How is it that the democratic principles inscribed in the Declaration of Independence were written by a slaveholder? The basic underlying cause of the War of Independence was the increasing conflict of economic interests between the propertied classes in the American colonies-Southern plantation owners and Northern merchant-traders-and Britain's ruling circles. In order to mobiliz

Jefferson wrote in 1814, "would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it." Joseph J. Ellis, a critical student of Jefferson's thought, commented: "He thereby kept his principles pure and intact by placing them in a time capsule; there they could stay until that appropriate moment in the future when the world was ready for them." Jefferson did not even free his slaves when he was dying, as Washington did.

Slavery was abolished not as a result of a "spiritually sanctioned mandate" but through a bloody civil war, in which 200,000 blacks fought in the Union Army. Jameson states that there was "an expansion of suffrage." But women did not get the right to vote until 1920, after almost a century of political agitation and in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which enfranchised women before "democratic" America. Later on, Jameson admits "the status in which the electoral franchise was left at the end of the Revolutionary period fell far short of complete democracy." To the extent that democratic principles inscribed in the Declaration of Independence were translated into reality, it was not as a result of a so called radical revolution but through generations of struggle by the exploited and oppressed against the American ruling class, of which Jefferson was indeed a founding father.

In America, as Washington and Jefferson regarded slavery as a temporary evil, the subsequent generation of Southern plantation owners declared slavery to be the economic basis of a superior civilization, namely their own. Beginning in the 1790s, influential voices in the South renounced the democratic principles of the Declaration of Independence as an incitement to slave revolts. For example, the following was written by a contributor to the Fredericksburg, Virginia herald following the slave revolt led by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800: "Liberty and equality have brought the evil upon us. A doctrine which, however intelligible, and admissible, in a land of freemen, is not only unintelligible and inadmissible, but also dangerous and extremely wicked in this country, where every white man is a master and every black man is a slave. This doctrine, in this country, and in every country cannot fail of producing either a general insurrection, or general emancipation." Hostility to Jacobinism became a central element in the ideology of the Southern slavocracy. In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, a South Carolina newspaper denounced what it called the "black Republican" party of Abraham Lincoln as "ready for bloody and forcible realities as ever characterized the ideas of the French revolution."

In France, the revolutionary turmoil enabled the peasants to seize the land from the feudal-derived aristocracy. The landed nobility, most of who fled the country in fear for their lives, ceased to exist as a ruling class. Moreover, the pressure of the Parisian working people and poor forced the government for a time to limit the maxim

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Approximate Word count = 2047
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)