An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress

While John Adams was salty about how long it took to declare independence, Thomas Jefferson was salty about editing:

The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with still haunted the minds of many. For this reason, those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offense. 

The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa 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. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures, for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.

Funny that he called out hypocrisy in a sort of meta fashion, as Thomas Paine was salty about that.  This was the clause in question:

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 & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobium 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 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 on 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.

Even without that grievance included in the declaration-final_final_fr.doc, folks in England were understandably salty:

Is it for them to ſay, that it is tyranny to bid a ſlave be free ? to bid him take courage, to riſe and aſſiſt in reducing his tyrants to a due obedience to law ? to hold out as a motive to him , that the load which cruthed his limbs ſhall be lightened ; that the whip which harrowed up his back ſhall be broken, that he thall be raiſed to the rank of a freeman and a citizen?

It is their boaſt that they have taken up arms in ſupport of theſe their own ſelf-evident truths - "that all men are equal" - that all men are "endowed with the unalienable rights of life , liberty, and the purſuit of happineſs."

Is it for them to complain of the offer of freedom held out to theſe wretched beings? of the offer of reinſtating them in that equality, which, in this very paper, is declared to be the gift of God to all ; in thoſe unalienable rights, with which , in this very paper, God is declared to have endowed all mankind?

Yet another reason that "natural rights" was a shitty foundation for our independence.

Selah.