30. The Slave-Trade and Public Opinion after the War. The Declaration of Independence showed a significant drift of public opinion from the firm stand taken in the “Association” resolutions.  The clique of political philosophers to which Jefferson belonged never imagined the continued existence of the country with slavery.  It is well known that the first draft of the Declaration contained a severe arraignment of Great Britain as the real promoter of slavery and the slave-trade in America.  In it the king was charged with waging “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 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 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."[31]

To this radical and not strictly truthful statement, even the large influence of the Virginia leaders could not gain the assent of the delegates in Congress.  The afflatus of 1774 was rapidly subsiding, and changing economic conditions had already led many to look forward to a day when the slave-trade could successfully be reopened.  More important than this, the nation as a whole was even less inclined now than in 1774 to denounce the slave-trade uncompromisingly.  Jefferson himself says that this clause “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,” said he, “felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."[32]

As the war slowly dragged itself to a close, it became increasingly evident that a firm moral stand against slavery and the slave-trade was not a probability.  The reaction which naturally follows a period of prolonged and exhausting strife for high political principles now set in.  The economic forces of the country, which had suffered most, sought to recover and rearrange themselves; and all the selfish motives that impelled a bankrupt nation to seek to gain its daily bread did not long hesitate to demand a reopening of the profitable African slave-trade.  This demand was especially urgent from the fact that the slaves, by pillage, flight, and actual fighting, had become so reduced in numbers during the war that an urgent demand for more laborers was felt in the South.