When I was in school I hated learning about history. I found it boring and not needed in our society at the time. As I have grown older I have stood and fought for our founding fathers with an understanding they were not perfect but were intent on creating a country that was close to perfect. Recently we have seen our founding fathers labeled as racists. I was watching an interview this morning with Glenn Beck. He had all kinds of amazing documents that Blaze TV has purchased and is compiling into an archive of historical documents for use in research and such. One of the documents he showed during this interview really stood out and caught my attention, it was an early draft of the Declaration of Independence. In the 4 page document there are a few things that I was never taught because the Declaration as I know it did not contain them. In it Thomas Jefferson has an entire paragraph about slavery. Here is what the paragraph states:
"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."
So what does all of that mean? In this paragraph he is talking about the King of England pushing slavery on the colonies in support of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. As you can see he say the king is "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 was Thomas Jefferson saying slavery was a war with human nature itself. He follows it by stating that the king was offering to pay slaves off with their "freedom" if they were willing to take up arms and fight against the colonist insurrection against Him and England.
So why would I want to bring this up? It is simple, maybe we as a society have been shown only those things which form a narrative that the educational system wants us to know. I know my sons have in recent time discussed slavery and how evil our founders were because they supported it. This original draft disproves all of it! Out of the 13 colonies only 2 states refused to support that paragraph in the Declaration, Georgia and South Carolina. The other 11 states agreed with these statements and wanted them to be a part of the document. For a group of raving racists who hated black people this paragraph certainly does not validate the accusation.
I had no idea. But now that I do I have an entirely new perspective on our founding fathers. I want to see the original documents so I can read an interpret them for myself. This one single document has opened my mind and given me an entirely new look on history. I hope some people read this and it makes them desire to learn more for themselves. For reference here is the website I quoted from: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery/
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