This episode of the Prager U 5 Minute Podcast is the third in our series called Making America

where we're covering five of the most critical players who have found this great nation.

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Thomas Jefferson and Equality.

All men are created equal, so it says the Declaration of Independence, eloquently penned by Thomas Jefferson.

But how do we reconcile the obvious contradiction between Jefferson's words about freedom and his actions as a slave owner?

Did Neshtasuse answers this question? Enjoy.

In one sentence, Thomas Jefferson not only laid the foundation stone for a new nation, he also set that new nation, the United States of America, on a path we still follow today.

His affirmation and the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights,

maybe the most influential words ever written this side of the Bible.

The U.S. Constitution ratified a little more than a decade later was guided by those words, subsequent amendments, including the 14th Amendment passed after the Civil War,

granting equal rights under the law, seem for all their grandeur to be restatements of the Equality Principle in Jefferson's original Declaration.

Yet Jefferson is controversial today because he embodies the contradictions of the founders.

Indeed, progressive scholars say he was the worst of them, the most hypocritical, because the very man who insisted that all men are created equal, not only permitted slavery, but himself owned slaves.

Did Jefferson not see the glaring contradiction between his principles and his practices, between the principles and practices of the infant American nation?

According to Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision of firming slavery in the territories, neither Jefferson nor the other founders could have seriously meant that all men are created equal.

They didn't act on the principle, so they couldn't have believed it.

Modern progressive jurists such as Thurgood Marshall, as well as historians such as John Hope, Franklin Hav, again with an irony that should not go unnoticed,

adopted the Taney view. In Franklin's words, the founders betrayed the ideals to which they gave lip service.

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