More than two hundred years ago, the founders of the United States of America successfully defeated the British in the Revolutionary War. Many fought and died to achieve freedom from the excesses of the Crown. The event that best illustrated our independence was the drafting of the Constitution of the United States. It was the document that contained the plan for this nation's future. It provided the directions for the management of the country with carefully crafted protections. Protections that were to ensure that the new government could never in the future become so powerful as to be able to infringe upon the rights and freedoms of the citizens. The framers of the Constitution added the Bill of Rights to ensure its ratification. The Bill of Rights, containing the first ten ammendments to the Constitution, served to explain the specific rights and freedoms granted to the citizenry. The first ammendment is probably the most treasured and most often cited. It prohib!
             its the government from tampering with our freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or our freedom of religion.
             The Constitution was a landmark document; nothing like it had ever been produced before. Following its drafting, all thirteen states eventually voted for ratification, and the Constitution became the foundation our country was built upon. Now the citizens of this new country could revel in their new freedoms and bask in their equality. Right? Well, not exactly. The freedom mentioned in the Constitution, and the equality mentioned in its predecessor, the Declaration of Independence, were not exactly applied evenly. When the Declaration of Independence said that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights," it carried a different meaning than it does today (Bardes 559). What it meant was that all white men were created equal, exclusive of women or black men. Moreover, the onl...