Jefferson wanted to condemn slavery in the Declaration of Independence. Congress said no.

This week marks the 250th anniversary of American independence. To mark that, I’ll have a series of 250th-themed columns this week.

Thomas Jefferson spent a lot of time with a quill pen in his hand. Princeton University is in the process of publishing a collection of everything he wrote. The editors started in 1943 and still aren’t done. They’re at 47 volumes so far and expect that by the time they’re done (or their descendants are done), the project will be north of 60 volumes.

Just imagine what Jefferson could have done if he’d had a computer.

If we know anything at all about Jefferson, it’s that he was an author — author of the Declaration of Independence. He left instructions that three things be inscribed on his tombstone; two of them involved authorship (the Declaration and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom). The third was his role in founding the University of Virginia. His two terms as president, during which he physically expanded the country with the Louisiana Purchase, didn’t make the cut in his mind.

There were other things that didn’t make the cut, either. Like any writer, Jefferson had to endure dealing with editors — editors who, in his view, did not always improve his prose. That was definitely the case with the Declaration of Independence. The Continental Congress went over it line by line and cut more than one-fourth of it.

Tonally, the biggest change came in the opening phrase. Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable …” Benjamin Franklin, who also knew a thing or two about writing, had that changed to: “We hold these truths to be self-evident …”

Substantively, the most significant change was a 168-word passage that Jefferson wrote about slavery — and that was discarded when it proved too controversial for some Southern delegates (and perhaps some Northern ones, too). It’s also a passage that grew specifically out of a situation in Virginia that later historians often left out of the history books because it remained sensitive well into our time: The British offer to free enslaved workers if they fought for the crown.

Jefferson’s original passage, part of a series of complaints about King George, went like this:

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.

There’s a lot packed into this long paragraph. In the first sentence, he indicts King George for allowing slavery and the slave trade. Jefferson, of course, was famously conflicted on the subject. He condemned slavery even as he practiced it. The comfortable lifestyle of the leading men of Virginia and other Southern colonies depended on an enslaved workforce, and they could not conceive of a way out of that, even as some of them began to understand the moral aspects of enslaving fellow human beings.

In the third sentence, Jefferson faulted the king for “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.” Here’s where things get complicated (and therefore more interesting, from a historical perspective). In the middle of the 1700s, many Virginia leaders became concerned about slavery. Some came to see it as a moral outrage. Others took a more narrow economic critique that northern colonies without slavery were prospering in ways that the Southern colonies weren’t. These leaders couldn’t bring themselves to do away with their own slaves, mind you, but they did begin to wrestle with its consequences.

One thing they could do — or thought they could do — was to stop the importation of more enslaved workers. In 1772, the Virginia House of Burgesses voted to raise the tax on imported slaves so high that it would have effectively ended importation. This vote was not quite as noble as it may sound. Yes, some Virginians were having moral qualms about slavery. However, some of them were making money by renting out their enslaved workforce — or selling off some people, if the price seemed right. If there were more slaves coming in, that would flood the market and lower the value of what plantation owners considered an asset. If the slave trade were halted, the value of the existing slaves would go up. Meanwhile, there was concern that slaves were starting to outnumber free white people in some Virginia counties. This started to unnerve some white Virginians.

The moral arguments for ending the slave trade and the financial arguments and security issues all overlapped, which makes it hard to tell why the Burgesses voted the way they did.

What we do know is that the British government blocked the move. The Journal of the American Revolution says that business interests from the slave-trading ports of Bristol, Liverpool and London lobbied for the veto on the grounds that it was harmful to “trade and commerce.” There were lots of people complicit in the slave trade.

In the final sentence, Jefferson wrote that the king “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.”

Here’s what Jefferson meant: Lord Dunmore’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Lord Dunmore was Virginia’s royal governor. He was never particularly popular — it was well-known that he didn’t want the Virginia assignment — and the rising tide of anti-British sentiment had made him even less popular. In June 1775, Dunmore slipped out of the capital of Williamsburg, never to return. He took refuge on a British naval vessel and spent the rest of the year anchored in Hampton Roads at modern-day Portsmouth, the last vestige of royal power in Virginia, trying to figure out a way to crush the rebellious gentry.

In early November, Dunmore took an extraordinary step: He announced that he would grant freedom to any enslaved laborer who fought for the British. This seemed a master stroke: He’d undermine the strength of the Virginia leadership, whose wealth depended on enslaved workers, and augment his forces at the same time. To some extent, his gambit worked: A thousand or more slaves slipped away from their plantations and made their way to Dunmore. It was also a great blunder: The proclamation outraged white Virginians and pushed some of them over the edge to the American cause.

“No other document — not even Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or the Declaration of Independence — did more than Dunmore’s Proclamation to convert white residents of Britain’s most popular colony to the cause of independence,” writes the noted Revolutionary War historian Woody Holton (who, by the way, is the son of former Gov. Linwood Holton).

To further complicate our understanding of things, many slaves sided with the American side — whether this was a case of “better the devil you know” or whether they believed the American talk of liberty or saw Britain as the instigator of the slave trade or some other reason is hard to say. We just know it happened and that some of those who helped win American independence were not people who enjoyed the liberty they were fighting for.

All that aside, the result was something the continent had never seen before: two biracial armies fighting each other.

In December 1775, Virginians set out to push Dunmore out altogether. The colonial army and Dunmore’s combination of British regulars and self-emancipated former slaves met in battle at Great Bridge in modern-day Chesapeake. Both sides had both white and Black soldiers. The men in Dunmore’s newly christened Ethiopian Regiment wore shirts that proclaimed “Liberty to Slaves.” The hero of the day was on the American side: Billy Flora, a free Black man from Portsmouth, single-handedly held up a British force trying to cross the bridge.

The Virginians prevailed, Dunmore retreated to Norfolk and, eventually, out to sea. All this was a great Patriot victory that cleared the British out of Virginia until Lord Cornwallis showed up late in the war.

The sight of enslaved workers taking up arms with the British left a powerful impression on Virginia’s white political leaders — and inspired Jefferson’s words.

The Congress, after a tumultuous debate that laid bare the rift between North and South that would later nearly split the nation in two, voted to strike Jefferson’s words. In their place, his original 168 became just seven, as the complaint against the king was rewritten to say: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” That was nice and discreet; it could mean almost anything — or nothing.

Jefferson and other Virginians, though, knew exactly what it meant.

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