Slavery and the Declaration of Independence: The Deleted Clauses

Photo credit: Image of Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence. Library of Congress.

Join Morven for the first program in the Generation Declaration series, “Slavery and the Declaration of Independence: The Deleted Clauses,” with OAH Distinguished Lecturer Holly Brewer, Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland.

In this lecture, Brewer argues that the deleted clauses of the Declaration of Independence are crucial for understanding the debates about slavery during the era of the American Revolution. In Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration, three of the twenty clauses complained about the actions of the English king related to slavery. Two of those clauses, both of which blamed the king for supporting that “execrable commerce” in people, were deleted from the final draft, after some debate and strong objections to the clauses by South Carolina’s delegates to the Continental Congress.

About the Speaker

Holly Brewer is the Burke Professor of American History and an associate professor at the University of Maryland. She works on debates about justice in early America and the British Empire through the revolutionary period and into the nineteenth century. She is the author of By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (2005), which won three national prizes in legal history, as well as of the prizewinning “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia” (The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 2 April 1997). She is currently finishing a book on the ideological origins of slavery in early America and the British Empire for which she received a Guggenheim fellowship. She is a keen supporter of K–12 history education and has provided content lectures on the prerevolutionary period for AP U.S. history teachers.

Click here to register. Your program ticket includes access to visit the museum any time between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. the day of the event. Light refreshments will be provided.