QuoteThere were debates about this, and those arguing that it applied to white men only also argued that it the Declaration was just worded this way to (paraphrased) get away from England. Lincoln famously turned this around, and the end result was the end of slavery.
Not exactly... applying the "all men" principle to everyone required two constitutional amendments: the 14th, which addressed, among other things, the citizenship rights of ex-slaves, and was passed in 1868, well after Lincoln's death; and the 19th, which recognized the citizenship rights of women, and wasn't passed until 1919. The founding fathers were long gone by the time either of these were passed.
Even if the Emancipation Proclamation was the "beginning of the end" of slavery, it still took 87 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Had the founding fathers actually been in favor of citizenship rights for women and black people (there were free blacks at the time, whose civil rights were also very restricted), they had plenty of time (there were 12 years between the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution) to make that the law of the land.
The belief in the inferiority of women and people of color was deeply ingrained among the founding fathers, and it still runs very deep today. This is why the rhetoric of returning to "original principles" and using them as a guide to interpreting the Constitution is, in my opinion, very dangerous.
I like the idea of self-determination too, but it's naive to think that it was something for which there was wide support in the 18th century.
