1776’s Unedited Dream
Happy 250th America
Thomas Jefferson got the Christian part right the first time. Let me explain.
The Enlightenment intellectual knew what Christianity truly taught, and that he was a hypocrite. He talked about liberty but held slaves in captivity. So was the king, George III was the chief enslaver and ruler of the most powerful human trafficking empire of the 18th century. He was also Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
People often say that American slavery should be seen in the light that the Founders were “men of their times” the problem is they knew it was wrong.
When Jefferson submitted his draft of the Declaration to Congress, the part about the King inciting slaves to rise against their enslavers originally read:
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & 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 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, & 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.
Jefferson made sophisticated and self-damning arguments. First that British enslavement of Africans was incompatible with the plain readings what it meant to be a Christian monarch, was rather the behavior that Christians historically condemned infidels for. Second that the Crown and Parliament claimed the right to force the colonies to permit slavery whether they wanted it or not, and finally that it was the height of hypocrisy to ask some slaves to rise up against their enslavers after you first enslaved them while Britain wanted to keep and expand slavery elsewhere.
George III was no Abraham Lincoln.
But neither was Jefferson. The only place the word Christian appears in the Founding documents is in the unedited condemnation of slavery which the Continental Congress made Jefferson cut from the final version of the Declaration of Independence.
Perhaps if Congress had stood for liberty with consistency Jefferson would have had the courage to live out his convictions. Others may have followed the example of George Washington. Maybe America would be 100 years farther along our journey to be a more perfect union.
But Jefferson put opposition to slavery on the table, and no delegate could claim ignorance. We cannot claim societal ignorance. That is a gift of history. Jefferson exposed his own hypocrisy and contradictions, so now we can dedicate ourselves to reconciling them and rejecting injustice.
We can live out the promise that all people are created equal.
Happy Independence Day.