The Declaration’s missing 168 words

In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson included a fiery 168-word passage in his draft of the Declaration of Independence that condemned slavery as "piratical warfare" and "execrable commerce," and accused King George III of waging "cruel war against human nature itself" by forcing enslaved Africans into the colonies. It was the most radical language in the document. Congress cut it between July 1 and July 3. South Carolina and Georgia refused to sign a declaration that questioned the slave trade they intended to continue. Northern delegates weren't exactly comfortable either, as Jefferson later noted in his autobiography, they "had been pretty considerable carriers" of enslaved people themselves. The delegates replaced Jefferson's passage with a vaguer complaint about the King inciting "domestic insurrections among us." Jefferson was furious, writing that Congress had "mangled" his draft, and the deletion haunted him for decades. The deeper irony: the man who called slavery an assemblage of horrors enslaved more than 600 people over the course of his life. Two hundred and fifty years later, those missing 168 words remain among the most consequential edits in American history.