"The Declaration of Independence" Before and After

George W. Bush, and his legal team, didn't invent redaction. Below is an excerpt from Thomas Jefferson's autobiography. As you know, Mr. Jefferson wrote "The Declaration of Independence."

In his autobiography, we see the original version of the document, and the document as we now know it after having been edited by what were the equivalent of our members of Congress, signatories of the document.

The excerpt below deals specifically with Jefferson's thoughts about slavery which were deleted from the official document:

[He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivatng and 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 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 for 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.]


http://wsu.edu/~dee/AMERICA/DECLAR.HTM