Did the founding fathers believe Americans are elite, or did they believe that all men are born equal?

Question

Here's why I'm asking the question. I have seen people who claim that only American citizens are deserving of the rights that we have. But weren't the founding fathers creating a society that represented what they believed ALL people deserve, regardless of national affiliation? Hint: There was no such thing as the United States of America or the Constitution when they penned the Declaration of Independence. So there were no Americans.

ILconservative: Where, exactly, do you see the words "wire-tapping" in my question? Thanks for not answering.

Answer 1

The Founding Fathers belived that all men were created equal, regardless of where they were. It didn't apply to only the colonists, but to all people. And we fervently hope that all nations will see the wisdom of this and grant their citizens the same rights and freedoms that we enjoy here in the USA.

This is not to say that we have a mandate to provide those freedoms for all people, or to support all people who want them, or to accept anyone who crosses our borders into them. We are saying that this is what all people deserve, not what all people are going to get.

Answer 2

Being English until after the war of Independence most were v. class orientated and certainly believed in manifest destiny and the white man's burden. They believed that they should be the managing elite and that they could take care of (wipe out) the indigenous people w/out help from the Empire (that was what the tax collected was for). There were also the first stirrings of an anti slavery movement at that time coming from the Church of England which was very worrying for American colonists who needed them to work the land as much as horses. Slavery was subsequently banned 2 generations earlier than in America throughout the British Empire. One of the most important of the pious sentiments regarding immigration from the Constitution was paraphrased by the French on the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, obviously no-one has taken that seriously for many generations. You are correct in your observation, the 'English fought the English,' in theory to replace our Magna Carta w. your current, though greatly amended Constitution. Even in the 1812 'conflict' you would have been hard pressed to tell which were the Americans and which were the English w/out the uniforms, the bloodlines were still identical.

Answer 3

How could they possibly believe that? Some of them owned slaves and all of them were fairly well off people and a few quite wealthy. Sometimes I think even from the beginning they were writing things they knew would never be applied to all people. Over two hundred years later not much has changed. We have an elite class here and everywhere in the world. Something like ten or twenty percent of the people in the world control the vast amount of the money and the other eighty percent are left to fight over the twenty percent of the money. All men might be created equal but once you are born, it appears you are then thrown to the wolves to fend for yourself and if you don't make it to the elite class, that's your problem.

Answer 4

Well, while I sympathize with your point I have to say that the first years of the United States were not accepting of ALL people... The right to vote, for example, was only extended to men that owned property. Many of the founding fathers owned slaves... Now many of the founding fathers (even slave owners) had questions about slavery but being a new nation they thought it would be wiser to put off that argument for awhile because they had to secure the new nation's economy.... Many of the Revolution Army's soldiers were never allowed to vote because they were not property owners.

Answer 5

The issue has only recently come up because libs are trying to confer constitutional rights to illegal combatants. Citizenship is a privelidge, not a right. We have no problem denying terrorists rights they would never dream of granting anyone else.

All men are created equal. But what disqualifies a terrorist from certain rights are not his birth status or even his citizenship, but his actions. If you do things like fight out of uniform and target civilians, you hopefully get caught and get whats coming to you: automatic death sentence.

I dont believe its elitist to suggest only citizens get due process especially when dealing with terrorists. That is simply the natural order.

Answer 6

the Declaration of Independence does not guarantee rights for Americans (because America was not a country, what the framers meant was the people of England should be free also) however the Constitution grants rights and protections to Americans not the English, French, or any other nation

Answer 7

All men are born equal. That's what it says. They certainly could have clarified that term, but they didn't. So, people who truly honor and believe the Constitution to be a great guiding document for our country should believe in universal rights for all people. That means no warrentless wiretapping, no torturing "enemy combatants". But alas, the president has already proven he doesn't give a sh*t about our rights or anybody else's.

Answer 8

Not in the modern sense. They believed that the "Nobility" should not have unlimited power, but they themselves owned slaves (many of them) and originally only white men who owned substantial property were allowed to vote.

Also, the Founding Fathers were strict isolationists who did not endorse or envision the US having soldiers posted all over the world for the purpose of cramming US policies down other people's throats. Many did not even believe in a standing army. In fact, the constitution only explicitly authorizes a navy and organized militias.

Answer 9

Let's get things straight; the "women are complicated" tag is just BS. I mean, it is obvious humans (either men or women) are complicated, but magic doesn't exist and every person is "simple" in the sense that every person follows the rules of formal science since physics, chemistry, biology are applicable to everyone. The "women are complicated" thing constitutes nothing but an moronic attempt to justify fallacies regarding their mindset based on a magical "complexity" which renders them immune to reason. Being realistic, women don't know a thing about themselves or men and their opinion is totally irrelevant.

Answer 10

Unfortunately, as smart as they were, the founding fathers had no reasonable method of predicting that, by 2007, a good 80% of the 300,000,000-member United States would be driven mostly by idiocy-based myopia.