“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...”

There are historians today claiming that Thomas Jefferson and other signers of the Declaration of Independence must have known in 1776 that they were hypocrites because every Colony at the time sanctioned African slavery. Why would they include the words then? One possible explanation is that they were describing themselves as a class of men challenging the longstanding view that monarchs ceded rights. At the time, it was as earth-shattering to say people are endowed with unalienable Rights as to say all men are created equal.

Jack Rakove of Stanford University says the American colonists were speaking as a people. They did use the plural. Why not “every man is created equal, that he is endowed by his Creator…” Maybe you can find signers of the Declaration of Independence who stated they were uncomfortable with “all Men are created equal”, but it seems most could have cared less and did not feel like hypocrites. Rakove also indicates that the current notion that it meant every man was equal did not arise until decades after the Declaration of Independence.

The position of some historians today is that Jefferson spent much time and energy trying to square the language with his reality in Virginia. This led to him writing things in Notes on the State of Virginia for the sole purpose of showing that blacks were not equal to whites and therefore were not included in “all Men”. To these same historians, he was extremely successful and singlehandedly changed the thinking on race for a vast number of Americans from Benjamin Rush to Justice Roger Taney.

In his introduction to a recent publication of Notes, Robert Pierce Forbes makes the following statement.

“Without question, Dred Scott is the fruit of Notes.”

Search the Dred Scott case for the word “rebuke” and then read the paragraph from the beginning. You will see that Mr. Forbes is making a tenuous connection at best and this is what he cites for his statement. The war on the founders is real and the people leading the charge are smart, motivated, and compelling writers.