America and the Age of Revolutions

Thomas Jefferson, the third chairman of the United States and the principal former of the Declaration of Independence possess galore(postnominal) slaves himself,1 yet, in 1776 he wrote, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that on the whole hands atomic number 18 created equal, that they are endowed by their condition with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.2 Bernard Bailyn claimed that these words did non rigorous exactly what they said,3 with hundreds of thousands of Africans denied their unalienable rights and with women not even considered. Americans of the late eighteenth century still believed in a hierarchical society,4 so it needs to be questioned if this gurgle of liberty and equality was but rhetoric or a vocabulary for social change. This demonstrate will argue that the majority did not benefit from the rhetoric, looking at principally at African-Americans, women and Native-Americans on fightd co nsidering the impact of white men on the Declaration of Independence, and it on them.\nThe liberty and equality held by many Americans certainly didnt return to all black Americans, with slaveholding still legally accepted, many decades after the Declaration of Independence. Whilst slaveholding had been abolished in the British conglomerate with the Slavery Abolition bit of 1833,5 it would take a war in America to mother an end to slavery. On July 5th, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a public lecture to the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, saucily York, referring to the Declaration of Independence, and stated, The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is divided by you, not by me. 6 Douglass was a braggy African-American social reformer and a leader within the abolitionist movement,7 who had escaped from slavery himself. He addressed his speech to the President (though not present), friends and swearing c itizens, and his biting indictment of the exculpate promises of the rhetoric within the Declarat...