Does the Declaration of Independence Mention Slavery?

No. The Declaration of Independence does not mention slavery. The words “slavery,” “slave,” and “slave trade” appear nowhere in the ratified text, even though Thomas Jefferson’s original draft contained a lengthy passage condemning the transatlantic slave trade. The Continental Congress cut that passage before adoption, leaving only one veiled reference to enslaved people in the final document.¹

What Jefferson Originally Wrote

A Committee of Five — Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman — was appointed on June 10, 1776, to draft the Declaration, and the actual writing fell to Jefferson. Among his listed grievances against King George III, Jefferson included a direct attack on the slave trade. He accused the King of waging “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.”¹

Jefferson labeled the trade “piratical warfare” and “execrable commerce,” and charged that the King was “determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.” He accused George III of using his veto to suppress “every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain” the trade. The passage then pivoted to a second accusation: that the King was “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” — a reference to British efforts to recruit enslaved people to fight against the colonists.²

The framing was strategic. Rather than confronting the colonists’ own participation in slavery, Jefferson cast the entire institution as something imposed on the colonies by the British Crown. Scholar Peter S. Onuf has noted that Jefferson portrayed colonial slaveholders as casualties of a “cruel war against human nature,” effectively shifting moral responsibility to the monarchy.³

Why Congress Cut the Passage

Jefferson later identified the slavery paragraph as the most important section removed from the final document, and its excision triggered what contemporaries described as the most intense debate among the delegates gathered in Philadelphia.⁴

Jefferson attributed the removal to delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, who “had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves,” along with Northern delegates who represented merchants profiting from the transatlantic slave trade.⁵ The opposition came from both ends of the colonial economy: Southern planters dependent on enslaved labor and Northern traders profiting from the shipping and banking tied to the trade.⁶

Stanford historian Jack Rakove has added another layer. Members of Congress, he argues, were “morally embarrassed” by the colonies’ own participation in chattel slavery and feared that condemning the trade while benefiting from it would expose them to accusations of hypocrisy.⁷ Some Southern delegates wanted to continue importing enslaved people, and compromise was seen as necessary to unify the colonies against Britain.⁸

Professor Joe Janes of the University of Washington has described the removal as a “dark bargain.” Leaving the clause in might have caused the Declaration to fail entirely, but removing it allowed the document to succeed “at the cost of a quarter of a millennium of kicking the can down the road.” At least one-third of the men who signed the Declaration were themselves slaveholders. Jefferson owned approximately 180 enslaved people in 1776.⁵

The One Veiled Reference That Survived

The deleted passage was replaced with far vaguer language. The final Declaration accuses the King of having “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” On its face, the phrase says nothing about slavery. Historians widely read it as a direct reference to Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of November 7, 1775.⁹

Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued the proclamation from his ship off the coast of Norfolk after his military position had deteriorated. It offered freedom to enslaved people and indentured servants belonging to rebel colonists who were “able and willing to bear arms” for the British. Within a month, 300 Black men had joined Dunmore’s “Royal Ethiopian Regiment.” Although the proclamation technically applied only to Virginia, it was reprinted in newspapers across all thirteen colonies and inspired thousands of enslaved people to seek freedom behind British lines throughout the war, by some estimates 80,000 to 100,000.¹⁰

The proclamation alarmed Southern colonists profoundly. Edward Rutledge, the future governor of South Carolina, said it would “work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies.” George Washington called Dunmore “that arch-traitor to the rights of humanity.”¹¹ The National Park Service notes that the Founders were “painfully aware” of the hypocrisy of writing “all men are created equal” while maintaining slavery, which is why the reference in the final document is “very veiled.”⁹

Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar has identified another indirect echo earlier in the Declaration. The grievance that the King “has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good” has been linked to Jefferson’s 1774 complaint that the King rejected colonial laws “of the most salutary tendency,” which included laws to prohibit or tax the international slave trade. Amar cites the example of the Massachusetts legislature, which voted to abolish the slave trade in 1771 and 1774 only to have both measures blocked by the royal governor.¹²

Did “All Men Are Created Equal” Include Enslaved People?

The Declaration’s most famous phrase did not, in practice, mean in 1776 what it would come to mean. According to Rakove, when Jefferson drafted those words, the intended meaning was not about individual equality at all. It was a claim that the American colonists “as a people” possessed the same rights to self-government as other nations. Freedom, equal rights, and full citizenship were reserved in practice for white men who owned property.⁷

That limited original scope did not go unchallenged for long. As early as January 1777, enslaved people in Massachusetts, including Lancaster Hill, Peter Bess, Brister Slenser, and Prince Hall, petitioned for their freedom, arguing they possessed a “natural and unalienable right to that freedom, which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind.” The British noticed the contradiction too. Lawyer John Lind, hired by the British ministry to refute the Declaration, asked pointedly: “Equal in what way? … ‘All men,’ they tell us, ‘are created equal.'”¹³

Over time, the meaning of the phrase shifted from a statement about national sovereignty into a principle of individual equality. That transformation eventually provided the philosophical basis for the Reconstruction amendments of 1865 to 1870, which abolished slavery and established broader definitions of citizenship and equal protection under the law.⁷

How the Silence Was Used Later

Because the Declaration says nothing about slavery directly, both sides of the pre-Civil War argument were free to claim it. Enslaved and free Black Americans, along with white abolitionists, turned its language into a weapon against slavery. Their argument was straightforward: a nation founded on principles of liberty and equality could not maintain an institution that violated both.

