“Your claim that the Declaration makes our Revolutionary war a “defense of slavery” is just false.”
If the colonies were not defending the peculiar institution who was?
Nobody, in 1776 there were no laws against slavery, and nobody was fighting to abolish it.
Yes, the British army, like Lincoln later, used emancipation as a military weapon against colonists, but for the Brits it proved an ineffective weapon, at least partly because in 1776 had Brits no problems with slavery, and did have problems accepting freed-blacks.
Conditions in 1861-'65 were quite different.