Us History

The Declaration of Independence contains words all Americans take for granted: “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…” The founders of the country that would become the United States had to put these words into a written declaration because those ruling them at the time did not recognize those rights. Democracy as we know it today was just beginning to take shape prior to the American Revolutionary War.

Often, the events are presented to students in overly simplistic ways: the colonists simply got mad because they had no parliamentary procedures for influencing the laws that governed them, a concept explained as “taxation without representation.” England imposed more and more taxes on the colonists, and they had no way to stop the King from doing this to them, so they rebelled. However, the idea that they should have the right to overthrow a government that denied them what we now think of as basic rights was a relatively new one, and not one embraced by all political leaders in Europe at the time.

These ideas began with discoveries in science that revealed that our physical world was governed by predictable rules, by cause and effect (Mills, 1996). At the time, science was viewed as a branch of philosophy, and scientific thinking was gradually applied to philosophy, leading to a new school of thought that came to be known as “The Enlightenment.” (The Economist, 1999) The idea of democracy wasn’t new. Ancient

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Greece had been ruled by a modified form of democracy that gave the right to vote to the upper echelons of male citizens.

The development of modern democracy also had roots in developing economic practice. John Locke, one of prominent thinkers in the Enlightenment movement, put great emphasis on the right to own property. Systems of law that were respected by members of many different countries were necessary so commerce could develop. Without laws regarding ownership and property, those engaging in trade could not be certain that transaction agreements would be honored (The Economist, 1999).

In reports of the events leading up to the American Revolution, the King of England is often depicted as a dictator who pronounced law as he saw fit based on his absolute power. However, the notion of a monarch with absolute power was not the standard for most of European history. The agreement signed after the Norman victory in 1066 required that the King share some of his power with representatives from the nobility (The Economist, 1999). Jean Bodin put the idea that kings ruled by divine right forth in 1576 (The Economist, 1999) and embraced by James I of England. Oliver Cromwell embraced the idea and dissolved the Parliament, which although not a true democracy, provided some checks and balances for the ruler (The Economist, 1999).

However, the effects of scientific discovery had already influenced how people thought about the ways they should be governed, and absolute authority was resisted. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the idea that politics, economics and even social mores could be rationally determined flowed out of discoveries in science, which demonstrated far greater order in the universe than had previously been understood (Mills, 1996).

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People still believed that God had given the world to human beings for their use, and people began to believe that logic and reasoning should determine all aspects of life. Mills (1996) notes that the Enlightenment movement embraced personal rights as crucial to the pursuit of an enlightened and rational government. They believed that individual freedoms including "freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one's talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his way in the world" were absolutely essential to mankind’s efforts to improve himself.

This broader view of how men should be governed was limited by the social mores of the time. It is appropriate to use the terms “mankind” and “men,” because women were not included in these newer views of suffrage. While the followers of the Enlightenment “held these truths to be self-evident,” they were only self-evident for white men, often white