Slavery, Equality, and the American Revolution

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary
of American independence, yet the nation's founding is controversial now in
ways it has not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a
major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the
unique value of their national inheritance.

In the fifth volume of this series, legal
scholars and political scientists discuss how the American Revolution both perpetuated
slavery and created the conditions for its abolition. While hundreds of
thousands of African Americans remained enslaved at the end of the
Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence's assertion of human
equality galvanized slavery's opponents and laid the groundwork for
increasingly egalitarian definitions of American citizenship.

Considering how the Declaration shaped
antislavery thinkers and politicians such as Frederick Douglass and Abraham
Lincoln and informed the 14th Amendment demonstrates how the American
Revolution enabled a "new birth of freedom" in the 19th century.