There are still battles to be fought, oppression to be trampled, and people to be liberated. Of course, the enemies of freedom still remain. The power of Jefferson's words was revived and did smite Jim Crow with a righteous fury. He and the hundreds of thousands who marched with him shouted those words. "This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir," he thundered. stood in front of his memorial and spoke the words that re-energized the Declaration of Indpendence, keeping it strong in all the decades since. Jim Crow did his best, but he, too fell in the end.Īnd so it was that 100 years after Lincoln re-consecrated the Declaration of Independence with the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King, Jr. And over those decades, Jefferson's spell weakened. Over the course of decades, they invoked their evil demons of Jim Crow and white supremacy to fight Jefferson. He resolved that "this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom." Two years later, slavery was crushed and the Union reunited.īut still the old slaveocrats struggled against the power of those words. And so it was on the fields of Gettysburg that America's greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, took the opportunity to strengthen Jefferson's spell and use his words to bind the nation back together. They had been bolstered for decades by the oppressed worldwide, who clung to them as a rock in their just demand for equality and freedom.
Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, tried to weave his own spell, declaring in 1861 that "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."īut Jefferson's words were too strong. Those words were so powerful that the slaveocrats of the Confederacy battled them directly.
At war because Douglass was absolutely right - the existence of slavery was a rebuke to the ideals Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Indpendence. One says: “To the memory of one of the most perfect of human beings, who has given her name to the town below.Less than 10 years later, the United States was at war. There are also 2 iron plaques on the sides of this pyramid. Rufane commissioned a pyramid (all the rage at the time) to be built as a memorial, on a hill overlooking the sea. As the port developed following the arrival of the settlers a few months later, it was renamed Port Elizabeth.
The fledging tented town developed around the fort and it was called Elizabeth’s Town by Rufane in honour of his beloved Elizabeth. There was an existing British fort there built in 1799 called Fort Frederick. The point where the settlers were due to disembark was Algoa Bay, on the south east coast of South Africa. However, as fate would have it, he didn’t return to England immediately but was asked to act as Interim Governor of the Cape (South Africa) as Lord Charles Somerset (actual Governor) had taken a leave of absence (about 3 years) and someone had to oversee the arrival of British and Irish settlers, due to arrive in early 1820. In a move that was unprecedented at the time, the British Army granted him a leave of absence (in official records they use the term ‘invalided’) and he left India with his 8 month old son to return to England indefinitely. The impact this had on Rufane was profound. In August 1818, Elizabeth fell gravely ill with ‘fever’ and passed away a week later. Hi guysWe’re looking for video editorsIf anyone has any experience editing videos in Adobe Premiere and Photoshop, please give us a message with your portf. While posted there, Elizabeth gave birth to their son, George in December 1817 but never really fully recovered from the birth. Two months after they were married, Rufane accepted a posting to India and Elizabeth accompanied him.
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