"The Founders Knew Better" a guest post by Tom Junod

It is amazing what you still can learn, especially when your child is going to school. 

Yesterday, while Nia was writing a paper on the Declaration of Independence, I read, for the first time, the entire document -- and I do mean the entire document, which is to say the draft that Thomas Jefferson included in his Autobiography.

There, I encountered a passage I had never read before, or even heard of. The passage came as part of Jefferson's prosecutorial litany of the crimes perpetrated by the English king, George III. 

But it was about something I was told had been left out of the Declaration of Independence.

It was about slavery, and it went as follows:

"[The King] 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 & 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 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 off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

In The Autobiography, Jefferson underscores the passage, to show that it was cut out of the final draft approved and signed by delegates to the Continental Congress. Jefferson also explains *why* it was deleted: 

"The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, 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."

These are the most tragic clauses in the history of our country, and some of the most shocking I have ever read, because they prove, definitively, that our country could have been -- and should have been -- better from its inception and birth.

That it didn't have to be this way.

That Jefferson and the Founders knew better.

And that the same man who wrote the clause that South Carolina and Georgia couldn't abide ended up owning slaves until he died, although he also lived in a state of secret wedlock with the enslaved woman who bore him children, Sally Hemings. 

And here we are.

Jefferson and the Founders knew better, but were ensnared in their own racism, economic and otherwise, and then in their own human contradictions.

And so it falls to us, and only us, to make it better, and live up to the ideals that Jefferson stated so beautifully but failed, in his own life, to fulfill. 

Thanks Nia for the opportunity to educate myself. I lived too long without reading this, without knowing how close we came as a nation to being born without our Original Sin.

by Tom Junod