Jefferson was so upset that Benjamin Franklin had to comfort him. Franklin did so by telling a convoluted tale of a haberdasher who wanted to put a longwinded sign advertising the hats he sold outside his business.
When the hatter’s friends finished offering editing suggestions, the resulting sign just bore the haberdasher’s name and an image of a hat.
Franklin’s story didn’t do much to ease Jefferson’s anxiety. The author of our first charter as a free nation continued to fret over the changes to his draft.
Nor did Jefferson’s displeasure dissipate with time. Through the remainder of his long life—he was only in his early 30s when he penned the declaration and lived for another half-century—he continued to send friends and admirers copies of his original draft, even after the finished and signed declaration had become one of the most famous and admired documents in the world.
Jefferson’s vexation wasn’t just a question of vanity, although he was proud of his prose.
No, the alterations that irked him the most were substantive ones.
They dealt with slavery.
Jefferson’s original draft laid the blame for the evil institution of human bondage at the foot of the British crown. He argued, torturously and not convincingly, that the king had allowed for the introduction of slavery into the American colonies and thus bore the moral responsibility for oppressing the enslaved and corrupting those who asserted ownership over them.
The other delegates to the Continental Congress disagreed—for at least two overarching reasons.
The first and more palatable disagreement with Jefferson’s draft was that the delegates didn’t think they could abdicate moral responsibility for America’s original sin. People who had profited from owning and abusing other human beings, they contended, had no right to shift culpability to the king.
If the colonists were going to demand liberty and autonomy, they had no right—moral or otherwise—to expect any monarch to save them from themselves. A free people’s salvation is a free people’s responsibility—and no one else’s.
The much less palatable objection to Jefferson’s argument was that there were many delegates who did not think of slavery as evil and therefore a source of oppression and corruption.
Because they considered enslaving men and women as a benefit to society, they thought Jefferson’s criticism of the king as one who aided and abetted slavery to be completely wrongheaded.
Thus, the fundamental debate that would nearly tear this nation apart in the 1860s and still divides us today took root.
It’s not surprising that it was Jefferson who forced America and Americans to face, however ineffectually, this supreme moral blight on our national character just as our nation was being born.
The contradictions in his character mirror those in our national character.
Jefferson, who has been called “the apostle of liberty,” delivered some of the most impassioned criticisms of slavery in the days before Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln emerged to speak for abolition.
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” Jefferson wrote about slavery in his classic “Notes on the State of Virginia.”
And yet … he was a slaveowner himself. Overwhelming evidence also suggests that he had a long relationship with a slave woman—the half-sister of his dead wife—who bore several of his children.
She also, of course, was in no way positioned or empowered to ever reject his advances.
Jefferson’s anguish over the elimination of his absurd argument in his declaration that the British king owned responsibility for our wrongs reflects our ongoing national uneasiness with confronting an essential truth.
That truth?
Free people can use their freedom to do evil as well as good.
This is why the American Revolution is never a finished process or an accomplished fact. If our national purpose is to liberate both human beings and the human spirit, that work never ends.
Voices 250 years ago struggled even to acknowledge that wrong was wrong and evil was evil. Many still struggle to do so now.
The struggle to confront the wrongs we have done and do is at the heart of the American experience.
Because our revolution never ends.
And the truth keeps marching on.
