Together with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights , the Declaration of Independence can be counted as one of the three essential founding documents of the United States government.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. A member of a committee of five that also included John Adams of The Fourth of July—also known as Independence Day or July 4th—has been a federal holiday in the United States since , but the tradition of Independence Day celebrations goes back to the 18th century and the American Revolution.
On July 2nd, , the Continental Congress From to , the Continental Congress served as the government of the 13 American colonies and later the United States. The First Continental Congress, which was comprised of delegates from the colonies, met in in reaction to the Coercive Acts, a series of measures Thomas Jefferson , author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U. When the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War broke out in Massachusetts in April , few people in the American colonies wanted to separate from Great Britain entirely.
But as the war continued, and Britain called out massive armed forces to enforce its will, more and With each passing generation, our notion of who that statement covers has expanded. It is that promise of equality that has always defined our constitutional creed. At different moments, the Virginia colonists had tried to limit the extent of the slave trade, but the British crown had blocked those efforts.
But Virginians also knew that their slave system was reproducing itself naturally. They could eliminate the slave trade without eliminating slavery. That was not true in the West Indies or Brazil. To make any claim of this nature would open them to charges of rank hypocrisy that were best left unstated. If the founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, thought slavery was morally corrupt, how did they reconcile owning slaves themselves, and how was it still built into American law?
Two arguments offer the bare beginnings of an answer to this complicated question. The first is that the desire to exploit labor was a central feature of most colonizing societies in the Americas, especially those that relied on the exportation of valuable commodities like sugar, tobacco, rice and much later cotton. Cheap labor in large quantities was the critical factor that made these commodities profitable, and planters did not care who provided it — the indigenous population, white indentured servants and eventually African slaves — so long as they were there to be exploited.
To say that this system of exploitation was morally corrupt requires one to identify when moral arguments against slavery began to appear. One also has to recognize that there were two sources of moral opposition to slavery, and they only emerged after One came from radical Protestant sects like the Quakers and Baptists, who came to perceive that the exploitation of slaves was inherently sinful.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:. For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:. For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:.
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:. For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. It captured perfectly the essence of the ideals that would eventually define the United States.
How could Jefferson write this at a time that he and other Founders who signed the Declaration owned slaves? The document was an expression of an ideal. In his personal conduct, Jefferson violated it. At the Seneca Falls Convention in , when supporters of gaining greater rights for women met, they, too, used the Declaration of Independence as a guide for drafting their Declaration of Sentiments. Their efforts to achieve equal suffrage culminated in in the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.
And during the civil rights movement in the s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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