Founding-era liberty claims excluded slaves, natives, women, and the poor

Evidence

The year did not see a fundamental change in the contours of the fight for freedom. The storied battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill occurred during the spring of 1775. In June 1775, the Second Continental Congress named George Washington to lead a newly formed American army composed of colonial militias that were besieging British forces in Boston, and it adopted the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms a month later. Even the American conception of liberty did not change in 1776. The individual rights declared in the state constitutions of 1776 echoed the Anglo-American rights demanded of Parliament in earlier petitions by the colonies and Congress. Slavery did not end in any state during 1776, Native Americans gained no legal rights, a woman’s status remained much the same, voting continued to be mainly the prerogative of property-owning males, and no state addressed economic inequalities. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 2

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the course’s examination of justice, equality, and freedom as contested founding values versus the actual exclusions codified in 1776 state constitutions. — connects to: Early declarations of rights lacked enforcement and excluded Catholics and atheists — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 271; America’s founding freedoms were written to exclude Black, female, and lower-class subjects. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 275; Revolutionary Americans’ liberty rhetoric contradicted their enslaved-holding practice — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 269 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Pertinent to grounding later legal doctrine debates about who ‘we the people’ originally included, though not one of the three listed articles directly.

Broader Connections

• America’s founding freedoms were written to exclude Black, female, and lower-class subjects. #corroborates (0.99) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 275
• Revolutionary Americans’ liberty rhetoric contradicted their enslaved-holding practice #corroborates (0.85) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 269
• Colonial white political democratization explicitly excluded free people of color #expands (0.85) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 272