History of the United States I / Unit 6 USH1 0757 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Declaration
The idea
In the summer of seventeen seventy-six the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Its second paragraph holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The bulk of the document is not that famous sentence but a long list of grievances against George the Third, and the list is the argument. A people may dissolve the political bands connecting them to another only for cause, and the grievances are the cause. Among them are that he kept standing armies among the colonies in times of peace without the consent of their legislatures, and that he rendered the military independent of and superior to the civil power. Those are the same objections Unit 05 traced through the Quartering Act and the vice-admiralty courts, now assembled as justification rather than complaint.
In practice
A document that opens by appealing to the opinions of mankind and closes by pledging to each other lives, fortunes and sacred honour.
Where people slip
Two cautions. First, the Declaration also refers to Native peoples as merciless Indian savages, in a grievance accusing the king of setting them on the frontier settlements. The sentence asserting that all men are created equal and the sentence describing merciless savages are in the same document, adopted on the same day, by the same men. Teach both, because the contradiction is the subject of the next century. Second, the Avalon Project text was compared against the anchor before this entry was written, and the substance matched. The two differ in capitalisation and one comma, and it could not be established whether that difference belongs to Avalon's transcription or to how the page was retrieved, so this course makes no teaching point of the document's typography.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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