Of Citizens, Subjects, and Smudges
A few days ago, just in time for the Fourth of July weekend, a rather gimmicky little story came out about a smudge under the word “citizens” in one of Thomas Jefferson’s early drafts of the Declaration of Independence. Using neat-o technology to analyze the smudge, document-preservation experts at the Library of Congress have revealed vestiges of the word “subjects.” (See the Washington Post graphic below.) Jefferson had first written the phrase “our fellow-subjects” before thinking better of it—presumably apprehending at that moment that the whole point of declaring independence was that we would no longer be the subjects of the English monarchy—and settling on “our fellow-citizens.”
Now, I don’t want to dampen anyone’s patriotic revelry, but this is really not a matter of great historical import. The revised phrase didn’t even make it into the final Declaration. Frankly, the story illustrates little more than elementary editorial acumen on Jefferson’s part. But all the hype does make this a perfectly reasonable time to draw attention to what is really important about Jefferson’s first draft. There is a much more significant smudge, figuratively speaking, which appears in the very next sentence, as Jefferson launches into a rapturous crescendo of rhetoric against the king’s support of the slave trade, the final grievance adduced in the first draft:
he has incited treasonable insurrections in our fellow-citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation of our property:
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & 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 piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative [i.e., his veto -JH] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
(Bold mine.) The humanitarian force of this epic passage simply dwarfs the rest of the declaration’s bill of particulars. Aside from a few rough patches (e.g., “that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die”?), this is truly spine-tingling prose of Shakespearean dimension. Moreover, the passage would have placed the new nation firmly on the side of universal human rights. Needless to say, it didn’t. No remnant of it survived into the final text. The “execrable commerce” had powerful protectors in the New World just as it had in the Old, and Jefferson’s masterful finale was unceremoniously dumped by the Continental Congress. Some of our fellow citizens were to remain subjects after all.
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