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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >We are cowards.
> 

"We" are also soulless Yankee propogandists.

The paragraph discarded from the Declaration of Independence did not deal in 
the slightest with the holding of slaves, it dealt only with the slave trade.

It was most vigorously opposed not by Southern delegates, who had little 
desire by 1776 to import yet more slaves (importation was already recognized 
as a 
serious problem in the South) but rather by the New England states whose ship 
holders were profiting immensely from the triangle trade.

Realize that you can't import slaves into, say, Tennessee.  You have to 
import them into costal colonies first.  

The US officially prohibited the importation of slaves in 1808.  

BUT

Virginia had already outlawed the importation of slaves in 1774
By 1786 every Southern state except Georgia and SChad outlawed importation of 
slaves 
Georgia ends all slave trade in 1798.  Not just importing slaves, but buying 
or selling any slaves to anyone.  
The only remaining Southern State, SC, never individually outlawed the 
importation of slaves, but it closed all slave markets (not just for imported 
slaves) in 1794.  The markets were reopened for a short time in 1803 to allow 
slaves 
attached to one family member to be assigned to another family memeber.  From 
the time of the Dec of Ind to the general prohibition against improrting 
slaves, SC, and probably no other Southern state imported slaves.

So the Southern states hardly had motivation to oppose this paragraph on the 
basis of the Slave trade:

"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most 
sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who 
never 
offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another 
hemisphere, 
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 where MEN should be bought 
and sold. he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative 
attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this 
assemblage of horrors might want no fact of (illegible), 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."    </HTML>