he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sac-
-red rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never of-
fended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemis-
-sphere, 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
#and#
where MEN should be bought & sold he has prostituted his negative
for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this
#determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold:#
execrable commerce:  and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact
of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms
among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them,
by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them:  thus paying
off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes
which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.]

There stands to this day that precious original,—­hot first-thoughts and cold second-thoughts, all in Jefferson’s own hand.  Look for a moment at the rich current of internal evidence running through that rough draught, and through all its erasures, changes, and emphatic markings,—­evidence of the deepest hatred not only of all tyranny, but of all slavery.  Thus, after he had written the passage, “determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold,” the idea continues hot in his mind; for, after smouldering a few moments, it flames forth again, is written again in the same phrasing, with the same show of emphasis, before he bethinks himself to erase it.  Then, too, the words Christian and MEN are the only words emphasized by careful pen-printing in large letters;—­and this labored movement of his pen marks the injury which he deemed the greater; for the largest letters and deepest emphasis are reserved for MEN.  Evidently, that word points out the wrong which, as Jefferson thought, “a candid world” would forever regard as the supreme wrong.

We have now noted Jefferson’s battle against slavery in the founding of the Republic:  let us go on to his work in the building of the Republic.

In 1782 he gave forth the “Notes on Virginia.”  His opposition to slavery is as fierce here as of old, but it takes various phases,—­sometimes sweeping against the hated system with a torrent of facts,—­sometimes battering it with a hard, cold logic,—­sometimes piercing it with deadly queries and suggestions,—­and sometimes, with his blazing hate of all oppression, biting and burning through every pro-slavery theory.