The Revolution — The Declaration of Freedom and Its Contradiction

In human history, there sometimes appears a single sentence that changes how the world is seen. In 1776, a document adopted in Philadelphia read thus — that all men are created equal, and are endowed by birth with rights that cannot be taken away. It was the moment when the people of colonies who had obeyed a king across the sea declared to the world that they would decide their own fate for themselves. This ideal would later cross borders to encourage many people, becoming a banner of freedom and democracy. Yet beneath the feet of those who wrote that radiant declaration lay a deep contradiction. Many of the very people who proclaimed equality owned enslaved people. America, as a nation, carried a dazzling ideal and a reality that betrayed it, both at once, from the very moment of its birth.

Colonies Tilting Toward Rebellion

The road to independence began with conflict over taxes. Britain, its finances strained by a long war with France, sought to ask the colonies to share that burden and introduced various taxes. In response, the people of the colonies grew increasingly resentful of being taxed without their own representatives in Parliament. No taxation without representation — this assertion became a phrase that symbolized the rift between the mother country and the colonies.

Tension gradually mounted, until at last it came to armed conflict. In 1775, the clash between royal troops and colonial militia at Lexington and Concord near Boston is regarded as the beginning of the Revolutionary War. At first, not all the people of the colonies desired independence. Many, it is said, wished for reconciliation with the mother country, and many sought to keep their loyalty to the king. In tilting public opinion strongly toward independence, a single declaratory document played a great role.

In July 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. The central figure in its drafting was Thomas Jefferson, with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams said to have taken part in its revision. The declaration enumerated the tyrannies of the mother country to argue for the legitimacy of independence, and proclaimed aloud the principle that all men are equal and possess rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This principle had the power to unite people under the great cause of independence and to give meaning to the struggle.

The Other Face of a Declaration That Sang of Freedom

Yet this lofty declaration held a contradiction that cannot be overlooked. When it proclaimed that ‘all men are created equal,’ there were, in reality, people not included within that ‘all men.’

Beginning with Jefferson, who drafted the declaration, many of the Founding Fathers who led the independence movement were themselves owners of enslaved people. To speak of equality as an ideal while relying, for daily life and wealth, on the labor of enslaved people — this fact lies at the very heart of the American founding as a deep-rooted contradiction, debated to this day. Those who gained freedom through independence were chiefly white men. People brought from Africa and enslaved, the Native peoples who had lived upon this land from the start, and women were all left outside that ‘all men.’

The war itself was no easy thing. Against a royal army superior in both equipment and numbers, the colonial side was forced into a hard struggle. The situation shifted decisively only after the support of France and other nations was added. In 1781 the British army surrendered at the Battle of Yorktown, deciding the broad course of the fighting. And in 1783, by the Treaty of Paris, Britain formally recognized the independence of the Thirteen Colonies. Upon land that had been part of an empire across the sea, a new independent nation was born.

The Constitution, an Unfinished Blueprint

The thirteen states that had won independence remained, at first, only loosely bound together. With no common currency and no strong central government, each behaved almost like an independent country, and so the whole is said to have lacked cohesion as a nation. To overcome this weakness, in 1787 representatives of the states gathered in Philadelphia to discuss the shape of a new nation. Presiding was George Washington, the general who had led the Revolutionary War.

The Constitution, drawn up after months of debate, divided the three powers of legislation, administration, and the judiciary, and provided a mechanism by which they would check one another. Designed so that power would not concentrate in any one person or any one institution, this structure is known as a pioneer among written constitutions that continue to function today. Washington was in time chosen as the first president, and the young republic took its first step.

And so the United States set out, holding aloft the grand ideal of freedom and democracy. A nation without a king, a nation where people govern themselves — this was, for the world of that time, a bold experiment. Yet it is also a fact that at that same founding moment, the greatest contradiction of slavery and the shadow of Native peoples’ exclusion were firmly inscribed. The history of this nation is nothing other than a story of endless tension between the ideal it raised and the reality that betrayed it.

The young nation, born still carrying ideal and contradiction, did not stand still. The narrow strip of thirteen states along the Atlantic coast was driven by a strong impulse to expand toward the vast continent spreading before it. West, ever west — that movement would bring new prosperity while at the same time forcing immeasurable suffering upon the people who had always lived there. Let us advance toward that story of light and shadow.