This is hilarious. I've long said that for many Americans, the only thing they know about the Declaration of *INDEPENDENCE* is that it's about "equality."
No. It's about *INDEPENDENCE*.
It is *NOT* about "equality." That line "All men are created equal" was not seen as applying to slaves when it was written. For the representatives and the populations they represented, it was about white Colonists. There was little thought that it should apply to slaves at the time it was written, (except for Jefferson of course) it was meant to argue the case of Englishmen.
It was Later seen to be hypocritical that we should say such a thing, yet not give the slaves their freedom, and some men did subsequently free their slaves as a consequence of pondering this idea.
But it is a modern conceit to believe the Declaration which justified the Separation of the 13 Colonies from England, is somehow about "equality."
It isn't.
Jefferson did write the Declaration. There must have been a reason he made a philosophical, rather than a merely legalistic argument. He was making a generalization about mankind -- man as man, man in the state of nature -- and leaving it for us to decide how to apply it. John Adams worked similar language into the Massachusetts Constitution, and Massachusetts courts interpreted it as making slavery invalid. Others didn't go that far, but there was something of a consensus in the founding generation that slavery was incompatible with Republican values. They weren't ready to get rid of it, but they thought a future generation would. That changed as the money started rolling in from cotton.
Jefferson was already on board with legal equality for slaves prior to the authorship of the Declaration, he just did not know how to get there with the king constantly vetoing all of their abolitionist efforts.
You can't hide from this fact DiogenesLamp, about the vetoes. It will always be there. It will never go away.