Weird History: 29

Not Whole Cloth

One thing about the Declaration of Independence that isn’t widely known is that Thomas Jefferson had to present the document to Congress for approval. Congress debated over this and made changes. In total, Congress made eighty-six revisions to Jefferson’s masterpiece, eliminating 480 of his words. The most striking changes were that Congress removed all references to “the execrable commerce”—slavery.

I found this rather interesting that Jefferson would word it this way, since at the time, he had dozens of African-Americans as slaves.

But the removal was mostly fueled by political and economic expediencies. While the 13 colonies were already deeply divided on the issue of slavery, both the South and the North had financial stakes in perpetuating it. Southern plantations, a key engine of the colonial economy, needed free labor to produce tobacco, cotton and other cash crops for export back to Europe. Northern shipping merchants, who also played a role in that economy, remained dependent on the triangle trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas that included the traffic in enslaved Africans.

So it would appear that in the Constitution at that time, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … did not apply to everyone.

On A Side Note: During the Revolutionary War, brides did not wear the traditional white wedding gown when married; they wore red as a sign of rebellion.