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Essential Questions to Consider

Essential Questions to Consider. How do you explain the American Revolution when it was all on defense of a few taxes here and there? Was the Revolution a revolution of law? When did the Revolution begin? (Not by firing shots) When was the tipping point when independence was a consideration?

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Essential Questions to Consider

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  1. Essential Questions to Consider • How do you explain the American Revolution when it was all on defense of a few taxes here and there? • Was the Revolution a revolution of law? • When did the Revolution begin? (Not by firing shots) When was the tipping point when independence was a consideration? • Does this Revolution continue today?

  2. Declaration of Independence Ratified 4 July 1776 Officially adopted 2 August 1776

  3. Drafting the Declaration of Independence Portrait by John Trumbull, as he might have looked in 1776. Second Continental Congress appointed John Adams to create a committee to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain. He and Ben Franklin knew almost immediately who should write it: the soft-spoken Virginian, Thomas Jefferson!

  4. Forming the Declaration of Independence • Not a new idea! Ideals of John Locke and other Constitutional political philosophers • Jefferson established this in the Declaration of Independence: • summarized this political philosophy in “self-evident truths;” • listed grievances against King George III, in order to justify breaking away from Great Britain; • declared to the world they were an independent nation.

  5. 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

  6. What of “all men created equal ?” • No immediate answer for slavery. • Presumed the new government of the United States of America would eventually outlaw slavery, but argued to focus NOW on independence from GB (feared the refusal of Southern states ratification of the Declaration if there was mention of slavery). • Many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. • Would it have been possible to outlaw slavery upon the adoption of the Declaration and eventually the Constitution?

  7. “Slavery is a wolf America holds by the ears” But as it is we have the wolf by the ears, we can neither hold him, nor let him safely go. Justice is in one scale, and self preservation in the other. —Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, 1820. We have the wolf by the ear and feel the danger of either holding or letting him loose. —Thomas Jefferson to Lydia Huntley Sigourney, 1824.

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