Not in the *DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE* they didn't! They intended the Declaration to serve *1* purpose, and that was to articulate a legal and moral right to break away from England.
It was never intended by any of the representatives of the 13 states to be an expression of opinion on the issue of slavery.
That is a later day lie that has become popular because people *want* it to be true, but it is however not true at all.
In 1776, the document going to King George III was *NOT* a commentary on slavery. It was a legal and moral claim to the right of *INDEPENDENCE* and it was nothing else.
Whatever the founders other feelings on the matter of slavery, it was not their intention to express them in the Declaration of Independence.
You are correct, but including the issue of slavery was given consideration as one of the reasons for breaking away from England. Here is the passage deleted from the final Declaration of Independence. This was written by Jefferson.
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
What you are saying is incorrect.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html
Here is the audio if you prefer. First link is a direct mp3 download.
http://www.archive.org/download/nonfiction066_1907_librivox/snf066_originaldeclarationofindependence_jefferson_hh_128kb.mp3
https://librivox.org/short-nonfiction-collection-vol-066-by-various/
No, the Declaration was always seen as having universal application. The lie that you are defending was the one spread by the Dred Scott decision, that the Declaration was only for White men. The Founder’s linked to this to the Biblical view that all men have souls and are equal before God.