Slaveholders said that when Jefferson wrote, "All are created equal," he didn't mean people of color also. Given Jefferson's actions in his life as the owner of hundreds of people, I have no doubt the slaveholders were right. Which makes interesting revealing the country's hypocrisy from the beginning Lincoln's assertion a Gettysburg of a new birth of freedom. The true founding of the country was with the adoption of the Constitution with its devious compromises over slavery and not the Declaration of Independece which happened in 1776 before we were ever a country.