Protecting slavery was a primary motive driving some colonists to declare independence

Evidence

And yet none of this is part of our founding mythology, which conveniently omits the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. They feared that liberation would enable an abused people to seek vengeance on their oppressors. In many parts of the South, Black people far outnumbered white people. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just thirty-three, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came in part from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. So they also understood that abolition would have upended the economies of both the North and the South. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 102

Categorization

• XREF: Core contested claim at the heart of the Wilentz letter dispute the reader is using this book to analyze. — connects to: Fear of loyalist-slavery-invasion convergence pushed southern delegates toward independence — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 133
• QUESTION: This is precisely the empirical claim historians contest — worth pinning down which parts are documented (the slave-based wealth, the Black-majority demography) versus asserted (the protective motive).
• ADDENDUM: Ties to the infrastructure-of-origin-stories reframing; the wealth claim about Jefferson chattel profits is a concrete instance of slavery as foundational infrastructure.