Congress deleted Jefferson’s slavery passage from the Declaration because it divided the colonies

Evidence

The founders recognized this hypocrisy. As Jefferson sat down in that rented room in Philadelphia in 1776 to draft our founding document, he initially tried to argue that slavery wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the vile institution on the unwilling colonists, called trafficking in human beings a crime, and, in a reference to Lord Dunmore’s proclamation, railed against the Crown for stoking insurrections by the enslaved. In the end, the other congressmen struck the passage, which many understood called unwanted attention to an unjust system that was already a source of division among the colonies. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 104

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s case study: shows how evidence is selected and suppressed in the founding text itself.