"The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
With these words the Declaration of Independence launches into a long list of grievances against the King of England, testifying to the world the profound nature of the hardships imposed upon the colonists.
The American Revolution remains distinguished among the many revolutions that have taken place the world over by the fact that it was initiated and led by the wealthiest class of people. Their heads would roll; their fortunes would be decimated; and their land holdings would be confiscated by the Crown.
Revolution is a gambit reserved for those with nothing to lose. Those with the most to lose are typically the voices of moderation and conciliation. The Second Continental Congress broke with these conventions.
What sort of audacious people, far from being desperate and hungry, would wage a revolution from a position of power? What sympathies could aristocrats kindle and stoke among foreign powers? Will the common people of the land be persuaded to take on risks created by their most empowered neighbors?
The world would demand answers to these questions. The Declaration of Independence was the vehicle to make the case to the world for a revolution called for by the wealthy.
The grievances in the document are called out, one-by-one, escalating in scale and tone -- whipping up the outrage of the readers and listeners little by little, until the Declaration of Independence comes to the final item.
That final item -- the one that by all rights should be followed with the 18th century equivalent of a microphone drop -- was dropped with a hollow thud, thanks to South Carolina's Edward Rutledge, the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence.
The greatest outrage of all, the final outrage in the list, the one that Jefferson penned with the greatest flourish of verbal embellishments was removed in order to preserve unity among the signers that Rutledge threatened to break if that last passage remained in the final text.
The final outrage in the actual signed document starts out: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us..." It fizzles out from there.
So what did Rutledge object to? What was the list building up to? What was the one outrage above all the other outrages for which Great Britain's King should be held accountable?
Here's what they removed:
"[The present King] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's 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 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."
This long grievance -- the ultimate offense of the King -- was meant to appeal to other nations, to persuade the common people of the colonies who would be called upon to bear arms, and possibly most of all to rally the people of England to sympathize with their overseas brethren over their monarch.
The context is important.
The First Continental Congress had issued its "Declaration of Colonial Rights" in 1774 protesting the Intolerable Acts and decrying "taxation without representation." In that document the First Continental Congress made the case to the people of Great Britain that whatever happened in the colonies could happen in Great Britain. The colonists' plight would one day be their own.
To this claim, the famous Tory author Samuel Johnson famously cautioned his fellow Englishmen who might be seduced by the colonists: "If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"
The deleted passage from the Declaration of Independence seems to be written as a riposte to Johnson's well-known quip. The Committee of Five tasked to draft the document refused to accept fault for American slavery by throwing full responsibility for the institution onto the King. It was all his fault. King George III was the driver of all slaves in the American colonies. For the moment, slavery was the ultimate yoke of oppression borne by the colonists.
Sure, the drafters were co-opting slavery and turning it inside-out, as though slavery oppressed the free men, however the practical implication of this deleted passage would have been profound. If the committee of drafters had their way, the fight for American independence would be all-inclusive. Everyone from slave-owners to slaves would be aligned against the Crown. The American Revolution would have been waged for the freedom of all people in the colonies, including the slaves.
That war indeed would have been revolutionary.
The idea of freedom for all men was not an unintended consequence of the slave-owning Jefferson. Months earlier, Thomas Paine had anonymously published Common Sense in which he stirred the hearts of the Declaration's drafters by exclaiming: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months."
The opportunity for the most radical transformation of humanity since Noah was at hand. and the drafters of the Declaration of Independence were poised to seize the moment.
Edward Rutledge, alas, was not so inspired.
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The resolve of the Congress convened in Philadelphia that summer was not up to his challenge. They bartered their fellow man's freedom for their body's unity. The deal they struck levied an injustice -- slavery -- without representation of those who would pay for it.
By omitting the king of all grievances from the final list of grievances, the signers transformed the Declaration of Independence into a not-quite-so-revolutionary exclusionary charter, extending the promise of liberty and freedom to some, not all.
With the deletion of one paragraph, the Declaration of Independence launched what was more or less the kind of revolution that one might expect an elite group of people to wage: impressive for what it was, disappointing for what it might have been.
Tragic for us all. And another shameful detail of South Carolina's history that needs to be taught.