So MELISSA DE WITTE wrote:
"When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” in the preamble to the Declaration, he was not talking about individual equality. What he really meant was that the American colonists, as a people, had the same rights of self-government as other peoples, and hence could declare independence, create new governments and assume their “separate and equal station” among other nations. But after the Revolution succeeded, Americans began reading that famous phrase another way. It now became a statement of individual equality that everyone and every member of a deprived group could claim for himself or herself. With each passing generation, our notion of who that statement covers has expanded. It is that promise of equality that has always defined our constitutional creed."
This echos exactly what Dr. Brion McClanahan has been teaching forever. Jefferson was no pie in the sky egalitarian. He was a decentralizer, he was always for self-government by smaller and smaller groups working things out on their own, which is the way the colonies operated largely up until King George and the parliament started pissing them off
Jefferson and others wanted no aristocrats or dicktators ruling over everyone from palaces in a central capital city., There is no amorphous blob called the people of the United States, in his time especially the "free and independent states" best represented unique regional cultures that demanded self-government on their terms. Nobody but the misnamed "federalists" wanted anything to do with emulating anything like the European crowns.
Dishonest Abe and others perverted the original meaning of “all men are created equal”. In the Gettysburg Address, saying "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". Rubbish! The forefathers did not bring forth a new nation, they brought forth 13 free and independent states. That nationalist "proposition nation" crap doesn't hold water.
