liberty and equality
Americans have always felt that liberty and equality are of utmost importance. Throughout American history, people have protested, fought, and died for their chance at equality. When European colonists and Native Americans met in the New World, they were no different. Each group had their own ideas about what liberties they were entitled to, and they were willing to do almost anything for freedom and equality. When the colonists arrived in the New World, they felt that they had many sources from which they could extract freedom. The first source of this liberty was the New World itself. Many of the colonists who immigrated to America during the late 16th and early 17th centuries were coming from an unpleasant lifestyle. England at that time was a land of feudalism and poverty. In order to survive, many peasants took to thievery. When these peasants came to the New World, they saw myriad opportunities to create a better life for themselves. In particular, they saw the possibility of freedom. However, the New World offered some contrasting ideas to the colonists. It gave them the chance to start over in a place 3,000 miles away from England. It was a land that did not yet know poverty, one where they could set up thei
For "commodities," as they were termed, were some of the colonists' most basic sources of freedom. The Native Americans did retain their rights to the planting fields, as these fields were somewhat subdued (Cronon! 56). American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. Therefore, masters segregated the servants from the slaves, which generally meant separating the whites from the blacks. In 1798, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Laws. The plantation owners knew that the fewer servants they had, the less tobacco they could produce. The colonial farmers believed they had come to a place where they would work as little as they did in England, but would reap more for their effort. The Alien Acts made it hard for immigrants to come to the America, while the Sedition Law attempted to silence those who were opposed to the Federalist way of running the government (Sharp 177). The Indians saw the land as whole, while the colonists "treated members of an ecosystem as isolated and extractable units" (Cronon 21). It was a small step for the colonists, who felt that the Indians were not humans but savages, to deny the Native Americans any rights to the land. Ironically, many of these servants were never able to establish successful lives for themselves in Virginia. In addition, from about 1680 onward, laws were passed that encouraged racism in the colony. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. In fact, humans have always been trying to discover what the terms "liberty" and "equality" actually mean. Virginians began to look upon slaves as things that could be, and often needed to be, hurt.
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