otherone
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Ok then. Who's job is it to "protect"?
Taking things from white people
- Thread starter Anti Federalist
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Ok then. Who's job is it to "protect"?
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"breastfeeding enthusiasts" 
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Chad Crowley
@CCrowley100
·
3h
The question is often raised whether Jefferson’s phrase “all men are created equal” was meant as a universal moral declaration or as a political statement bound to a particular people.
The prevailing view takes the first position. It has been repeated for generations in schools and public life until it hardened into civic dogma. Yet this interpretation reflects a modern myth, not Jefferson’s intent.
The universalist reading was not born in 1776 but much later, when mid-twentieth-century America began presenting the Declaration of Independence as a sermon on global equality. Jefferson’s intent was altogether different. He affirmed the political rights of English colonists as freeborn subjects, not the equality of mankind.
Jefferson himself made his position unmistakably clear. In his 1825 letter to Henry Lee, he wrote that the Declaration was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of,” but “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.” What he called “self-evident truths” were not metaphysical dogmas but the practical principles already accepted within the English constitutional tradition. His purpose was to express those principles “in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.” By this he meant the rights of Englishmen under natural and common law: government by consent, security of person and property, and freedom from arbitrary power. These were the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” which Jefferson understood as the moral foundation of legitimate government, not a call for the universal equality of all peoples.
His drafts and correspondence confirm this understanding. The Declaration’s language on equality was drawn from earlier colonial petitions and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, all of which appealed to inherited legal liberties. Jefferson’s concern was not to introduce a new philosophy of man but to restate the ancient rights of freeborn subjects in a form suited to the political crisis of his age. As he later told Roger Weightman in 1826, he saw the American Revolution as the culmination of “the sacred principle that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.” His meaning was political and constitutional, not anthropological.
The Continental Congress confirmed this understanding in 1774. Its “Declaration and Resolves” grounded colonial rights in English law and constitutional precedent, reinforced by the royal charters. The colonists claimed the liberties of Englishmen, including self-government and trial by jury. When Washington and Adams spoke of liberty, they used the same language. Their aim was to preserve their political birthright, not to legislate for mankind.
Jefferson’s earlier “Summary View of the Rights of British America” makes this even clearer. He wrote that the settlers, before emigrating, had been “free inhabitants of the British dominions,” and that in forming new societies they had not surrendered “the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects.” The “laws of nature” he invoked described a people’s right to govern themselves, not a moral claim to human equality.
His later writings confirm this. In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson observed that Black and White were unequal “in the endowments both of body and mind,” and that “the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” He rejected the idea of innate equality. His unease with slavery arose from prudence and moral tension within a single civilization, not from belief in a universal human order.
The first naturalization law of the Republic makes this explicit. Passed in 1790, it limited citizenship to “free White persons.” That provision reflected the Founders’ view of the Republic as the political continuation of English civilization, not as an instrument of universal rights.
The reinterpretation of Jefferson’s words as a declaration for all mankind did not exist in his time. It developed gradually over more than a century, altering both the moral language and the political anthropology of the Republic. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, “all men are created equal” meant equality within lawful government, the rights of Englishmen under law. During the abolitionist movement, that meaning changed. Writers such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass began to treat Jefferson’s phrase as a moral weapon against slavery. Abraham Lincoln completed the transformation when, in his “Gettysburg Address,” he described the nation as “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” For the first time, Jefferson’s statement of inherited political rights became a moral proposition about mankind.
After the Civil War, progressive reformers and liberal Protestants carried this reinterpretation further. Thinkers such as John Dewey treated democracy as a moral vocation rather than a political arrangement, while writers like Israel Zangwill in “The Melting Pot” recast America as “God’s crucible,” forging humanity into one people. By the time of Franklin Roosevelt, equality had become a civic ideal sanctified by the modern state. Even then it remained largely rhetorical, invoked against poverty and dictatorship rather than as a principle of racial transformation.
Only after the Second World War did this reading become official doctrine. The moral aftermath of the war cast hierarchy itself, and even the idea of a culturally and ethnically homogeneous European West, as evils to be extirpated from Western thought, while the American-led international order sought to universalize its founding myths for the sake of global legitimacy.
In this setting, Jefferson’s phrase was reinterpreted as a precursor to modern human rights. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights cited it as the moral foundation of the postwar state, and later presidents invoked it to connect the founding to the civil-rights agenda and to the moral framework of global democracy. By the 1950s this view had entered public education. Textbooks and civic instruction recast Jefferson as a prophet of universal equality. Through repetition in classrooms, speeches, and ceremonies, the reinterpretation displaced the historical meaning entirely.
By the late twentieth century, Jefferson’s historically bounded statement, once a defense of English republican liberty, had been transformed into a theological assertion of universal sameness. The phrase came to express a new anthropology, one that denied inherited distinction and treated history as a moral pilgrimage toward equality.
Jefferson’s meaning remained local and historical. He believed that no Englishman in America could be made a subject without consent. That was the “common sense of the subject.” The later belief that the Declaration proclaimed a single moral law for all mankind belongs to a different epoch, built on different assumptions and animated by a different faith.
@CCrowley100
·
3h
The question is often raised whether Jefferson’s phrase “all men are created equal” was meant as a universal moral declaration or as a political statement bound to a particular people.
