You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Uncle Sam, Switched at Birth? Have Americans Traded "Choice" for Liberty?
But, it had, actually. What the Declaration of Independence declared on that July Fourth, 241 years ago, was a statement born out of self-rule to a very large degree. Here, in the colonies, the Americans had discovered, not that they wanted to be free men, but that they were, indeed born free*, and in that understanding, they stood to declare that no one owned them.
*not so much slaves and women, or natives, just the slave owning native killing white man.
Yes, baah, it was less than perfect, but the ideas of declaration, are none the less powerful. And at that time, even more than the men who wrote it had dared to dream for themselves.
It was powerful, at the time abolition was happening in England, people over here weren't considered people, the ones that declared independence had a slavery clause, there was nothing about the declaration which was "powerful" especially considering that it was because they revolted when people were most desperate, it was something of a natural movement, and the slave owners managed to land in the pockets they were trying to get away from. I don't know what they dreamed, but what it accomplished wasn't anything praise worthy, it led to the largest ethnic cleansing under the name Manifest Destiny while the country has been in a perpetual cannibalization ever since.