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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 ...
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 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 ...
H. L. A. Hart argued that if there are any rights at all, there must be the right to liberty, for all the others would depend upon this. T. H. Green argued that "if there are such things as rights at all, then, there must be a right to life and liberty, or, to put it more properly to free life."
Thus, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen) can be encapsulated so: (1) Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility; (2) The end of all political associations is the ...
All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.