Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence owned many slaves himself,1 yet, in 1776 he wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."2 Bernard Bailyn claimed that these words did not mean exactly what they said,3 with hundreds of thousands of Africans denied their unalienable rights and with women not even considered. Americans of the late 18th century still believed in a hierarchical society,4 so it needs to be questioned if this talk of liberty and equality was simply rhetoric or a vocabulary for social change. This essay will argue that the majority did not benefit from the rhetoric, looking principally at African-Americans, women and Native-Americans before considering the impact of white men on the Declaration of Independence, and it on them.
The liberty and equality held by many Americans certainly didn't extend to all black Americans, with slavery still legally accepted, many decades after the Declaration of Independence. Whilst slavery had been abolished in the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833,5 it would take a war in America to bring an end to slavery. On July 5th, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech to the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society 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 reformer and a leader within the abolitionist movement,7 who had escaped from slavery himself. He addressed his speech to the President (though not present), friends and fellow citizens, and his biting indictment of the empty promises of the rhetoric within the Declarat...