a. today. Don't be fooled. The courts are not the sole guardians of our democracy; the people, interim through their elected officials, are!

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women ...