In the well of understanding

In the well of understanding

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Unequal Independence: Deletion from History

















As we celebrate the intellectual birth of the United States this Independence weekend, the airwaves patriotically extract select portions of Thomas Jefferson's momentous document to reinvigorate national pride. Unfortunately, Americans are not great students of history. We are the culture of taglines and sound bites, easily swayed by summaries packed with expectations and select truths.

Most don't, for example, realize that Jefferson's original submission was heavily edited by revolutionary Congress; nor are they familiar with what was amended, added or extracted. Even a cursory read of what was produced and codified for public consumption is dichotomous - on one hand it is indeed a declaration but it rests much of its argument on the grievances of King George (III). One's declaration of self never requires justification because it has nothing, even remotely, to do with anyone else. However, this joint declarative and complaint directs us toward an unmitigated belief and fear that haunts the US to this day: that we can never be masters and mistresses of our own fate without intervening forces beyond our borders seeking to circumscribe our experience. (Indeed, Washington's farewell to the nation years later volubly demonstrates the continuation of this trepidation - "Beware foreign entanglements" - and drove US policy into the modern era).

The great irony of Jefferson's words become obvious when we learn that a paragraph condemning slavery was removed wholesale:

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, captivatng 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, by murdering the people for 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.


The delegates from Georgia and South Carolina were the instrumental forces responsible for this deletion. Of course, the paradoxical aspect of this passage is that Jefferson is blaming the British for the importation and commercialization of slavery without acknowledging the implicit agreement of the colonists to participate. Though Jefferson's archives hint that this removal troubled him to the end of his life (which incidentally was 50 years later on July 4th), he himself never freed his slaves. Jefferson's character was inherently flawed in that his emotions and intellect pressed him toward liberty but his circumstances allowed him to choose to sustain this immoral turpitude. He similarly writes of the cruelty and misuse of Native Americans, pardoning it regrettably as the cost of modernity.

Naturally, women are ghosts and no mention is made of their rights in this venerable text. Can one help but wonder if this declaration meant anything more than the bitter invective of one interested party, who had accrued wealth stolen from new lands they had plundered and wrested from the aboriginal inhabitants, against another interested party staking the same claim?

It would seem that even before we coined the term sound bite, our Founding Fathers were practiced at the art of smooth recitations which explain away American self-interest under the guise of the importation and exportation of freedom.

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