Think about the Declaration of Independence for a second. Yeah? Okay, good. If you don't know it that well, pull it up online. This site has a pretty readable copy.
If you learned anything about it in high school or even college, you probably learned an incorrect version of it. What a lot of people, even good ones, seem to think about the famous lines is entirely wrong thanks just to the horrible way it has been taught by many people.
The line most maligned is also possibly the most famous, the first sentence of the second paragraph:
"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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Pretty cool, right? But a lot of people I talk to seem to get it wrong.
Most people have the idea in their heads that Thomas Jefferson was a racist and sexist who didn't really mean "all" when he said it. In fact, thanks in part to the rarity of the phrase any more, most people don't know he was referring to all mankind, not just all males, with the word "men." I love the Hamilton play, but Lin sort of got something wrong when Angelica says "I'ma compel [Jefferson] to include women in the sequel [to the Declaration]." They were already included. Jefferson in no way believed women had less rights than men.
You know the problem with thinking that way? A racist was the first who did, and he used that idea to enforce racism. That man was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger Taney (pronounced, annoyingly, tawn-y, not tain-y). In the infamous Dred Scott case eighty years after the Declaration was written, Taney argued that the Founders didn't mean all men in the Declaration of Independence—therefore the racist chattel slavery that went on in the US was completely fine, since the Founders were obviously racists.
Nobody, not even racist pro-slavery people like John C. Calhoun or the VP of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens, believed this: just Roger Taney.
The unfortunate truth behind Taney's argument is that Jefferson did own slaves, but there's historical context needed here. Calling him a racist in principle because of that fact just doesn't make sense: he couldn't legally free them according to Virginia state law, and if he had sold them, they would have likely ended up in the hands of even crueler masters. More importantly, Jefferson, while President, helped ban slavery in the new territories the United States was gaining. That doesn't sound like a guy who meant only rich white men are created equal.
Taney's belief is now the default way to think about the Founders, especially Mr. Jefferson, and that's unfortunate. The Founders weren't, by a long stretch, perfect men. However, they were not racists in the way that they are taught today, and that takes away from the lessons we can learn about them.
If you like this, I have a blog. Check it out, or the ghost of Thomas Jefferson will haunt you. True story.
