All Men Are Created Equal - Applications in American History

Applications in American History

Declaring the equality of all men did not prevent the United States from continuing the widespread practice of slavery, although the phrase was frequently raised by abolitionists in anti-slavery arguments. President Abraham Lincoln relied on the Declaration of Independence when making the case that slavery went against the deepest commitments of the American nation. Though he did so throughout the 1850s and into his presidency, the most famous example can be found in the Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others convened at the Seneca Falls Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York in July 1848, they drafted and signed a document titled the Declaration of Sentiments. The opening sentence alludes to this phrase:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

The phrase was also quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous I Have a Dream speech, as the "creed" of the United States:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'