The word “slavery” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, in which that seminal document expresses the egalitarian belief that “…that all men are created equal;” of which, this then is contradicted by the fact that the slavery of human beings was most definitely of existence and of persistence, to some degree, large or small, directly or indirectly, in all of those thirteen colonies, and thereby subsequently left unaddressed by that Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, of which it was then reviewed by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, before being submitted to the Continental Congress in June of 1776. What most people don’t know is that Jefferson actually did address slavery in that document, so written in a way that the blame for such was laid upon the feet of King George III of Great Britain. So then, when the complaints in regards to the injuries, usurpations, and tyranny committed by the King against the colonists, was written by Jefferson, part of the long clause he wrote addressing slavery, said the following: “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 thus signifies that in actuality the biggest flaw and contradiction of that Declaration of Independence, was actually directly addressed by its author; yet, as we know today, this clause did not make it into the final rendition of that Declaration of Independence. It is important to acknowledge, that representatives of all thirteen colonies, totaling fifty-six men, eventually signed that Declaration, but not until that time in which particular clauses to that Declaration, were amended, removed, or modified. This thus meant that those that were the biggest proponents of slavery, either because they benefited directly from slave labor, or benefited through the profit and trafficking so of, would not countenance a clause that vilified that peculiar institution, but rather desired to see it, effectively ignored.
So indeed, the slave masters and slave sympathizers were triumphant in winning their way on what became the Declaration of Independence. It must be stated that by the Continental Congress not forthrightly addressing the enslavement of their fellow human beings, who had been forcefully taken and stolen from their distant homeland, so that a very few could profit from their uncompensated labor; and of which these enslaved peoples had no rights to which the white man was bound to respect; this thereby meant that legally, slaves were considered to be by American jurisprudence chattel property, which was a horrible and tragic wrong.
The thing about committees is that often times, compromises have to be made; but there are those special times in regards to certain subjects, of which, some of these specific subjects, fundamentally, cannot be compromised, because to do so, undercuts the very meaning as well as the justification of the very principles of that document, so being debated upon. This was one of those times, and those so gathered together into one body politic, failed in their highest duty, to answer correctly to their Creator, as well as to recognize that, quite obviously, unalienable rights, were rights that applied to all men as well as to all women. That failure, and the subsequent bloody Civil War, that inevitably came, has, even to this day, not yet, cleansed clean what that Declaration of Independence, was really supposed to represent and to be.