Luke Nicastro, The American Conservative
... All honor to Jefferson—to the man who ... had the coolness,
forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary
document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so
to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a
rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing
tyranny and oppression. ...
It isn't called "American Con Mag" for nothing.
Jefferson's enemies to his dying day were "the chains of monkish ignorance and superstition" of religion, not slavery.
The abstract truth of human equality in the Declaration of Independence was most certainly not "applicable to all men and all times".
It was "for thee, but not for me".