by Jerry Curtis

Created on: February 23, 2011

America's covenant and founding values are essentially encapsulated in our Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"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."

Setting aside for a moment, that the aforementioned lofty statement may have rung hollow to Black slaves, it is the foundation of a social and philosophical movement that was the legacy of The Enlightenment. Philosophers like John Locke were Thomas Jefferson's inspiration and were at the vanguard of a movement that no longer accepted as natural a nobility and its monarch who ruled by so-called "Divine Right." America has never been about monarchs who claimed "divine right" to rule over others. Thomas Jefferson knew that we were above all that.

The foundation of the American Revolution was likewise in the next sentence of the Declaration:

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."

King George III and his arrogant ministers and Parliament were of a starkly different opinion and pursued a policy of economic and military oppression that outraged all levels of American Colonial society. The egregious British Stamp Act and other punitive laws united colonists up and down the eastern seaboard and eventually resulted in armed insurrection.

Moreover, much of the Declaration of Independence is a list of grievances against the British King, which begins with the statement, "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 reasons for the insurrection were likewise a covenant entered into by the signers.

Then how can such a lofty and momentous document such as our Declaration of Independence be regarded as anything other than an example of colossal hypocrisy, given that many of the signers were slave holders? Put another way, how could America's founding values be freedom for some, but slavery for others? Thomas Jefferson struggled with that dichotomy. In Stephen B. Oates' "The Approaching Fury" (Harper, 1997), Jefferson's words are put in the first person:

"I can say, truthfully,

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