Sheer nonsense.
The entire first half was a treatise on Enlightenment thinking of that time. John Locke, Hobbes, Francis Bacon, couldn’t have written it better.
This document was a social and political informative text as much as it was a legal document, and a host of contemporaries wrote to just that point.
This first section comprises a series of universal rights, stating that when this humanity’s rights are broken, and the trust in the established authority is lost, then it is not the right, but the duty of the people to dispose of that government and create a new one that protects the rights of its citizens. The ideas presented here echoes the well-known “Second Treatise of Government” written by Locke, especially those in which the Declaration emphasizes the patience of the American people in withstanding British abuses.
You need to get your mind out of the 21st Century jurisprudence and consider it from the Enlightenment mindset of the 18th Century to really appreciate what Jefferson put together.
But further than the Declaration, Jefferson himself was against slavery. As was Washington and most of the Founding fathers.
It was a process. The country was not ready for it in 1776, if they wanted to include the Southern colonies in the new Republic.
Our Republic has always been a process toward freedom. That is why it is so hard to see what the Socialist Left is doing to it. They, not us, are rolling it backwards.
What is sheer nonsense is the belief that representatives of 13 slave holding states would sign a document asserting a right to freedom for their slaves.
That is clearly incorrect, but that is what people are trying to make us belief.
And how do we know this is true? Because Jefferson attempted to put in a lot more anti-slavery language, and the other members of the committee overrode him and made him remove that verbiage.
The entire first half was a treatise on Enlightenment thinking of that time. John Locke, Hobbes, Francis Bacon, couldn’t have written it better.
Vattel, for he is the only one of which I am aware that actually suggested the colonies form a Republic and declare independence from England. The others danced around the point without actually saying it, and no wonder, because they would have been in serious monarchical trouble had they said such a thing. Samuel Rutherford found out.
"Finally, several sovereign and independent states may unite themselves together by a perpetual confederacy, without ceasing to be, each individually, a perfect state. They will together constitute a federal republic: their joint deliberations will not impair the sovereignty of each member, though they may, in certain respects, put some restraint on the exercise of it, in virtue of voluntary engagements. A person does not cease to be free and independent, when he is obliged to fulfil engagements which he has voluntarily contracted."
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But further than the Declaration, Jefferson himself was against slavery. As was Washington and most of the Founding fathers.
Washington did not become against slavery until much later in his life, well after the slave owning general from Virginia led the armies of the slave owning confederacy against the British Union while the Union was offering freedom to the Confederate slaves. (Lord Dunmore's proclamation et al.)
The founders did take Jefferson's words to introspect their positions on slavery and decided that they wanted to get rid of it, but again, this was not their intent at the time it was written, but a later day epiphany.
It was a process. The country was not ready for it in 1776, if they wanted to include the Southern colonies in the new Republic.
Without accepting slavery, there never would have been a Union and there never would have been a war of Independence.
The Southern states weren't all that much passionate about it until after Francis Marion led the British armies through the South and pissed off the Southern people because of the British abuses of them.
Never won a battle, but created the conditions necessary to win the war.