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Old 07-29-11, 11:55 PM   #3
Sailor Steve
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Your points are good ones, but nothing new. We Americans have wrestled with that problem ever since that time, and never reached a final conclusion. I well address a couple of them, though.

First, the Declaration's "89 things removed". Unless you count each individual word as a "thing", I don't see how that is possible. Eighty-nine changes, sure. A great many of those changes were made by Jefferson himself and his fellow 'Committee Of Five' members John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The removal of the Slavery clauses was partly, as Stealhead said, to appease the Southern States. This would carry over into the Constitutional debates eleven years later, and again the Southern States would force the hand of the others.

But there is another reason those parts were removed, and that is that Jefferson in those parts blamed King George for the slave trade itself, which was pretty silly, and the Congress recognized that fact when apparently Jefferson himself did not. He said that was his favorite part of the document.

Here you can compare the three versions of the document side by side.
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration...nt/compare.htm

And here you can see the changes made by the committee before it ever got to the Congress as a whole.
http://www.princeton.edu/~tjpapers/d...claration.html

Second, the question of slaves running away. Who wouldn't? But were the numbers you named the number who ran away during the war, or the total number during those men's lifetimes? I've not read the documentation on that.

Third, British stirring up slaves to run away is a bit disingenuous, seeing that Great Britain herself, while not allowing slaves in-country as far as I know, continued to traffic in slaves until 1807 and didn't outlaw slavery altogether until 1833.

But you asked how Americans feel about it. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I think anyone who ever engaged in the trafficking of other human beings, or owned other human beings was wrong, pure and simple. The justified it to themselves at the time, but many of the wrestled with the problem. Washington stipulated in his will that all his slaves be freed upon the death of his wife. Madison had a friend who hated the practice so much that he sold his land in Virginia and took his entire 'family' to Kentucky, where he bought all the land he could and divided everything equally between himself and his former slaves. But he was just one man, and the country as a whole continued the practice for far too long.

So were the Founders hypocritical on that point? Certainly. But they were also conflicted about it. What should they have done differently? What could they have done differently? I don't know.
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