Jefferson's Slavery Paragraph

Can't say he didn't try!

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s 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 opprobium 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.

Ka-POW!

Callin' out the British monarchical system as inherently hurtful and morally corrupt, he naturally thought to establish the true across-the-board declaration of personal independence. It wasn't to be ~ axed by Them Guys -- or we ain't gon' bee gettin' that nation we ended up gettin. Our almost-ideal is built on faultlines of ugly compromise, and a worse-off negative virus. I just didn't know TJ was on the full delivery at this point. He seemed to have been following the reasonable course of thought as passed to him through Natural Philosophy. To include ALL men. The Rights of Man! Les Droits Des l'Homme! Thomas Paine! Voltaire! David Hume! El Shaddai! Francis Bacon! Knowledge is Power!

Here's some o'that LC Flavor, including some sweet close-up parchment shots. PBS Africans in America good stuff here right on. Even General Powell brings a little somethin' round. And a quick rundown of DEISM to round out the TJ stroll.