Benjamin Banneker Writes to Jefferson

In August 1791, Benjamin Banneker, a free Black mathematician and astronomer, wrote directly to Jefferson, then Secretary of State. He quoted the Declaration’s language back to its author, noting Jefferson once held “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” He then accused Jefferson of “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression,” making Jefferson himself “guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others.” He urged Jefferson to “put your soul in their souls’ stead.”¹⁴

Jefferson’s reply was politely evasive. He wrote that “no body wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men,” and noted he had sent Banneker’s almanac to a French scientific academy. He attributed any perceived intellectual deficiencies in Black people to “the degraded condition of their existence” rather than nature, but did nothing to change the system that produced those conditions.¹⁴

The 1799 Petition to Congress

On December 30, 1799, Reverend Absalom Jones and 70 other free Black men from Philadelphia petitioned Congress to end the international slave trade, protect free Black people from kidnapping, and pursue eventual emancipation. They invoked the Declaration directly: “If the Bill of Rights, or the declaration of Congress are of any validity, we beseech that as we are men, we may be admitted to partake of the Liberties and unalienable Rights therein held forth.”¹⁵

The petition received a hostile reception. When Pennsylvania Congressman Robert Waln introduced it in the House on January 2, 1800, the body voted the following day to refer parts to a committee while attaching a formal statement that the petition “ought therefore to receive no encouragement or countenance from this House.”¹⁵

Frederick Douglass on the Fourth of July

The most celebrated abolitionist use of the Declaration came on July 5, 1852, when Frederick Douglass addressed the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. He called the Declaration the “ringbolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny” and its principles “saving principles” that must be upheld “at whatever cost.”¹⁶ Then he turned the celebration on its head: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”¹⁷

Douglass argued that a nation professing the Declaration’s ideals while permitting slavery had turned its “boasted liberty” into “an unholy license.” Yet he drew a distinction that separated him from some fellow abolitionists: he insisted the Constitution itself was not a pro-slavery document, pointing out that the words “slavery,” “slaveholding,” or “slave” appeared nowhere in its text. Despite the “dark picture” he painted, Douglass drew “encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.”¹⁸

Dred Scott and Lincoln’s Answer

The question of whether the equality clause included Black people reached its most consequential confrontation in the years before the Civil War. In the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that “the enslaved African race were not intended to be included” in the Declaration and “formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.” Taney argued that at the time of the founding, people of African descent were “considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings” who were not part of the political community, and that the Constitution had to be interpreted according to its original meaning.¹⁹²⁰

Abraham Lincoln answered Taney directly. In a speech at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857, Lincoln rejected the claim that the Declaration’s authors did not intend their words to apply to Black people. He pointed out that at the time of the signing, free Black men were citizens and voters in five states: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina. He called Taney’s interpretation a “slander upon the framers.”²¹

Lincoln argued that the authors did not mean all men were equal in “color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity,” but rather that they were equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Declaration was intended, he said, as a “standard maxim for free society” to be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.”²²

Lincoln later crystallized this philosophy in a private fragment written around January 1861, using a metaphor from Proverbs. The Declaration’s principle of liberty was the “apple of gold,” and the Union and the Constitution were the “picture of silver” framed around it. “The picture was made for the apple — not the apple for the picture,” he wrote, arguing that the Constitution existed to protect and preserve the Declaration’s aspirational promise.²³

The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, has been described as giving “legal force to the principle argument of the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal.”²⁴ Slavery, then, is absent from the Declaration itself but present in nearly everything around it: in what Jefferson drafted, in what Congress cut, in the veiled grievance that replaced it, and in the two centuries of argument over what the document’s silence was meant to allow.

1
Library of Congress. Jefferson’s “Original Rough Draught” of the Declaration of Independence
2
American Battlefield Trust. Jefferson Condemns the Slave Trade in the Declaration of Independence
3
Liberty Fund. Jefferson, Slavery, Race, and the Declaration
4
BlackPast. The Declaration of Independence and the Debate Over Slavery
5
University of Washington. Documents That Changed the World: The Declaration of Independence’s Deleted Passage on Slavery
6
New American History. The Deleted Passage
7
Stanford University. How the Meaning of the Declaration of Independence Changed Over Time
8
Jack Miller Center. Jefferson and the Declaration
9
National Park Service. The Declaration of Independence: What Were They Thinking?
10
Gilder Lehrman Institute. Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation
11
The Atlantic. America’s Twofold Original Sin
12
National Constitution Center. Annotated Declaration of Independence
13
Gilder Lehrman Institute. The Pursuit of Equality
14
National Park Service. Benjamin Banneker Letters to Thomas Jefferson
15
National Park Service. Petition of Absalom Jones and Others
16
Bill of Rights Institute. Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July
17
Teaching American History. What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July
18
National Constitution Center. Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July
19
National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford
20
Bill of Rights Institute. Dred Scott v. Sanford Opinions
21
Mr. Lincoln and the Founders. Commentary
22
Dickinson College. Lincoln on the Declaration
23
Gilder Lehrman Institute. Abraham Lincoln’s Apple of Gold and the Declaration of Independence
24
National Endowment for the Humanities. Abolitionists