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All men are by nature equally free and independent. Such equality is necessary in order to create a free government. All men must be equal to each other in natural law. Jefferson also may have been influenced by Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which was published in early 1776: Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis, 1778. He is credited with ...
They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal—equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they said, and this they meant.
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
The first and second article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason and adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention of Delegates on June 12, 1776, speaks of happiness in the context of recognizably Lockean rights and is paradigmatic of the way in which "the fundamental natural rights of mankind" were expressed at the ...
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... In the 19th century, the movement to abolish slavery seized this passage as a statement of constitutional principle, although the U.S. constitution recognized and protected the institution of slavery.
Ashley was heard in August 1781 by the County Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington. [9] Sedgwick and Reeve asserted that the constitutional provision that "all men are born free and equal" effectively abolished slavery in the state. When the jury ruled in Bett's favor, she became the first African-American woman to be set free under the ...
(In both cases the parties relied on the provision in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights which says that "all men are born free and equal", a formulation explicitly quoted by the blockquote immediately above the text accompanying footnote 9, and that is the wording to which the qualifier "This wording" refers.) As to your second point, the ...
The first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaims that "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility." The first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen replied: "Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights.