All men are created equal

Hey there, Sam.

That's exactly the question Berstein is wrestling with, right? Because Jefferson is the guy who wrote, "All men are created equal," and he also owned hundreds of human beings.

Berstein doesn't wanna just give us a timeline.

He wants to get inside the mind of the man and figure out how those two things lived in the same head.

So I think it's really worth getting into something that's been an issue for quite some time for us politically.

What did the founding fathers actually believe? Is there any kind of discrepancy here between what conservatives think they believed and what they actually did? I can think of no better place to start than at the phrase, all men are created equal.

I hate hearing this phrase because what it means to do is imply a kind of discrediting contradiction within the minds of the founders, Jefferson in particular.

You say all men are created equal, but then you own slaves.

What did this mean then? Do we think that maybe these guys were smarter than you and that this is not actually some kind of contradiction? Let us explore.

Obviously, this is the phrase in the Declaration of Independence.

They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity." which is just a fancy word for people you're related to by blood.

So in other words, that they were appealing to the fact that the settlers had shared blood with the English and that not only justice should have swayed them, but the very fact that they were ethnically related, that ought to have been something they were listening to as well, right? They should have factored for that.

But pretty much everything was Jefferson's.

including that famous line that all men are created equal and possess rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But that famous line, we hold these truths to be self-evident, the first part of the sentence was Jefferson's.

The second part originally...

And Jefferson had a pretty good mentor right beside him in Benjamin Franklin.

But before we leave the text of the Declaration of Independence, we have to address the elephant in the room.

Despite how learned he was, despite how he said all men are created equal, God, Clearly, this wasn't the case.

The early draft that he put together condemned the transatlantic slave trade.