| FOUNDATION: Unit II. What Are Human Rights and Where Do They Come From? | 8 of 15 |
 The American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights |
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England’s King George III sought to make his empire more profitable by implementing new economic and land distribution policies that were resented by the American colonists. The taxes levied on the colonists and the increased repression of their freedoms eventually led to a rebellion. The revolutionaries rallied to the ideology that the freedoms, liberties, and fruits of their labors — to which they had a natural moral right — were being taken away by the English crown.
The Declaration of Independence When Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he took ideas directly from John Locke’s Second Treatise, i.e., “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” compared to “life, liberty, and property”. The Declaration stated that:
The Bill of Rights After the colonists won independence, these inalienable rights were further codified in the Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to the US Constitution (1789). The Bill of Rights is one of the first translations of moral or philosophical rights into the national laws of a country. The protection of certain individual rights that had been argued by philosophers like Locke and proclaimed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence were thus made part of US law when they were adopted in the Bill of Rights. In the newly formed United States of America, people were guaranteed certain individual rights by law that the government was obliged to respect and protect. Those rights are still respected and protected today.
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