On July 2, 1776, American colonies declared independence from Great Britain, a day that John Adam’s believed would be “the most memorable epocha in the history of America,” according to constitutionfacts.com. Two days later, the final text of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was approved by Congress, which was signed nearly a month later on Aug. 4.

Jefferson may be considered the “author,” but he was actually part of a committee that included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman. The Virginia Constitution and George Mason’s draft of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights are considered Jefferson’s two primary sources of inspiration when he wrote it.

In that first draft of Virginia’s rights, Mason wrote “all men are born equally free and independent.” It was the precursor for Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” a statement filled with contradiction considering that Jefferson — and many of America’s founding fathers — owned slaves.

They helped perpetuate a system that chained men, women and children in perpetuity while spouting their shiny and lofty ideals. It was this contradiction that filmmaker, founder of Inertia Films and Suffolk native A. Troy Thomas sought to examine in his award-winning documentary “Liberty and Slavery: The Paradox of America’s Founding Fathers.”

“They gave us the rationale by which we call them hypocrites,” Thomas said in a phone interview. “They gave us the ammunition to shoot them, so to speak.”

The National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded “Liberty and Slavery” a pair of Emmys for the historical documentary and non-news photographer categories at the Capital Regional Emmy Awards held in June.

The documentary has won 21 awards in various film festivals and competitions across the country. It has been screened at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, the historic Plaza Theatre in Atlanta, Ga., and other locations.

Thomas also screened the film in the fall of 2016 to 10 people in a Suffolk church, including his mother, Ann Burgadine, and his father, James Jackson Thomas Jr. His father even got a small part in the finished film in the closeup shot of a slave master’s hands holding a Bible, he said.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Thomas said. “It took almost four years to make the documentary. It’s always nice to be recognized for your work in your chosen fields, but we felt that it was an important documentary, especially in light of the times we are living in today in America.”

Thomas and his crew traveled to about a dozen different states and the District of Columbia to interview 43 different experts on 18th-century culture, the history of the Transatlantic slave trade and the early American economy that slavery built.

“It got kind of out of control. I probably should have interviewed only 10 to 12, but then I started reading books and couldn’t stop, plus a lot of people wanted in on this,” Thomas said.

Experts in the documentary talked about how several key figures in American history handled slavery. John Adams, for example, did not own any slaves for moral reasons.

“He was a farmer. At one point he had 140 acres of land as a young lawyer, before he went off to the Continental Congress, and he even writes about how he could have saved a lot of money if he had slaves. But he wouldn’t do that, because he morally did not believe in slavery,” Caroline Keinath, deputy superintendent of the Adams National Historical Park, said in the documentary.

Of course, it was easier for political leaders in Massachusetts to take a stand, where slaves constituted “an infinitesimal part of the population” according to Richard Beeman, author of “Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor” and former professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Beeman died Sept. 6, 2016.

Political leaders in Virginia and South Carolina, however, had economies where slavery was considered crucial for both labor and crop expertise.

“If you’re doing rice in South Carolina, people of African descent brought the technology, the hydrology, all of the skills to do the rice industry came out of Africa,” according to Carl Westmoreland, senior historian at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in the documentary.

“Rice, sugar, it was grown in all parts of Africa,” Richard Cooper, director of interpretation at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, said in the documentary. “When you go into the low country and you see those rice fields on the (Drayton Hall Plantation) in Charleston, S.C., and others, you have to flood the land, unflood the land. There’s canal systems that go through these rice fields.”

Africans knew how to do all of this, and the Europeans used their knowledge to their own ends. Experts agreed that the prosperity of America’s economy originated from the blood, sweat and tears of slaves.

“Slave labor is essential to what was being produced in the American colonies at the time. Without slave labor, the economy falls,” Carter Hudgins, president and chief executive officer of the Drayton Hall Preservation Trust. “it’s almost like gasoline. If we lost gasoline as a fuel today, would our economy stop? Absolutely.”

As a child, George Washington’s family had slaves who would comb his hair, dress him and bring him his chocolate and tea. Thomas Jefferson inherited roughly 50 slaves from his parents and held notions of slavery as a “despotic, cruel, ugly institution,” according to Henry Wiencek, the author of “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves.”

“He referred to slavery as ‘unremitting despotism,’ and described a scene from his childhood where he had seen a parent abusing a slave,” Wiencek said in the documentary. “He didn’t say ‘whipping,’ but he said ‘giving vent to passions against the slave.’ He could see how the power of slavery turned slave masters into very, very cruel people.”

By the end of their lives, several founding fathers came to their own realizations on this grim practice. Benjamin Franklin, whose Pennsylvania Gazette would advertise the sale of slaves, freed the last of his own by 1785.

“By 1787, he was president of the Pennsylvania Society for the abolition of slavery in that state,” Beeman said.

Compromises were made between the northern and southern states that kept slavery alive in states like South Carolina and Georgia. Ideas were considered for what would happen if the slaves were freed. Would they be given their own land and reparations? Would they be sent back to Africa by ship?

“You see Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison all expressed moral concerns about the moral institution of slavery, but they do nothing about their own possessions in slaves,” according to Thomas Kidd, historian and author of “Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots.” “They don’t free them upon their death, they don’t free them in their wills. They pass them on to their descendants.”

Washington was surrounded by men he fought alongside in the war, like Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton, who pushed him on this issue. Towards the end of his life, he wrote about his moral crisis on slavery, and set in motion to free his own slaves before his death.

“When George Washington wrote his will in the last summer of his life, he specified that all of his slaves that he owned in his own right — roughly 123 people — were to be set free after the death of his wife Martha,” Wiencek said. “Washington also called for the education of the young slaves and training of everyone up to the age of 25 in a skill. He said ‘no one should be exiled from the state.’

“He was saying everything that Jefferson would not admit. That slaves were smart enough to read and write, that slaves were amenable in training, that slaves had a right to live in this country.”

Thomas explained that the reverence he had for the founding fathers faded as he looked closer at their flaws as human beings, but he also gained a different kind of respect for men that bore the burden of leadership.

“You were asking them to start a nation, gain independence and abolish slavery in their lifetime. It’s completely unfair of us to expect them to do both. It had never really been done in the history of mankind. Individuals had freed their slaves, but there was never a whole society to my knowledge that really did that,” he said.

“Liberty and Slavery” doesn’t forgive the founders for what happened, but it also acknowledges the entirety of their circumstances.

“We should grapple with them as imperfect figures who we can learn from because of their imperfections, as well as what they did well,” Joseph Ellis, author of “Founding Brothers” and professor emeritus of history at Mount Holyoke College, said in the documentary.