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3 November, 09:33

Which group of people benefited most from language being used in the Declaration of Independence

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  1. 3 November, 10:08
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    I would say white males were the group that benefited most from language used in the Declaration of Independence.

    Explanation:

    The Declaration of Independence uses this language to assert rights:

    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.

    "All men" were to be afforded those rights with full equalilty ... but women were not granted the same exercise of rights in the early United States. For more than a century after the founding of the USA, women did not enjoy the right to vote or participate in government. Women's rights were not protected until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which said, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

    Also, in the thinking of the men at the time of the Declaration of Independence (1776), non-white persons were not considered to be of the same status as whites. It is true that in his original draft of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson condemned the slave trade carried on by the British. Jefferson himself owned slaves he had inherited, but saw an eventual emancipation of slaves as something that would need to be done over time. The paragraph in the draft of the Declaration said that the King of England "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty" by capturing, transporting and selling human beings from the distant land of Africa. Jefferson called the "market where men should be bought and sold" an "execrable commerce" carried on by authority of the British crown. ("Execrable" is an adjective related to excrement - - something extremely nasty.) But those comments against the institution of slavery were dropped from the final version of the Declaration of Independence. Georgia and South Carolina would not join in voting for independence from Britain unless the paragraph about the evil of the slave trade was omitted, and so it was omitted from the final version.

    The rights of black Americans were not protected until the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which said: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
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