The demands for
local self-government or for national independence, one or both of which
were the genuine issues at stake, were subordinated to the claim of the
inherent and inalienable rights of man. Hence the culminating formulation
in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The cause of the community was to be
won under the guise of the cause of individuals.
In Jefferson's original draft of the great declaration there was a
paragraph indicting the king for having kept open the African slave trade
against colonial efforts to close it, and for having violated thereby the
"most sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant people, who never
offended him, captivating them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to
incur miserable death in their transportation thither." This passage,
according to Jefferson's account, "was struck out in complaisance to South
Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation
of slaves and who on the contrary still wished to continue it.
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