![]() ![]() He admitted that slaveholding rendered his own class depraved “despots” and destroyed the “amor patriae” of their bondsmen. Slavery was a system, said Jefferson, “daily exercised in tyranny,” with slaveholders practicing “unremitting despotism”, and the slaves a “degrading submission”. ![]() Jefferson, who had crafted the Declaration of Independence for this fledgling nation at war with the world’s strongest empire, felt deeply worried about whether his new country could survive with slavery, much less the war against Britain. The American revolution still raged, many of his own slaves had escaped, his beloved Virginia teetered on social and political chaos. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1781. ![]()
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