The prevailing view takes the first position. It has been repeated for generations in schools and public life until it hardened into civic dogma. Yet this interpretation reflects a modern myth, not Jefferson’s intent.
The universalist reading was not born in 1776 but much later, when mid-twentieth-century America began presenting the Declaration of Independence as a sermon on global equality. Jefferson’s intent was altogether different. He affirmed the political rights of English colonists as freeborn subjects, not the equality of mankind.
Jefferson himself made his position unmistakably clear. In his 1825 letter to Henry Lee, he wrote that the Declaration was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of,” but “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.” What he called “self-evident truths” were not metaphysical dogmas but the practical principles already accepted within the English constitutional tradition. His purpose was to express those principles “in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.” By this he meant the rights of Englishmen under natural and common law: government by consent, security of person and property, and freedom from arbitrary power. These were the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” which Jefferson understood as the moral foundation of legitimate government, not a call for the universal equality of all peoples.
His drafts and correspondence confirm this understanding. The Declaration’s language on equality was drawn from earlier colonial petitions and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, all of which appealed to inherited legal liberties. Jefferson’s concern was not to introduce a new philosophy of man but to restate the ancient rights of freeborn subjects in a form suited to the political crisis of his age. As he later told Roger Weightman in 1826, he saw the American Revolution as the culmination of “the sacred principle that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.” His meaning was political and constitutional, not anthropological.
The Continental Congress confirmed this understanding in 1774. Its “Declaration and Resolves” grounded colonial rights in English law and constitutional precedent, reinforced by the royal charters. The colonists claimed the liberties of Englishmen, including self-government and trial by jury. When Washington and Adams spoke of liberty, they used the same language. Their aim was to preserve their political birthright, not to legislate for mankind.
Jefferson’s earlier “Summary View of the Rights of British America” makes this even clearer. He wrote that the settlers, before emigrating, had been “free inhabitants of the British dominions,” and that in forming new societies they had not surrendered “the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects.” The “laws of nature” he invoked described a people’s right to govern themselves, not a moral claim to human equality.
His later writings confirm this. In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson observed that Black and White were unequal “in the endowments both of body and mind,” and that “the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” He rejected the idea of innate equality. His unease with slavery arose from prudence and moral tension within a single civilization, not from belief in a universal human order.
The first naturalization law of the Republic makes this explicit. Passed in 1790, it limited citizenship to “free White persons.” That provision reflected the Founders’ view of the Republic as the political continuation of English civilization, not as an instrument of universal rights.
The reinterpretation of Jefferson’s words as a declaration for all mankind did not exist in his time. It developed gradually over more than a century, altering both the moral language and the political anthropology of the Republic. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, “all men are created equal” meant equality within lawful government, the rights of Englishmen under law. During the abolitionist movement, that meaning changed. Writers such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass began to treat Jefferson’s phrase as a moral weapon against slavery. Abraham Lincoln completed the transformation when, in his “Gettysburg Address,” he described the nation as “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” For the first time, Jefferson’s statement of inherited political rights became a moral proposition about mankind.
After the Civil War, progressive reformers and liberal Protestants carried this reinterpretation further. Thinkers such as John Dewey treated democracy as a moral vocation rather than a political arrangement, while writers like Israel Zangwill in “The Melting Pot” recast America as “God’s crucible,” forging humanity into one people. By the time of Franklin Roosevelt, equality had become a civic ideal sanctified by the modern state. Even then it remained largely rhetorical, invoked against poverty and dictatorship rather than as a principle of racial transformation.
Only after the Second World War did this reading become official doctrine. The moral aftermath of the war cast hierarchy itself, and even the idea of a culturally and ethnically homogeneous European West, as evils to be extirpated from Western thought, while the American-led international order sought to universalize its founding myths for the sake of global legitimacy.
In this setting, Jefferson’s phrase was reinterpreted as a precursor to modern human rights. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights cited it as the moral foundation of the postwar state, and later presidents invoked it to connect the founding to the civil-rights agenda and to the moral framework of global democracy. By the 1950s this view had entered public education. Textbooks and civic instruction recast Jefferson as a prophet of universal equality. Through repetition in classrooms, speeches, and ceremonies, the reinterpretation displaced the historical meaning entirely.
By the late twentieth century, Jefferson’s historically bounded statement, once a defense of English republican liberty, had been transformed into a theological assertion of universal sameness. The phrase came to express a new anthropology, one that denied inherited distinction and treated history as a moral pilgrimage toward equality.
Jefferson’s meaning remained local and historical. He believed that no Englishman in America could be made a subject without consent. That was the “common sense of the subject.” The later belief that the Declaration proclaimed a single moral law for all mankind belongs to a different epoch, built on different assumptions and animated by a different faith.
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In-Depth - Community Gun Violence | Center for Gun Violence Solutions
Johns Hopkins Crime Study
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Danke
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He needs a more vicious service dog.
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NYC transit slasher cut loose by judge, then knifes stranger in deranged subway attack: cops
Demitri Marshall, 32 – who has seven prior arrests – was picked up by cops several hours after cops say he cut the 27-year-old man across his face without warning on Canal Street near Essex Street,…
nypost.com
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Blacks are the only race opposed to cutting taxes and government spending
Blacks vastly out of step with all other races on this issue
Dr.3D
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Yeah, my Doberman would have gone crazy on that guy. Poor girl would then probably lose her life.
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