Slavery & The Declaration of Independence

During Monday's discussion, we talked for several minutes about slavery and its place in the Declaration of Independence. Many students brought up the sort of irony that Thomas Jefferson's original draft mentioned the cruelty of the King's use of slavery, when the Founding Fathers and virtually all wealthy white men of that day owned slaves themselves. In previous class periods, we had talked about how slaves were common, and the colonists did not view slaves as being equal to themselves because it had become ingrained into them that it was the "right" thing to do. By the time colonists were writing the Declaration of Independence though, we considered in class whether the colonists knew the error of their ways. After continuing on this discussion for awhile, the realization that helped me better understand why the colonists chose to not include "abolishing slavery" as an objective was one of my classmate's observations. He said that the Declaration's purpose was obviously more aimed at the King, and pointed out that discussing an issue such as slavery in this document would be a huge political move. Of course, I don't think that it was right that the colonists owned slaves, but I do consider that perhaps some of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had radical ideas with the hopes to abolish slavery one day, knowing that the Declaration would be a strong precursor.