The Declaration’s anti-slavery passage was cut to protect slaveholding delegates’ economic interests.

Evidence

Benjamin Franklin, sitting next to him, failed to cheer him up. The delegates cut Jefferson’s long passage calling the English hypocrites. Apparently, delegates from South Carolina and Georgia disliked Jefferson’s characterization of slavery as a “cruel war against human nature”; that language threatened the foundation of their vast estates. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 279

Categorization

• XREF: Another instance of policy/interest (delegates’ estates) suppressing an antiracist idea — the edits to the Declaration are policy decisions shaped by self-interest, not pure principle.