As on other days, Congress’s journals and delegates’ correspondence from June 27, 1776, don’t have any direct bearing on the Declaration drafting process or even the impending independence vote – even though, as we will see tomorrow, the committee will submit a final draft the next day. Business is taken up with military matters, such as troop recruitment and movement, continued inquiry into “the miscarriages in Canada,” etc. More claims to be approved – for boarding, medicines, camp kettles, etc., etc.

All of this serves as a reminder that the “business” of war, as especially one as long and dispersed as the Revolutionary one, is often a daily, slow, grinding bureaucratic processing of otherwise uninteresting details that need to be dealt with.

By this point, Thomas Jefferson is surely polishing and preparing a clean, fair copy for Charles Thomson, Congress’s secretary, probably drawn off the “original Rough draught” that we examined yesterday. And surely there is some tension in the air and some talking, in terms of counting delegates and delegations (votes would be counted by delegation, but each delegation would need a majority for its single vote).

I’ve mentioned several personages so far who were in one or another of Jefferson’s spheres during this time, and therefore could observe him closely or who were influenced by him. But perhaps no one was closer, at least physically, than his 14-year-old “body servant” Robert Hemmings (or Hemings), about whom we know so very little – but of course (sadly, of course), there are no words from Hemmings, no images of him, little trace at all of him in Philadelphia in June of 1776 – except that we have to assume he dutifully attended to Jefferson while he, among other things, worked at straightening out phrases like “all men are created equal.”

I find Hemmings’ situation to be one of the harshest of historical ironies. In fact, they were related, so to speak, by marriage, as Hemmings’ father was also Jefferson’s own father-in-law, John Wayles. True, Jefferson did eventually “free” Hemmings – it was a complicated situation – in 1794, but he did so by selling him to someone else on the condition that Hemmings labored to pay off the amount (which he did by the following September).

It would be worthwhile, to sharpen the irony further, to consider very briefly the slavery clause Jefferson was adapting and expanding from his draft of the Virgina Constitution. In its most original form there, it was grievance of about the length of the others and about three-fourths of the way through the list, although with some Virginia-specific complexity:

by prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us; those very negroes whom by an inhuman use of his negative he hath refused us permission to exclude by law

But for the Declaration – for reasons entirely unknown – Jefferson determined to change some wording, expand it perhaps fivefold, AND place it at the very end, as the culminating grievance, just before the paragraph denouncing the “British brethren.” Yesterday, I called attention, even in Jefferson’s manuscript version, to the eye-catching typographic features he wanted to use for emphasis (italics, capitalizations), very rare for his personal style. Now let’s try – it won’t be easy, especially briefly – to dig into the meaning and issues.

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 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 these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he hath deprived them, by murdering the people upon 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.”

You may be unfamiliar with this clause, because not a single phrase of it survived Congress’s edits, despite Jefferson’s efforts. (He later blamed South Carolina and Georgia for opposing, along with some northerners involved in the slave trade.) On the one hand, the clause clearly denounces the Transatlantic slave trade as an outrageous injustice, and it raises the rhetorical temperature of the Declaration draft considerably – but on the other hand, what EXACTLY does it even mean?

Because I want to keep this short, there’s just not enough time to explain it in detail, but let’s paraphrase a bit: George III (or perhaps his agents on his directive) without provocation has gone to Africa, violently kidnapped an innocent people and transported them across the Atlantic, and then, as if that weren’t enough, he “obtruded” them on other innocent people. “Obtruded” is the key word – it’s a rarely used word and basically means “coerced someone into doing something.” That is, George III somehow underhandedly made colonists purchase slaves, massive numbers of them; this implies that the “obtruded” upon colonists never wanted slaves in the first place, and in fact tried to pass laws that would impose duties (or tariffs) on slave sales as means – a first step, so to speak – of restraining and then ultimately prohibiting the trade altogether.

But George, as king, had the prerogative of reviewing/approving colonial legislation, and thereby “prostituted his negative” by vetoing all such attempts – which is not even quite half-true. But to make matters absurdly and tragically worse, George now wants to free these slaves to murder their master (through the agency of Governor Dunmore’s November 7, 1775, proclamation offering freedom to slaves who would fight on the King’s side). Jefferson describes a viciously cruel and sadistic circle, a horrific plot mainly against – the innocent, unsuspecting colonists!

He only fails to mention that these same colonists had already passed legislation (not vetoed) in the 1600s described as Partus Sequitur Ventrem, which meant that the status of the mother (i.e., whether free or enslaved) determined the status of any infant, regardless of paternity. The Virginia attempts at legislating the Transatlantic slave trade would have no effect on that set up; Virginia slaveholders like Jefferson knew full well that they had a biological means to increase the slave population without the trade at all.

And yet Jefferson wanted to preserve this clause for later public review AND act injured because Congress had the temerity to dispense with it. But it wasn’t kept under wraps for long. Jefferson had shared drafts of both the Virginia Constitution and the Declaration of Independence with his teacher, mentor, and colleague George Wythe. Tragically, Wythe was murdered by poisoning, most likely by his dissolute grand-nephew George Wythe Sweeney on June 8, 1806.

When Wythe’s papers came under the control of Major Duval, he passed them on to the Richmond Enquirer, which published both on June 20, 1806, and Jefferson’s Declaration draft to Wythe was reprinted several times in the early 1800s as a result. You can read the first publication of both drafts in the Richmond Enquirer through the Library of Congress website, on pages 2 and 3.

When anyone tells you to look the other way when it comes to slavery and the American Revolution, especially during the 250th anniversary,  please remind them that the Founders themselves, in any number of shameful ways, opened the door for us to do exactly that. And it isn’t pretty or easy to deal with, even when it isn’t overly brutal and hate-filled.

Countdown to Semiquincentennial: Number 21, June 27, 1776
By Michael G. Ditmore