{"id":3713,"date":"2026-07-04T10:07:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T10:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=3713"},"modified":"2026-07-04T10:07:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T10:07:13","slug":"opinion-19th-century-reformers-made-this-country-more-equal-inclusive-and-strong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=3713","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: 19th century reformers made this country more equal, inclusive and strong"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cWhen, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature\u2019s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course. We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.\u201d<\/p>\n

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So begins the 1848 \u201cDeclaration of Sentiments,\u201d the culminating statement of the Women\u2019s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the brilliant 32-year-old author, gamely echoed the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n

Stanton submitted a \u201clong train of abuses\u201d to \u201ca candid world.\u201d Having refused woman a voice in government, she explained, man \u201coppressed her on all sides.\u201d Man oppressed woman legally, economically, socially, educationally, morally, professionally and religiously. \u201cHe has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.\u201d Stanton and her co-signatories (68 women and 32 men) demanded a simple, audacious remedy. They demanded the vote.<\/p>\n

The founders are justly celebrated for what they built, but they must also be remembered for the inequalities they perpetuated. They initially restricted the franchise to white men of property, and barred women from institutional politics. New Jersey, the sole, brief exception, restricted the vote to white men in 1807.<\/p>\n

Systemic exclusion<\/h4>\n

Most painfully, given everything they professed and dared to change, the founders embraced the British Empire\u2019s commitment to prosperity through exploitation. They preserved and even accelerated an economic and political system designed to strip Indigenous people of their homelands on a continental scale and to rob most African Americans (a fifth of the U.S. population in 1776) of their labor, their bodies and their children. The Declaration\u2019s notorious invocation of \u201cmerciless Indian savages\u201d and its more circumspect reference to \u201cdomestic insurrections\u201d (that is, slave rebellions) reflect these brutal commitments. This was more than subordination or exclusion. This was organized predation.<\/p>\n

But America\u2019s unwilling outsiders fought their way in. Starting with the campaign for universal white male suffrage soon after the American Revolution, marginalized and exploited people fought for equal rights. Honoring them isn\u2019t about replacing the polluted with the pure. Like their counterparts in the founding generation, most 19th century reformers had their own prejudices and their own ideas about whose liberation mattered most. Over generations of struggle, though, their collective triumphs made this country more equal and inclusive \u2014 which is to say they made it vastly stronger. Their triumphs also made it more righteous.<\/p>\n

Like members of the Women\u2019s Rights Convention, these outsiders often invoked the Declaration of Independence as a discursive weapon. None wielded that weapon more skillfully than the victims and enemies of slavery. Charles Walker, Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass (one of Stanton\u2019s male co-signatories) were among the most well known. They all used the Declaration to expose the hideous chasm between the nation\u2019s professed ideals and its enslavement of millions. In the most brilliant political speeches in U.S. history, Abraham Lincoln made the Declaration\u2019s premise that \u201call men are created equal\u201d the foundation of his moral and rhetorical assault against slavery.<\/p>\n

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Radical vision<\/h4>\n

But for enraged clarity, nothing matched John Swanson Jacobs\u2019 \u201cThe United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.\u201d Jacobs escaped slavery in his early 20s. He went on to become a student, whaler, abolitionist, lecturer, miner and sailor. In 1855 he delivered his earthquake of a manuscript to a newspaper publisher in Sydney, Australia. Although excerpts were published internationally,\u00a0the full memoir\u00a0was only rediscovered by historian Jonathan Schroeder in 2016.<\/p>\n

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Jacobs collapses the distance between the nation\u2019s lofty ideals and its depraved slave regime. He does this by letting the language of pro-slavery lawmaking slither alongside the music of the Declaration. After the famous line about \u201clife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,\u201d for example, he quotes the Constitution\u2019s fugitive slave clause. To the line about governments deriving their \u201cjust powers from the consent of the governed\u201d he adds its unspoken qualification: \u201cexcluding Indians and free negroes.\u201d The Declaration champions the right to alter or abolish government destructive of life, liberty, and happiness. He exposes the country\u2019s selective commitment to that right by quoting a law that pardoned \u201cany person maliciously killing or dismembering a slave\u201d so long as the killing or dismemberment happened \u201cby accident in giving such slave\u00a0moderate correction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jacobs sees the founding era as a betrayal of principle. \u201cIt was then slavery struggled for its existence,\u201d he furiously insists. \u201cHad not the friends of liberty compromised principle for power this would have been numbered among the things that were.\u201d The indictment was Jacob\u2019 challenge to his own times, arguing that slavery should already have been a thing of the past. It would fall to his contemporaries to finally make slavery \u201camong the things that were.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was for the few. Today it belongs to the many. But that noble, happy arc wasn\u2019t inevitable. It took words and work and sacrifice from outsiders and from allies on the inside. As we\u2019ve all been reminded over the last year and a half, many in this country are determined to see equality\u2019s triumphs reversed. Never in my lifetime has pathetic nostalgia for the white man\u2019s republic been closer to the center of power. So, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary this month, let\u2019s take inspiration from the generations of Americans who decided to honor the founding\u2019s accomplishments through improvement rather than veneration.<\/p>\n

Brian DeLay, a professor of history at UC Berkeley, is the author of \u201c War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War.\u201d\u00a0\u00a92026 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Marginalized activists transformed America\u2019s original founding ideals into a powerful tool to demand genuine equality<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"yoast_head":"\nOpinion: 19th century reformers made this country more equal, inclusive and strong - Next City Digest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=3713\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Opinion: 19th century reformers made this country more equal, inclusive and strong - 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