Rhetoric of the American Revolution & its Social Impact

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Ideals of the American Revolution

When our forefathers looked towards and then established their lives via hard labour and toil in the then New World, they were seeking for a distant land that gave the sweetest of life's ideals - freedom. Freedom to follow a particular faith, freedom from Royal tyranny, freedom to work the earth and reap its rewards, freedom of citizenship, freedom to and the opportunities that come with property and ownership. Why was this so? 16th and 17th century Europe was dominated by Empires were monarchs, kings and the church conducted, dictated, owned and controlled the lives of their subjects. It didn't mean that the colonies established in the New World were 'free'. The people of the colonies were still subject to and ruled by the colonial masters. In the case of New England, each territory or state were governed as provinces and, while the Colonies elected representatives into a Continental Congress meant for self-governance the entire colonies were subject to the British Monarch who governs as an absolute monarch therefore all of the Empire territories in principle belongs to the British King and all it's people subject to the influence, will and taxation decided upon by the nobility. It is the perceived abuses of the monarchy that finally drove the Founding Fathers to revolt and their unified cry of 'enough is enough' can still be read today in the American Declaration of Independence. BY this time the colonies have existed for some centuries already and the ideas if Enlightenment, particularly that of John Locked have seeped into Colonial consciousness, hence the Founding Fathers believed that the British Crown's abuses must stop for ' All men were created equal'. We can see this in the beginning passage of the Declaration -

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among this ...