That was the great constitutional opportunity that Americans failed to grasp, perhaps because four years of Civil War and a decade of the military occupation of the South simply exhausted Northern public opinion. Even now, if you look at issues of voter suppression, we are still wrestling with its consequences. How did the founding fathers view equality? And how did these diverging interpretations emerge? But after the Revolution succeeded, Americans began reading that famous phrase another way.
It now became a statement of individual equality that everyone and every member of a deprived group could claim for himself or herself. 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?
Parliament was determined to bring its unruly American subjects to heel. Britain began to prepare for war in early The first fighting broke out in April in Massachusetts. The movement for independence was now in full swing. The colonists elected delegates to attend a Continental Congress that eventually became the governing body of the union during the Revolution. After Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a motion to declare independence on June 7, , Congress formed a committee to draft a statement justifying the break with Great Britain.
The initial draft of the Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson and was presented to the entire Congress on June 28 for debate and revision. After two days of editing and debate, the Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, , even as a large British fleet and more than 34, troops prepared to invade New York.
By the time it was formally signed on August 2, printed copies of the document were spreading around the country, being reprinted in newspapers and publicly read aloud. While the road to independence had been long and twisted, the effect of its declaration made an impact right away. Now heart and hand, as one person said, could move together. Throughout the s and early s, the North American colonists found themselves increasingly at odds with British imperial policies regarding taxation and frontier policy.
When repeated protests failed to influence British policies, and instead resulted in the closing of the port of Boston and the declaration of martial law in Massachusetts , the colonial governments sent delegates to a Continental Congress to coordinate a colonial boycott of British goods.
When fighting broke out between American colonists and British forces in Massachusetts, the Continental Congress worked with local groups, originally intended to enforce the boycott, to coordinate resistance against the British.
British officials throughout the colonies increasingly found their authority challenged by informal local governments, although loyalist sentiment remained strong in some areas. Despite these changes, colonial leaders hoped to reconcile with the British Government, and all but the most radical members of Congress were unwilling to declare independence.
However, in late , Benjamin Franklin, then a member of the Secret Committee of Correspondence, hinted to French agents and other European sympathizers that the colonies were increasingly leaning towards seeking independence. While perhaps true, Franklin also hoped to convince the French to supply the colonists with aid.
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