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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 5 page paper which considers how America's founding fathers stated in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal," yet by owning slaves did not practice what they preached. How could the hypocrisy exist where equality was being championed while at the same time one human owned another? Bibliography lists 4 sources.
Page Count:
4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TG15_TGdoislav.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
revolution to demonstrate their commitment to this claim. The concept of everybody being equal was certainly a revolutionary one as many historians have duly noted. According to Robert
Hole (2001), "Many regarded rights as specific privileges which had been granted to certain people" (p. 38). The inclusion of the word all in the Declaration of Independence changes
everything. Or did it? The same man who composed this stirring rhetoric, Thomas Jefferson, was also an unabashed owner of slaves who freely bought and sold them as
profits dictated, as were the signers of the Declaration and the framers of the Constitution. How could these learned men be such hypocrites, the students of the twenty-first century
wonder? What is important to remember when considering this complex issue was that slavery did not appear to be any type of stumbling block to achieving what the founding
fathers deemed as equality because at the time it was not steeped in controversy (DSouza, 1995). In most parts of the eighteenth-century world, slavery was commonplace; freedom was not
(DSouza, 1995). As African-American historian Nathan Huggins noted in his text, Black Odyssey, neither the words slave nor slavery appear in the text of the U.S. Constitution (DSouza, 1995).
Perhaps the founding fathers did not regard African Americans as men or slaves. After all, they regarded themselves as the ones who had been enslaved by the oppressive
policies of George III, to whom the Declaration is addressing. According to John Hope Franklin, another African-American historian, "Jefferson didnt mean it when he wrote that all men are
created equal... Weve never meant it. The truth is that were a bigoted people and always have been" (DSouza, 1995, p. 30). John Adams recognized that the Revolution could
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