English · Lycée général (C1 to C2), Bac pro (B1 to B2)

Session 7: From the colonies to 1776: who was included?

Recap check
  1. What is the National Day of Mourning?
  2. Who was Wamsutta Frank James?
  3. Give one argument on each side of the debate.
Answer key
  1. A day held in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day since 1970.
  2. An Aquinnah Wampanoag man whose speech was refused in 1970.
  3. Keep: a shared family holiday. Rethink: it hides dispossession.
Question: All men are created equal: which men?

Objectives

Documents

Key document

After 1763, Parliament imposed new taxes on the colonies. The colonists used English principles against London: no taxation without representation. On 4 July 1776, the Declaration of Independence stated that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The same text, in its list of grievances against the king, calls Native peoples “the merciless Indian Savages”. Slavery remained legal in all the colonies.

Read the source: National Archives, Declaration of Independence

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
Declaration of Independence, 1776
"the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions"
Declaration of Independence, 1776

Activities

  1. Find the link between the Magna Carta (1215), the Bill of Rights (1689) and no taxation without representation.
  2. Read both quotations from the same text: what do they show together?
  3. Make a table: included / excluded in 1776 (property-owning white men; women, enslaved people, Native nations).
  4. Summary: from Jamestown to 1776, self-government grows, and so do exclusions.

Exercise

Mediation: explain in English, in three sentences, why the Declaration can be read in two ways.
Answer keyExample: The Declaration states that all men are created equal and that power rests on consent. Yet the same text calls Native peoples savages, and its authors kept slavery. It is both a founding text of liberty and a text of exclusion.

Gap-fill worksheet

Word bank: consent, representation, equal, excluded, grievances

  1. No taxation without ______.
  2. Governments rest on the ______ of the governed.
  3. The Declaration says all men are created ______.
  4. Women and enslaved people were ______.
  5. The list of complaints against the king is a list of ______.
Answer key
  1. representation
  2. consent
  3. equal
  4. excluded
  5. grievances

Homework

Write a short speech (one minute) by a colonist in 1765 against the Stamp Act, then one sentence answering it from a Native or enslaved person's point of view.
Answer keyModel answer: the speech uses no taxation without representation and the consent of the governed; the answer points out that those who speak of liberty are taking land or holding people in slavery.

Levels

LevelAdjustment
PremièreTimeline 1215, 1689, 1765, 1776.
TerminaleParagraph comparing two quotations.
C1/C2 extensionRead Locke and Montesquieu and discuss their influence and their blind spots.
Bac proOral role play of the town meeting.