Now for a serious Fourth of July talk, what did Thomas Jefferson really mean by "all men are created equal?" We like to pretend he meant all mankind, but I need proof. I think he excluded women. Possibly you can find evidence he thought women should be allowed to own property or even vote. Maybe he even suggested they could vote before 1804, but it doesn't matter when the only election he'd be running in was decided by about 200 male electors. I need proof, meaning a written statement to one or more men saying he thought women were equal. Did Jefferson think boys were included with men? I don't think so. As a child Jefferson was so disciplined he studied 16 hours a day. Obviously he was born below the sons of dukes and princes and believed he could overcome the gap with knowledge. That's the equality he spoke of: potential. He was about to become one of the most learned men of his day and one of the most important people in a country where the accident of birth was not acknowledged as being an advantage. In other words, we might be created equal, but I won the race to the top. Find humility in his writings and I'll believe you, but by putting that in the declaration he was asserting a claim not far below Muhammad Ali. If he was willing to consider himself equal to men, he certainly did not consider himself equal to boys. Did he include black men with the word men? Jefferson died when Charles Darwin was 17, but he strikes me as a man who would have swallowed evolution hook, line and sinker. Darwin's grandfather was looking into those same matters and some thoughts on the subject might have reached him. It is a mere coincidence that evolutionary theory assigns white and non-white races a common ancestor. If the initial presentation was that whites originated from one primate and blacks from something lower would anyone at the time have fought too hard on the subject? Even now it would be hard to let that go if you believed it and made a big deal of it for over 100 years. Jefferson certainly would not have rushed to judgment on scientific matters beyond his expertise, so his definition of what is and is not a man would be on hold until someone with more precise knowledge could decide it for him.
I think Jefferson knew he was blowing smoke, but he wanted to go all out in his declaration that Americans had equal rights to Britons. To do that, he needed to bring the colonists up and King George III down. And what better way to do that than to declare no one was born better than anyone else? Jefferson was denying the British concept of nobility, the term "elders and betters" referring not just to those older than you but those higher up the nobility scale than you. It obviously wasn't true to the early Americans even after the Revolution, since only those with certain property were allowed to vote, meaning all men were not equal, but as a statement of defiance of a king, it's hard to top.
