Essential Questions to Consider

o 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?

Declaration of Independence

Ratified 4 July 1776Officially adopted 2 August 1776

Drafting the Declaration of Independence

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!

Portrait by John Trumbull, as he might have looked in 1776.

•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.

Forming the Declaration of Independence

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

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?

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.

“Slavery is a wolf America holds by the ears”