Interdependence Day

"It was after the military clash at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, between colonial Minutemen and British troops, that the Continental Congress decided on separation. They organized a small committee to draw up the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote. It was adopted by the Congress on July 2, and officially pronounced July 4, 1776. . .
"Some Americans were clearly omitted from [the] circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of Independence: Indians, black slaves, women. Indeed, one paragraph of the Declaration charged the King with inciting slave rebellion and Indian attacks. . . The use of the phrase 'all men are created equal' was probably not a deliberate attempt to make a statement about women. It was just that women were beyond consideration as worthy of inclusion. They were politically invisible. Though practical needs gave women a certain authority in the home, on the farm. or in occupations like midwifery, they were simply overlooked in any consideration of political rights, and notions of civic equality. . .
"Thomas Jefferson had written a paragraph of the Declaration accusing the King of transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and 'suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.' This seemed to express moral indignation against slavery and the slave trade (Jefferson's personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died). . . Jefferson's paragraph was removed by the Continental Congress, because slaveholders themselves disagreed about the desirability of ending the slave trade. . .
"When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine Group, conservatives who had opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting, and shouting: 'Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may.'"
- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States