On Sat, 30 Mar 2002, Richard E. Dixon wrote:

> a study of constitutional thought in England as it translated to the colonies
> does not include slavery of Africans as a consideration in the relationship
> of the people to the monarchy, nor was it necessary to include them in the
> "people" that entered into the contract to form the United States.


If we can agree that the Declaration of Independence addresses "the
relationship of the people to the monarchy," it might be useful to ponder
this passage which Jefferson included in an early draft of the document
(subsequently excised):

"He 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 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." (TJ, 28 June 1776)

As to whether slaves were to be part of the "contract to form the United
States," one might ask the same question about servants, the poor,
children, women, new immigrants, Native Americans, and non-Christians. In
theory, as dependents or outsiders, these groups were not political actors
in a republic. In practice, many of them participated in the forming of
the nation that occurred beyond the walls of that locked convention hall
in Philadelphia.

Doug Deal
History/SUNY-Oswego
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