Jefferson’s 1774 manifesto blamed the British crown for holding back slavery’s abolition

Evidence

By the time of the American Revolution, the first full-blown abolitionist movement had emerged, influencing a newly emergent anti-slavery rhetoric, even among enslavers like Thomas Jefferson. In 1774, he drafted a powerful freedom manifesto, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in which he accused the British king of holding back the march of racial progress that the colonists wanted. “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state,” Jefferson wrote. Several of the admirers of A Summary View printed and circulated it widely, launching Jefferson into national recognition. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1249

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Revolutionary-War-cause dispute case study — this is the empirical root of the ‘blame Britain’ origin narrative.