'America and the Age of Revolutions'

'doubting Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the point author of the resolution of Indep final stageence have some(prenominal) a(prenominal) slaves himself,1 yet, in 1776 he wrote, We stomach these truths to be self-evident, that exclusively men atomic number 18 created equal, that they are endow by their former with certain intrinsic Rights, that among these are Life, freedom and the pursuit of Happiness.2 Bernard Bailyn claimed that these words did not mean but what they said,3 with hundreds of thousands of Africans denied their unalienable rights and with women not even considered. the Statesns of the easy 18th blow ease believed in a class-conscious society,4 so it unavoidably to be questioned if this rag of liberty and equation was simply empty talk or a vocabulary for genial change. This essay result argue that the mass did not wellbeing from the cajolery, looking in general at blacks, women and Native-Americans on contend d considering the impact of clean-living men on the answer of Independence, and it on them.\nThe liberty and compare held by many Americans certainly didnt stretch along to all low Americans, with bondage still legally accepted, many decades after the resolution of Independence. Whilst slavery had been abolished in the British pudding stone with the Slavery abolishment Act of 1833,5 it would head a war in America to bring an end to slavery. On July 5th, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech to the Ladies Anti-Slavery golf club of Rochester, New York, referring to the Declaration of Independence, and stated, The rich inheritance 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 crusader and a leader within the emancipationist movement,7 who had escaped from slavery himself. He turn to his speech to the president (though not present), friends and checkmate ci tizens, and his biting indictment of the empty promises of the rhetoric within the Declarat... '