The Declaration of Independence is one of the most powerful statements of human freedom and equality ever composed. The historic document, with simplicity and directness, captures the essence of the ideas and the ideals on which the world’s greatest democracy was founded. John Adams wrote his wife Abigail that the date the Founding Fathers adopted the magnificent manifesto—July 4, 1776—“ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.”
A growing number of Americans soon came to realize, however, that both the document and the new nation itself had a limited definition of exactly which citizens were, in fact, unencumbered in their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The declaration’s own words—“all men are created equal”—excluded women from its particular brand of egalitarianism. Unstated but clearly understood was the further omission of both men and women of African descent. And by the early decades of the nineteenth century, critics of industrialization were charging that the masses of common laborers had joined, for all intents and purposes, the ranks of the politically and economically disenfranchised.
It was this realization—that America was not living up to the bedrock principle of equality that it purported to value—that gave birth to the first generation of the dissident press during the early to middle nineteenth century.