In an article on Britannica.com
The author claims that in one of Jefferson's initial drafts of the Declaration of Independence, he essentially said individuals aren't to blame.... and instead its the institutions who are to blame. Can anyone verify this with primary sources or let me know where I could read more about this specific passage / claim.
Thanks!
Relevant Text from the website below.
In his initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson condemned the injustice of the slave trade and, by implication, slavery, but he also blamed the presence of enslaved Africans in North America on avaricious British colonial policies. Jefferson thus acknowledged that slavery violated the natural rights of the enslaved, while at the same time he absolved Americans of any responsibility for owning slaves themselves. The Continental Congress apparently rejected the tortured logic of this passage by deleting it from the final document, but this decision also signaled the Founders’ commitment to subordinating the controversial issue of slavery to the larger goal of securing the unity and independence of the United States.
The passage as drafted and removed was as follows: "He [referring to King George] 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, captivating & 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 & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or 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 has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." Source of passage: Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and other Writings, Official and Private (Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Maury, 1853-1854).
I think it is a mischaracterization to say that this passage "absolved Americans of any responsibility for owning slaves themselves." If you read this passage without any other context, you would anticipate that part of the motive for the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War would be to abolish slavery. However, we know that Thomas Jefferson himself held hundreds of slaves during his lifetime (and refused to free them after he died), and that many of the original colonies were not willing to abolish slavery, given their economic dependence on the practice. So there is tremendous hypocrisy and inconsistency in the ideals professed by Jefferson and the other founders compared to their actual practices.