political philosophers to which Jefferson belonged never imagined the
continued existence of the country with slavery. It is well known that
the first draft of the Declaration contained a severe arraignment of
Great Britain as the real promoter of slavery and the slave-trade in
America. In it the king was charged with waging "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 and
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 and 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, by murdering the
people on 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."[31]

To this radical and not strictly truthful statement, even the large
influence of the Virginia leaders could not gain the assent of the
delegates in Congress. The afflatus of 1774 was rapidly subsiding, and
changing economic conditions had already led many to look forward to a
day when the slave-trade could successfully be reopened. More important
than this, the nation as a whole was even less inclined now than in 1774
to denounce the slave-trade uncompromisingly. Jefferson himself says
that this clause "was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and
Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves,
and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our northern