when she seeks to apply a restriction, she is met by a rebuke from the English ministry.
The immortal Declaration of Independence contains a clear and familiar expression of the sentiments of the colonists upon the natural rights of men at that time. That “all men are created equal, with certain inalienable rights” was no new conception of Jefferson; it was the embodiment of the deeply rooted convictions of the American people; an idea that had been fully discussed in their conventions. Even Georgia had, just the year previous, resolved in the Darien committee, “at all times to use our utmost efforts for the manumission of our slaves in this colony upon the most safe and equitable footing for the masters and themselves.” The clause in the original draft of the Declaration indicting George III, as the patron and upholder of the African slave trade, which was stricken out to satisfy South Carolina and Georgia, whose people had found slavery “profitable,” expresses clearly the feelings of the majority of the colonists in regard to this horrible traffic in human flesh. It reads as follows:
“Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for every legislative attempt to prohibit, or restrain this excerable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and 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 which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
The first Continental Congress in which the colonists enjoyed, for the first time, an unrestrained legislation, in accordance with the long expressed wish of the country, resolved “that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen united colonies.”
