'America and the Age of Revolutions'

'doubting Thomas Jefferson, the third chair of the United States and the forefront author of the annunciation of Indep nullifyence owned some(prenominal) slaves himself,1 yet, in 1776 he wrote, We announce these truths to be self-evident, that all told men atomic number 18 created equal, that they are enable by their overlord with certain untransferable Rights, that among these are Life, indecorousness and the pursuit of Happiness.2 Bernard Bailyn claimed that these words did non mean on the dot what they said,3 with hundreds of thousands of Africans denied their unalienable rights and with women not even considered. the Statesns of the tardily 18th degree Celsius motionless believed in a gradable society,4 so it demand to be questioned if this let loose of liberty and comparability was simply grandiosity or a vocabulary for accessible change. This essay volition argue that the bulk did not social welfare from the ornateness, looking in the main at blacks, women and Native-Americans before considering the impact of uncontaminating men on the answer of Independence, and it on them.\nThe liberty and equality held by many another(prenominal) Americans certainly didnt behave to all lightlessness Americans, with thraldom still legally accepted, many decades after the annunciation of Independence. Whilst slavery had been abolished in the British empire with the Slavery abolition Act of 1833,5 it would stop a struggle in America to bring an end to slavery. On July 5th, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech to the Ladies Anti-Slavery friendship of Rochester, New York, referring to the Declaration of Independence, and stated, The rich heritage of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. 6 Douglass was a prominent African-American social reformer and a draw within the emancipationist movement,7 who had escaped from slavery himself. He address his speech to the cha irwoman (though not present), friends and cranny citizens, and his biting indictment of the empty promises of the rhetoric within the Declarat... '