'America and the Age of Revolutions'

'doubting Thomas Jefferson, the third electric chair of the United States and the asterisk author of the announcement of Indep ceaseence owned numerous slaves himself,1 yet, in 1776 he wrote, We assure these truths to be self-evident, that all told men are created equal, that they are endow by their originator with certain unassignable Rights, that among these are Life, autonomy and the pursuit of Happiness.2 Bernard Bailyn claimed that these words did non mean merely what they said,3 with hundreds of thousands of Africans denied their unalienable rights and with women not even considered. the Statesns of the new-made 18th snow tranquil believed in a vertical society,4 so it need to be questioned if this babble of liberty and equating was simply ornateness or a vocabulary for loving change. This essay pull up s get downs argue that the bulk did not bring in from the grandiloquence, looking chiefly at blacks, women and Native-Americans out front considering the impact of etiolate men on the resolving of Independence, and it on them.\nThe liberty and equality held by many a(prenominal) Americans certainly didnt put across to all pitch blackness Americans, with slaveholding still legally accepted, many decades after the proclamation of Independence. Whilst slavery had been abolished in the British imperium with the Slavery abolition Act of 1833,5 it would take a struggle in America to bring an end to slavery. On July 5th, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech to the Ladies Anti-Slavery connection of Rochester, New York, referring to the Declaration of Independence, and stated, The rich hereditary pattern 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 reformist and a attractor within the abolitionist movement,7 who had escaped from slavery himself. He address his speech to the president (though not present), fri ends and coadjutor citizens, and his biting indictment of the empty promises of the rhetoric within the Declarat...'