All Men Are Created Equal: A Promise and a Contradiction

The Declaration of Independence, adopted on 4 July 1776, justified separation from Britain with a short statement of principle: all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and governments exist to secure those rights. Thomas Jefferson, its main drafter, drew on English constitutional ideas and Enlightenment political thought. The contradiction was obvious even then: Jefferson and many signers enslaved people, and roughly one in five people in the colonies was enslaved.

Jefferson's draft included a passage blaming the king for the slave trade, but Congress removed it. Critics such as the British writer Samuel Johnson mocked colonists for demanding liberty while holding people in slavery, while enslaved petitioners in Massachusetts quoted the Declaration's ideals to demand their freedom. Over the next two centuries, abolitionists, women's rights activists and civil rights leaders repeatedly used its words to argue that the nation should live up to its founding promise.