The Southern perspective Part One
At the time of the American Revolution, a good many Southerners viewed slavery as a necessary evil. Men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but bemoaned the practice, and spoke of an eventual future where slavery would be eradicated. Jefferson, of course, understood the contradiction between his Declaration of Independence and the fact that he was a slave holder: how could "All men be created equal" yet some were consigned to bondage? If some men, because of the color of their skin, were not created equal, what then of the Declaration? And if you were to take the position that Africans were not human, what then defined humanity? Jefferson has been called a hypocrite, but in truth he grappled with these perplexing issues his entire life and died unable to solve them, but warning doom on his native land unless it could.
I don't know if you want to, but in order to understand Jefferson and the words of the Declaration of Independence you need to go a lot deeper.The Declaration was John Adams' idea of a public expression of the reasons why the Lee Resolution was introduced and, hopefully, passed by the Congress. The Lee REsolution was simply and brief:
Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.
That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.
It was important that a Virginian introduce this as the clicks within the congress were pretty clear. The deep South was going to hold together for the most part with South Carolina as the lead; the north was going to form around the leadership of Massachusetts and John Adams, with a very heavy assist from Pennsylvania's Ben Franklin. But the largest "state" with the most people, money, soldiers and military might was Virginia and so it was known and clear that all actions taken must have Virginian support. Once Virginia signed on with Massachusetts almost all of the states fell in line except the Carolinas and Georgia. And all they hald out for was the slavery issue knowing that the leadership of the North was against it.
Once introduced, it was incumbent on the Congress to get it passed as soon as possible and through the debates and deals maked by John Adams and others, the Resolution was finally accepted and passed on July 2, 1776. One of the clear conditions of that passage was the agreement that the south could keep its slaves - they wouldn't have gotten South Carolina without that deal, and North Carolina deferred to the SC and New York was up in the air because their specific state government was a mess.
In order to inform the public as to the reasons why independence was voted for (and frankly, most of the literate public really already knew, but the founders felt that they needed to write to posterity more then anything else) Adams was given the authority to form the council to write the Declaration. It was made up of Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston and the history suggests that Adams specificaly wanted Jefferson. By that time he actually was involved little with the verbal deabte running through the congress but his writing style was known and respected throughout. It was felt that while Adams could make the argument, no one really liked John too much and his writing style was very attacking and accusatory, not romantic and flowing like Jefferson. Franklin didn't have the time and the other two weren't about to be put in the place of having to deal with the other 3 bigger names. So they imposed upon Jefferson for his writing style and for the fact that, again, they wanted a Virginia to be the figure head.
Jeffersons' writing of the Declaration took the ideas and arguments that Adams made in Congess, and used many an assist from the other great thinkers of the age to come up with the argument. Almost none of it was his own argument, singularly made by Jefferson. However, there was one particular section that was all Jefferson and that was the attack on slavery. It was taken out of the document to appease the Carolina's but Jefferson's argument "against" slavery is very different then understanding the hypocrisy of the institution and the words h used to open the Declaration. That section 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:[11] 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 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.
This was his charge, not against slavery, but against the King of England. It was the King who forced slavery upon the Americas and punished the landed men of the south with it. It wasn't their fault, it was a weapon of the empire. It wasn't so much that it was a wrong that needed to be ended - it was a wrong inflicted upon the colonies by the king to war with his own subjects and force them all into a continued bondage with each other for his own uses.
Now, Jefferson was avowed Anglofile. He hated the British, but that hate was entirely self serving. He was an aristocrat fully throughout and lived so above his means that he died bankrupt. In fact most of the southern gentlement of the time did because they lived far above their means in a dying economy that perpetuated its own destruction. In order to keep his fancy living of expensive French wine, food and clothes, Jefferson repeatedly took loans from English banks and sold portions of his wife's estate to pay for it. His continued improvements to Montecello cost so much money that by the time he died he barely owned a quarter of the original estate. He ated the fact that th English money men had the audacity to charge compoounding interest on his debts and the debts of his fellow southerners thereby making their expensive lifestyle so terribly deadly. But he never stopped, he just kept going.
So, to Jefferson, the English king forced slavery upon him to rule them both, slave and master, and did it to force the south to use slaves to care for the crops that they had to sell to English merchants at a lower cost then they would have liked, all in a convoluted attempt to float and continue debt that the Jefferson's of the world never took any great pains to pay off in any way - simply yelling the people who dared loan them the momney in the first place.
That hate boiled over into the Declaration. But, like a I said, that slavery attack was taken out. No, Jefferson didn't challenge slavery because of some perfect sense of the unity of mankind - he did because of the economic condition he put himself in.
This all, of course, brings to light the next massive economic policy argument Jefferson gets involved in, which is Hamilton's plan for Assumption of state debts for the new federal government. It is in that argument and fight that the seeds of civil war started - in the first Congress, with the first policy before them, and because in order to get to that debate they floored a resolution to declare slavery unjust.