Every time I post quotes by Thomas Jefferson on social media, something I do quite often because he has always been the founding father I most closely identify with, my Progressive friends trot out their customary talking points with maximum smugness. I’m absolutely sure you know which ones I’m talking about. The ones condemning Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves, which he inherited and tried desperately to free but could not because of Virginia law. and being a white supremacist. Jefferson very hard to free all slaves on several occasions but failed. He was no white supremacist either. Neither charges are valid and are discussed in these two books: Jefferson Lies and The Real Thomas Jefferson. Both are extremely well documented and chock full of quotes.
As Independence Day rolls around every year liberal news agencies bash Thomas Jefferson for hypocrisy because they claim he only included white people when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, that he did not touch on slavery at all. They are dead wrong on this. The original and complete text of Declaration of Independence, as originally written by Thomas Jefferson, is proof of hollowness if these charges.
The truth of the matter is that the original complete text of the Declaration of Independence is proof that Thomas Jefferson was actually a failed abolitionist. When he wrote the Declaration of Independence he included a clause condemning the King of England for England’s role in slavery. That criticism of slavery in our most seminal document would have ended slavery in the this newborn nation. The clause was eliminated by the members of the Continental Congress who were from colonies that supported slavery. Here is the deleted clause.
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, 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 the 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 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 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.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 