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February 25, 2016

Documents that Changed the World: The Declaration of Independence’s deleted passage on slavery, 1776

In his Documents that Changed the World podcast series, University of Washington Information School professor Joe Janes explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents, both famous and less known.

But in his latest installment, Janes might make you wonder how differently American history might have unfolded, had 168 powerful words not been excised from the Declaration of Independence at the last minute.

“I wanted to tell the story of the passage itself and the great void its absence left,” said Janes, “and dig a little deeper into the process of its removal by the Second Continental Congress in 1776 and how little we know about it.”

The deleted words — beginning with “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 …” — were a condemnation of George III, “the Christian King of Great Britain,” and his participation in and perpetuation of the slave trade.

“Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold,” the lost passage continues, “he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.”

In his podcast, Janes takes the listener through what’s known — and still unknown — about the removal of the passage, which was but one of dozens of edits to the Declaration. Jefferson himself, years later, claimed the words were “struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves.”

Janes, long interested in doing an episode on the idea of deletion, was reading the website Blackpast.org when he was reminded of the lines cut from the Declaration. The site, the creation of UW history professor Quintard Taylor, is a 13,000-page online reference center dedicated to providing information on African-American history, “and on the history of the more than one billion people of African ancestry around the world.”

Janes also notes Jefferson’s own “deeply conflicted position” on the subject, as the founding father owned 180 slaves at the time, and 87 more by 1822 — none of whom were freed upon his death. “There are few clean hands here,” Janes writes; “at least a third of the signers (of the Declaration) were slaveholders and even in northern states abolition was gradual.”

He said, “It’s not an original thought, but it has always struck me as a dark bargain: Leave the clause in and the Declaration fails (though perhaps not independence itself; that was agreed to two days earlier), take it out and it succeeds but at the cost of a quarter of a millennium of kicking the can down the road — as we still are today.”

The Documents that Changed the World podcast series is also available on iTunes, where it has now passed a quarter of a million downloads so far.

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For more about this or any of the Documents that Changed the World podcasts, contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu.

Previous installments of the “Documents that Changed the World” series

• Series introduction/President Obama’s Birth Certificate
• The Nineteenth Amendment
• John Snow’s cholera map, 1854
• Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’
• The Internet Protocol, 1981
• The AIDS Memorial Quilt
• An 18 1/2-minute presidential mystery
• Gutenberg indulgence, 1454
• ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’
• The fraudulent ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’
• A papal resignation
• The ‘Casablanca’ letters of transit
• ‘What is the Third Estate?’ 1789
• Alfred Binet’s IQ test, 1905
• Einstein’s letter to FDR, 1939
• The Riot Act, 1714
• The Rosetta Stone
• The Zapruder film, Nov. 22, 1963
• The Book of Mormon
• The DSM, 1952
• Airline ‘black box’ flight data recorder, 1958
• Alaska Purchase Check, 1868
• Zimmerman Telegram, 1917
• Rules of Association Football (Soccer), 1863
• The Star Spangled Banner, 1814
• Joseph McCarthy’s ‘list,’ 1950
• Rosie the Riveter Poster, 1943
• Exaltation of Inanna, 2300 BCE
• Annals of the World, 1650
• Charles Richter’s seismic scale, 1935
• Alfred Nobel’s will, 1895
• The Vietnam War Memorial, 1982
• FDR’s Thanksgiving proclamation, 1939
• The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 1896

Tag(s): Blackpast.org • Documents that Changed the World • Information School • Joe Janes • Quintard Taylor

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