It’s been over 200 years since the original thirteen colonies of America fought their revolutionary war against Great Britain, in hopes of achieving their independence. We shall be going through a few areas of the Revolution, such as the military, social hierarchy, the role of men and women during the war, the colonists’ values of equality and their social contract response to the British government’s abuses, and we’ll compare these areas to the present day. The American Revolution started around April of 1775, when British redcoats and American militiamen exchanged gunshots in Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. However, that was only the beginning of the fighting; the reasons for the war date from years prior, when resistance from the …show more content…
John Locke was a key figure in the Enlightenment (which was at its peak at the time of the revolution), who stated that the government’s duty was to secure the rights of the people with the consent of the governed. If the government fails to do its duty, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to create a new one. Essentially, this was what the American Declaration of Independence revolved around; it calls out King George III on his acts that violates their values of equality and their unalienable rights and declares the independence of the thirteen …show more content…
Going back to the Declaration of Independence, it only acknowledges the “self-evident truth” that all men are created equal, implying that women are out of the question. In hindsight, the document even had a hole in its argument for equality among men, almost bordering hypocritical. Around the time of the revolution, a significant amount of the population of the colonies was composed of slaves of African descent who were seen and held as property, clearly not equal with the wealthy land-owning white men. It also helps to remember that the author of the Declaration of Independence, Third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson, was a white, wealthy man who owned slaves. If we arrange the hierarchy, at the top was the British crown, next was the white male aristocratic landowners and the delegates of the continental congress, next was the middle-class men and women, and at the very bottom were the slaves. Post-revolution, the only thing that changed in the hierarchy was the removal of the British