In March , she wrote her husband, John Adams , imploring him and the other members of the Continental Congress to:. Who Celebrated? W ere there any enslaved people there? If there, were they equally celebrating? No doubt we know the answers because for centuries enslaved African Americans and other cultural minorities were deprived of equality and civil rights.
Until the Fourteenth Amendment July 9, , African Americans were exempt from citizenship and equal protection. The Chinese Exclusion Act May 6, denied admission to these immigrants. Women could not vote until the Nineteenth Amendment August 18, Central American and Mexican children are separated from their families and detained at the borders.
The list goes on. African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos — all people should be treated equally under the law and protected from police brutality. 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?
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 Declaration of Independence. Learn More The Declaration of Independence expresses the ideals on which the United States was founded and the reasons for separation from Great Britain.
Read a Transcript. Bill of Rights. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
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.
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