Problem
How can I answer her with a good discussion.. the book is give me liberty by Eric Toner ed6 vol2 -The irony in the American call for freedom at a time when America was a slave society is rooted in the fact that the very concept of freedom that was so highly valued by the American colonists was being denied to a significant portion of the population. The Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed that "all men are created equal" and endowed with "certain unalienable Rights," was written in 1776 at a time when slavery was legal in all 13 of the original colonies. Slavery was a deeply entrenched institution in America, and the economy of the Southern states was largely dependent on the labor of enslaved Africans. Despite this, many of the Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of Independence, were themselves slave owners. The irony lies in the fact that while the American colonists were calling for freedom from British rule, they were simultaneously denying freedom to an entire group of people within their own society. This contradiction was not lost on some of the Founding Fathers, such as Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, who opposed slavery and recognized the hypocrisy of the situation.