Page 89 - JM Book 9/2020

• He rejected America’s appeals for reconciliation.
• He aroused domestic conflict among the citizens.
• He transported people accused of crimes to England to stand trial. • He waged war against the colonies.
By late afternoon, the delegates were ready to consider the last offense – the slavery clause that John Adams had warned Jefferson about when he read the draft for the first time on June 24.
Thomson read from the declaration.
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidels powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative 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.”
In very strong language, Jefferson had condemned the slave trade and criticized King George III for protecting it. Over the years, some colonies had passed laws to reduce or ban the importation of slaves, but the king always vetoed them because of the revenues his government received.
On December 10, 1770, King George issued instructions to the Royal Governor of Virginia commanding him “. . . to assent to no law by which the importation of slaves should be in any respect prohibited or obstructed.”
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