The promises of the American constitution, in particular the phrase “that all men are created equal”, rings hollow when compared to the actual situation of various minority groups in the new independent United States. The practice of slavery, the lack of women’s suffrage, and the land appropriation and basic genocide of the Native American population existed in the colonial America, but continued in the newly formed country. In this regard, the concept of man in the constitution must be read as, essentially, white males, such that the United States, despite the rhetoric of freedom and liberty from the Crown that motivated the Revolutionary war, did not possess a radically new political vision of what would later come to be known as human rights.
Certainly, such prejudices were ubiquitous in the time period. The concept of man introduced by the United States in the constitution was not consistent with our own conceptions of what constitutes the human being, but instead reflects the dominant anthropology and racial and gender-based hegemonies of the time period. At the same time, the motives of the Revolutionary War itself could be cited so as to understand why radical change did not occur. Namely, to the extent that the Revolutionary War was largely triggered by dissatisfaction with British economic policy in the colonies, in particular, taxation (Middlekauf, 2005, pp. 240-258). The motivation behind the Revolutionary War was therefore not some entirely new vision of human anthropology and what constitutes the human being, as the Constitution would seem to indicate, but rather a war of economic interests. For this reason, therefore, the minority situation in the United States was not radically altered. Furthermore, incidents such as Shays’ rebellion, which occurred after the Revolutionary War on the basis of similar frustration over U.S. financial policy, shows that armed conflict in the U.S. during this period was above all motivated by the economic.
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"American War of Independence".
- Middlekauff, R. (2005). The glorious cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789.
New York: Oxford University Press
