The Declaration and Slavery: Convictions vs. Contradictions  

In his last letter before his death, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred …”  Through these words, he was saying two things at once: (1) a horse has no inherent rights or liberties, and (2) no human is the natural sovereign of another human.

That from the most famous slave-owning Founder?  So what about slavery as the most blatant contradiction to the Declaration’s conviction of human equality?  For the unbiased, a few facts of history help balance the picture …

• Founding Father Alexander Hamilton never owned slaves and was vehemently opposed to the institution his entire life.

• Founding Father John Adams never owned slaves and was also adamantly opposed to slavery throughout his life, calling it a “foul contagion” and a moral evil in direct contradiction to the idea of human equality.

• Founding Father Benjamin Franklin owned five slaves during his lifetime, but came to condemn slave-holding as an “atrocious debasement of human nature.”  He ultimately freed his slaves and became president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

• Founding Father George Washington inherited slaves from his father and through his marriage to Martha Curtis, but came to oppose slavery entirely, desiring “to see a plan to rent his own lands and replace his slaves with paid laborers.  In his will, he freed all his slaves.

And Thomas Jefferson, though definitely a slave-owner, was a little more complicated than the biased caricatures of him have reflected. In his Summary View, he wrote that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.”

In addition, Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration included a strong condemnation of slavery and the slave trade in particular as a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty.”  And in 1784, he proposed a ban on slavery in the Northwest Territory.

Yet, it is true, when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, he owned over one hundred slaves.  It is also true that he never freed them. “We have the wolf by the ears,” he said [referring to the institution of slavery], “and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” 

So the man was obviously conflicted, with his personal practices contradicting his professed principles, both of which were informed by practical implications.  But the Founders as a group saw the institution of slavery phasing out.  And they made sure of it through the Continental Congress, which intentionally infused the Declaration with the first self-evident truth, that “all men are created equal,” knowing it would ultimately force slavery out of existence.

Moreover, the abolitionists (a largely Christian movement) were gaining momentum.  In fact, as one Declaration scholar acknowledged, “The Declaration and its assertion that all men are created equal quickly became the political touchstone of the nascent abolitionist movement in the United States.” (The Making of the American Mind, p. 108)  

Subsequently, the First Continental Congress formed a policy that would end the slavery institution, and the Second Continental Congress affirmed and reinforced that policy three months later.  The colonies also began boycotting other nations who were still involved in slavery. In 1776, Delaware outlawed the slave trade, with Virginia following suit in 1778.

Years later, John Quincy Adams offered a fair-minded perspective, when he wrote of his father’s generation and the inherent tension they dealt with between their founding principles and the evil institution of slave-holding: “The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented.”  Yet, he continued, “no charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge.  Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery.” 

The point is, blacks were not made slaves by the Declaration of Independence.  They became such by the ambivalent sides of human nature and human culture. Like each of us, the Founders were obviously not perfect men.  While they affirmed the dignity of all human beings, they simultaneously wrestled with the depravity of their own. We can be ultimately thankful, though, that they never equivocated on the former and never minimized the latter. 

Brian Schroeder is the former Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction, an ordained minister and founder/president of the ChrisCorps Commission.

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