Declaration of Independence

Historians have often viewed Thomas Jefferson’s preamble in the Declaration of Independence and his commitment to human slavery as contradictory. However, these aspects were not inherently contradictory given the context of the time. The Continental Congress chose a diverse committee to draft the Declaration to ensure geographic and ideological balance, Jefferson, along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston, were selected for this purpose. Jefferson represented the slaveholding southern colonies and was renowned for his eloquence, powerful writing style, and ability to articulate complex ideas clearly and persuasively.

John Adams later recounted that he persuaded the Committee to assign Jefferson the primary responsibility of drafting the Declaration because Adams himself was seen as too abrasive. Jefferson was more popular and could garner widespread support for the document.  As a young Enlightenment thinker with notable literacy skills, Jefferson accepted this responsibility to craft an inspiring document that adhered to the rule of law while being acceptable to the majority, including those who supported slavery. This constraint presented Jefferson with a significant dilemma as he penned the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Further, Jefferson was a devotee of the British political theorist John Locke, who posited that the most precious thing man has is property, defined as Life, Liberty, and Estate.  Locke’s definition of “property” encompassed material possessions and self-ownership, making slavery neither justifiable nor contemplated in his Two Treatises of Government.

Locke also argued that slavery conflicted with natural law. Locke’s perspectives concerning liberty and the social contract profoundly influenced Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. This intellectual legacy created a profound tension for Jefferson as he grappled with the moral and philosophical inconsistencies of advocating for freedom while maintaining the institution of black slavery.

Given his knowledge, Jefferson saw Roman Law as the only way to address colonial slavery’s unlawful origins and to counteract the legal consequence of the British imperial government’s abolishment and repeal of colonial slave statutes and hereditary slave laws in 1766 and the ruling of the Twelve Judges panel in the Somerset case that found—slavery was not “allowed or approved by the law of this Kingdom”  and could only be lawful if authorized by “positive law,” a legislative power which only the British Parliament possessed in 1772.

Furthermore, in November 1775, the British imperial government began the process of emancipating all black colonials suffering as slaves living in colonial America. It came to be Jefferson’s hardened opinion that this was the final “nail in the coffin” for colonial slavery, reinforcing his belief that Roman Law was necessary to address these challenges if slavery was to survive.

The grievance section in the Declaration of Independence is exculpatory and conclusive evidence, as the core complaint against King George III was his abolition of “our most valuable laws,” which fundamentally altered colonial government forms.

Moreover, the Founders were even found complaining in the Declaration of Independence—that King George III—

• “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, refusing his Assent to Laws establishing judiciary powers.”
• ”He has refused his Assent to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended, in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so, has utterly neglected to attend to them.”
• “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
• “He has refused other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only,” and
• “He has suspended our own legislatures and declared himself invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.”

The grievances in the Declaration of Independence emphasize three significant points. First, without the valid approval of King George III or one of his predecessors, an English monarch, colonial slave statutes and hereditary slave laws were null and void because colonial assemblies in the American colonies lacked the legislative power to solely pass a colonial law within their territories as the colonial legislature was bicameral, a fact affirmed by English law and colonial charters. The pretended colonial slave statutes and hereditary slave laws, which colonial assemblies enacted without the assent of England’s monarch, were void ab initio, and they were never valid colonial laws.

Second, before the Founding Fathers declared independence on July 4, 1776, King George III and the British imperial government had already passed valid legislation that abolished America’s “most valuable laws” and had begun to emancipate black colonials living in colonial America—a fact the Founding Fathers freely memorialized and acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence. Under English law, the American colonies had no legal recourse as Parliament’s supreme legislative authority was constitutionally authorized, parliamentary sovereignty, and it was the absolute law of the land.

Third, slave laws were among the colonies’ “most valuable laws,” their abolition by Parliament’s Declaratory Act of 1766 caused a fundamental change in the structure of colonial governments, a point made clear in the grievance section of the Declaration. While the Declaration of Independence does not specifically mention the abolition of colonial slave statutes and hereditary slave laws, all such colonial laws were necessarily legislatively abolished because they questioned or called into question Parliament’s exclusive authority to enact “positive law,” which was required to enact a slave law in the Kingdom or questioned Parliament’s English Bill of Rights of 1689 and other laws enacted by Parliament.

The Declaratory Act of 1766 invalidated all colonial laws that challenged or questioned Parliament’s legislative power, including those governing slavery, as confirmed by the Somerset decision in 1772. In large part because of the Somerset decision, which affirmed parliamentary sovereignty and its declaration that slavery could only be a legal condition in the Kingdom based upon “positive law,” a legislative power only which Parliament possessed, Thomas Jefferson, a revered Founding Father, passionately advocated for adopting Roman Law before the First Congress in July 1776. Moreover, Jefferson opposed the adoption of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and English law. Despite his efforts, the practicalities of establishing a new legal system for the United States favored maintaining English common law, and Jefferson’s initiative failed.

The colonists had been living under this system for generations, and it provided a ready-made structure for legal proceedings, governance, and societal order. Transitioning to a different legal system, like Roman Law, would have been problematic and disruptive.

Jefferson lamented this decision for the rest of his life, as Congress had also made substantive edits to the Declaration of Independence’s grievance section. Because of the adoption of English law and the edits, Jefferson complained that America’s Founding Fathers had “mangled” the Declaration. He held onto this grievance until his death on July 4, 1836, coincidentally, the same day as the death of America’s second President, John Adams, and the half-century anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Regarding the edits made to the grievance section of the Declaration, Jefferson initially indicted King George III as an emancipator of the enslaved. Jefferson stated:

“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 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 evert 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 has obtruded them; thus paying of former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

Jefferson’s indictment of King George III was removed at the last minute due to objections from delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, as well as other representatives who were economically dependent on slavery and the slave trade. Jefferson was blaming the King, rather than himself and his fellow slave-holding Patriots, for imposing black bondage on unwilling white colonists.

Jefferson’s indictment, marked by gross deception, persuasively documents his fear regarding Parliament’s Declaratory Act of 1766 and the British imperial government’s Southern Strategy of emancipating enslaved black colonials, led by Virginia’s Governor Lord John Murray Dunmore.

Slavery was the catalyst for organizing America’s thirteen colonies, not a rising democratic spirit. However, the Founding Generation in the slave-holding colonies knew that the privileged class’s discomfort with the British imperial government’s hands-on governance that delivered them riches was a problematic rallying cry to mobilize the masses near the point of rebellion.