However, in order not to offend the sensibilities of the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina, the Congress elected to omit Jefferson’s denunciation of slavery from the final declaration. The Second Continental Congress received a draft of the Declaration from Jefferson that made the British rejection of the petition submitted by the First Continental Congress to end the slave trade one of the grounds for severing ties. Nowhere were the novel, and transcendental, implications of the Declaration so visible as in Jefferson’s attempt to include a denunciation of slavery.
