at they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness." Not so familiar to modern readers is the
following, which an English historian of our literature calls "the most
eloquent clause of that great document," and "the most interesting
suppressed passage in American literature." Jefferson was a
Southerner, but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on
the subject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George for
promoting the "peculiar institution" was left out from the final draft
of the Declaration in deference to Southern members.

"He has waged 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 by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this
execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no
fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise
in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them
by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off
former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes
which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other Southern
statesman afterward adopted on the subject of slavery was not taken by
the men of Jefferson's generation. Another famous Virginian, John
Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slave-holder, in his speech on the
militia bill in the House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said:
"I speak from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls for fire
in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her
bosom." This was said _apropos_ of the danger of a servile
insurrection in the event of a war with England--a war which actually
broke out in the year following, but was not attended with the
slave-rising which Randolph predicted. Randolph was a thorough-going
"State rights" man, and, though opposed to slavery on principle, he
cried "Hands o