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Slavery and the Declaration of Independence: The Deleted Clauses

Sunday, January 25 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. 

Photo credit: Image of Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence. Library of Congress.

Join us for the first program in the Generation Declaration series, “Slavery and the Declaration of Independence: The Deleted Clauses,” with OAH Distinguished Lecturer Holly Brewer, Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland.

2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Join Morven, the home of a Signer, as we dive into all things Declaration with a new public program series. Generation Declaration invites public historians, scholars, and writers to share their work researching little known or underrepresented aspects of America’s founding document. 

Join us in discovering: Who was this document written for and why? How was it printed and represented visually? What did news outlets have to say about it? In what ways has the document been repurposed for other movements for justice and independence? 

We’re pleased to announce the first program in the series, “Slavery and the Declaration of Independence: The Deleted Clauses,” with OAH Distinguished Lecturer Holly Brewer, Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. 

Due to the projected weather forecast, this program has been moved to an all-virtual format. Attendees can join the program from home via Zoom webinar. Pre-registration is required in order to receive a link.

Slavery and the Declaration of Independence: The Deleted Clauses

In this lecture, Brewer argues that the deleted clauses of the Declaration of Independence are crucial for understanding the debates about slavery during the era of the American Revolution. In Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration, three of the twenty clauses complained about the actions of the English king related to slavery. Two of those clauses, both of which blamed the king for supporting that “execrable commerce” in people, were deleted from the final draft, after some debate and strong objections to the clauses by South Carolina’s delegates to the Continental Congress. 

While historians have tended to ridicule these clauses on the grounds that Jefferson owned slaves and that the colonists themselves were solely responsible for slavery, Brewer contends that Jefferson understood both a history and a political and legal structure that we have forgotten. This lecture therefore helps to provide a history, as well as a political and legal structure, for understanding the debates over the Declaration’s principle that all men are created equal.

About the Speaker

Holly Brewer is the Burke Professor of American History and an associate professor at the University of Maryland. She works on debates about justice in early America and the British Empire through the revolutionary period and into the nineteenth century. She is the author of By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (2005), which won three national prizes in legal history, as well as of the prizewinning "Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia" (The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 2 April 1997). She is currently finishing a book on the ideological origins of slavery in early America and the British Empire for which she received a Guggenheim fellowship. She is a keen supporter of K–12 history education and has provided content lectures on the prerevolutionary period for AP U.S. history teachers.

Upcoming programs in the series

• Thursday, April 9, 2026 - John Bidwell, Curator Emeritus at the Morgan Library, on “The Declaration in Script and Print”
• Sunday, July 19, 2026 - Emily Sneff, Public Historian and Author, on “When the Declaration was News”