Essay On The Contradiction Of American Freedom

The Contradiction of the American freedom and Slavery: Freedom not so for all U.S. History 1301 The English literature mastermind, Samuel Johnson, once exclaimed “How is it, that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” The people of the United States had to fight for freedom in multiple occasions; as a nation through the American Revolution, but also as individual groups such as the Abolitionists, and later on through the Women’s Suffrage movement and Civil Rights movement. For, the same document that created this great nation did not protect all those that took shade under its umbrella. It is of great irony then that a nation that birthed itself out of the principle of human freedom is the same nation that prospered by the principles of human slavery. The contradiction manifests itself in three ways: a revolution that sought an unprecedented freedom from the tyranny of England while it continued to dehumanize its
Many blacks of the time falsely believed that their freedom was at hand with the American Revolution. Ironically, the indentured servants who were the masterminds behind the ‘bacon’s rebellion’ an upheaval based upon the need for equality between their rich counterparts would also later seek to become slave masters themselves. It was a contradiction because while, they violently opposed inequality and tyranny of England on Americans or the rich on indentured servitude they actively ignored the cries of many blacks’ grievances. Many blacks at the time refused to watch while their white counterparts sought freedom and in order to ensure their human dignity, petitioned the General Assembly of New England in 1779 as