Did the declaration of independence talk about slavery?

Answer 1

Declaration and SlaveryIn his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson has listed the last grievance against the King of Great Britain as allowing slavery and the slave trade to continue and condemned the King for offering freedom to slaves who would fight on the side of Great Britain.

The section dealing with slavery was removed because of the objections of the delegates from the southern states who attended the Congress. It was believed that it was better to remove the section dealing with slavery and gain the support for independence from the southern states, than risk a long debate over the issue of slavery even before independence had been won from England.

Answer 2

Slavery and the Declaration

The contradiction between the claim that "all men are created equal" and the existence of American slavery attracted comment when the Declaration was first published. "If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature", English abolitionist Thomas Day wrote in a 1776 letter, "it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves." In the 19th century, the Declaration took on a special significance for the abolitionist movement. Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown wrote that "abolitionists tended to interpret the Declaration of Independence as a theological as well as a political document". Abolitionist leaders Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison adopted the "twin rocks" of "the Bible and the Declaration of Independence" as the basis for their philosophies. "As long as there remains a single copy of the Declaration of Independence, or of the Bible, in our land," wrote Garrison, "we will not despair." For radical abolitionists like Garrison, the most important part of the Declaration was its assertion of the right of revolution: Garrison called for the destruction of the government under the Constitution, and the creation of a new state dedicated to the principles of the Declaration.

The controversial question of whether to add additional slave states to the United States coincided with the growing stature of the Declaration. The first major public debate about slavery and the Declaration took place during the Missouri controversy of 1819 to 1821. Antislavery Congressmen argued that the language of the Declaration indicated that the Founding Fathers of the United States had been opposed to slavery in principle, and so new slaves states should not be added to the country. Proslavery Congressmen, led by Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, argued that since the Declaration was not a part of the Constitution, it had no relevance to the question.

From this time forward, defenders of slavery, from John Randolph in the 1820s to John C. Calhoun in the 1840s, found it necessary to argue that the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" was false, or at least that it did not apply to black people. During the debate over the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1853, for example, Senator John Pettit of Indiana argued that "all men are created equal", rather than a "self-evident truth", was a "self-evident lie". Opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, including Salmon P. Chase and Benjamin Wade , defended the Declaration and what they saw as its antislavery principles.

Answer 3

nothing, the men that were writing the declaration of independence decided to not to put a natural right for slaves in it because they would not get enough signatures from the southern colonies.

Answer 4

No. Slavery was not a topic of this declaration.

Answer 5

No, it does not. Thomas Jefferson was against slavery at the time, and wanted to write against it in the Declaration, but some members of Congress didn't want him to.