Why thomas jefferson wrote the declaration of independence

But where the quarrel between large and small states had nothing to do with the lasting interests of citizens — you never vote on the basis of the size of the state in which you live — slavery was a real and persisting interest that one had to accommodate for the Union to survive. Second, the greatest tragedy of American constitutional history was not the failure of the framers to eliminate slavery in That option was simply not available to them.

The real tragedy was the failure of Reconstruction and the ensuing emergence of Jim Crow segregation in the late 19th century that took many decades to overturn. That was the great constitutional opportunity that Americans failed to grasp, perhaps because four years of Civil War and a decade of the military occupation of the South simply exhausted Northern public opinion.

Even now, if you look at issues of voter suppression, we are still wrestling with its consequences. How did the founding fathers view equality? And how did these diverging interpretations emerge? But after the Revolution succeeded, Americans began reading that famous phrase another way. It now became a statement of individual equality that everyone and every member of a deprived group could claim for himself or herself.

With each passing generation, our notion of who that statement covers has expanded. It is that promise of equality that has always defined our constitutional creed. At different moments, the Virginia colonists had tried to limit the extent of the slave trade, but the British crown had blocked those efforts. But Virginians also knew that their slave system was reproducing itself naturally. They could eliminate the slave trade without eliminating slavery.

That was not true in the West Indies or Brazil. To make any claim of this nature would open them to charges of rank hypocrisy that were best left unstated. If the founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, thought slavery was morally corrupt, how did they reconcile owning slaves themselves, and how was it still built into American law?

In , someone discovered a previously unknown Dunlap Broadside. There are only 26 known surviving Dunlap Broadsides today. Jefferson was a member of a five-person committee appointed by the Continental Congress to write the Declaration. Robert Livingston, one of the members of the committee who wrote the Declaration of Independence, never signed it.

He believed that it was too soon to declare independence and therefore refused to sign. One of the most widely held misconceptions about the Declaration of Independence is that it was signed on July 4, Jefferson was quite unhappy about some of the edits made to his original draft of the Declaration of Independence.

He had originally included language condemning the British promotion of the slave trade even though Jefferson himself was a slave owner.

The two youngest signers of the Declaration of Independence were both from South Carolina. Thomas Lynch, Jr. Most of the other signers were in their 40s and 50s. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, , the 50th anniversary of the vote to approve the Declaration of Independence.

Nine of the signers of the Declaration died before the American Revolution ended in In the summer of , when the Declaration was signed, the population of the nation is estimated to have been about 2. Jefferson was unhappy with many of the revisions—particularly the removal of the passage on the slave trade and the insertion of language less offensive to Britons—and in later years would often provide his original draft to correspondents.

Benjamin Franklin tried to reassure Jefferson by telling him the now-famous tale of a merchant whose storefront sign bore the words: "John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money;" after a circle of critical friends offered their critiques, the sign merely read, "John Thompson" above a picture of a hat.

Pressured by the news that a fleet of British troops lay off the coast of New York, Congress adopted the Lee resolution of independence on July 2nd, the day which John Adams always believed should be celebrated as American independence day, and adopted the Declaration of Independence explaining its action on July 4. The Declaration was promptly published, and throughout July and August, it was spread by word of mouth, delivered on horseback and by ship, read aloud before troops in the Continental Army, published in newspapers from Vermont to Georgia, and dispatched to Europe.

The Declaration roused support for the American Revolution and mobilized resistance against Britain at a time when the war effort was going poorly.

The Declaration provides clear and emphatic statements supporting self-government and individual rights, and it has become a model of such statements for several hundred years and around the world. Thomas Jefferson to John Randolph, August 25, Transcription available at Founders Online. Journals of the Continental Congress, , ed. Worthington C. Ford et al. Washington, D. Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, Buy Tickets.