Jefferson and the Founding Fathers gave us the greatest foundation any nation has ever had.
It’s easy for us to look back with all we know today, and question and even condemn the Founding Fathers of the United States for inconsistencies and practices that are obviously evil to us today. But the fact is, that slavery seems so obviously wrong to us today, is thanks to the ideas bequeathed to us by them. They took John Locke’s ideas, clarified and amplified them, and “pledge their lives and their sacred honor” to defend those ideals.
It was the Founding Fathers that grasped the eternal truths espoused by Locke. It was they that enunciated the principles and honed them, and then rallied behind them as the basis for the new nation of the United States of America. It was they that went to war to dislodge, not only British rule, but more importantly, the old ideas of kings and subjects, masters and slaves, service and sacrifice; and who replaced those ideas with the sacred freedom of the individual and the pursuit of happiness as a right and a noble end.
The errors and the inconsistencies were tragic, and in the case of slavery, wretched. But these errors and abominations were not created by the Founding Fathers, they were hangovers and well-entrenched, and widespread practices that had been the unquestioned norm for millennia. There can be no doubt that the Founding Fathers, and Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, in particular, really intended “all men” to include every race and creed. In an early draft of the Declaration, Jefferson specifically calls out slavery.
Jefferson’s Attack on the Practice of Slavery
Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence condemned slavery as an unmitigated evil foisted on the colony by the British crown. Unfortunately, it was struck out to placate SC and GA, and to hold the fledgling nation together. Here is the damning, deleted passage:
[King George III] 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 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, and 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.
Source: Rough Draft Declaration of Independence, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 1, 1760-1776. Ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, pp 243-247. Accessible at Library of Congress.
Despite the compromise, the pledge remained. And Martin Luther King recognized it as such: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir… This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” MLK went on to condemn America’s failure to follow through on that pledge.
The Founders weren’t perfect, but they gave us an unprecedented, rational and moral foundation for the new nation, one that would soon motivate the nation to go to war to end slavery; and that would secure the freedom that has led to unprecedented prosperity. It’s because of them that we see so clearly today, that all men are in fact free and equal sovereign individuals, and that slavery is so obviously a violation of those sacred rights, and thus an unspeakable evil.
They fought for us, let’s fight for them. We owe an incalculable debt to their genius, their philosophical acumen, and their bravery. Virtually everything we enjoy today, can be traced to their fight for a free nation based on the recognition of individual rights.
Happy birthday America!
