“Levelling Principles” versus “Execrable Commerce”: Debating Slavery’s Legalities from the Declaration to the Treaty of Paris

The day after the committee of five shared the draft of the Declaration of Independence with the full Congress, on June 29, 1776, Edward Rutledge of South Carolina reacted in horror. Such “levelling Principles which Men without Character and without Fortune in general Possess, which are so captivating to the lower Class of Mankind . . . will occasion such a fluctuation of Property as to introduce the greatest disorder.” His horror translated into the removal of many of the passages that were explicitly opposed to slavery: the final declaration, a treaty between the states, still contained some “leveling principles” in its statement that all men are created equal, but the specific passages calling Africans “MEN” in italics and capital letters and condemning the slave trade as “execrable commerce,” an “assemblage of horrors” and “piratical warfare” were gone. This paper traces how that struggle over levelling principles during those few days both reflected debates and struggles that had come before, and presaged another deadly bargain over whether to protect or reject the commerce in people during the negotiation that ended the revolution with the Treaty of Paris. Then another South Carolinian, Henry Laurens, would play a critical role to protect that “execrable commerce,” this time more silently, but even more powerfully. In both treaties – words had powerful legal implications for slavery and the slave trade. This is the story of how two South Carolinians sought “to keep the Staff [the sceptre of power] in our own Hands” even as others sought to enshrine more egalitarian principles. And why it matters.