The struggle for liberty and independence during the period of American Revolution laid the foundation for the creation of the new great nation giving the worldview and life principles that were based upon enlightened thinkers. In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote, “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation” (448).
Those words are perhaps so of the most important…show more content… Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families” (Paine, 439). What can be interpreted from this passage is that Paine is pointing out that for a country to say they rule over another and govern them is all well and good, until that parent country begins to no longer look out for the interests of those people and instead places them in harms way. Thomas Paine published this work anonymously on January 10, 1776 as an advocate for the call for immediate independence from England (Belasco and Johnson, 437). Thomas Paine can be seen by some as a person who even though he did it anonymously, was one of the first to step out and say that enough is enough with the treatment and unfairness directed towards the colonies by Britain at that time, this is evident by the statements made in Common Sense and with the people in which he associated with, some of those including Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin to name a few. Something endearing that about Paine that stood out to me from the reading was a single sentence, Paine said, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind” (Belasco and Johnson,…show more content… Thomas Jefferson, our third president of the United States, who lived from 1743 until 1826, places him within the neoclassical age, which I fully believe that he supported and wrote in. At 30 years old he was already establishing himself as an American patriot by publishing A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which was a pamphlet that argued the allegiance of the colonies to Britain was strictly voluntary (Belasco and Johnson, 446). “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Jefferson, 448). It is evident from the previous passage that Jefferson thought in an enlightened way being that the passage was intellectual and philosophical in nature. I believe that without the works of Jefferson and those like him who helped influence the actions of the many men who chose to attempt to gain independence at that time, that even with the changes in how things were viewed because of the neoclassical age this revolution needed to gain ground, and the best way to do so is have those willingly to take the chance and write about what they believe should