No. Thomas Jefferson and His Declaration of Independence Do NOT Deserve Praise for Supposedly Giving Some Good Ideas to the World
by John Spritzler
July 31, 2026
We've been told it over and over again in our American schools and by our American establishment that the American Founding Fathers and in particular Thomas Jefferson gave the world new and wonderful ideas in the Declaration of Independence, with its famous line:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
But what we've been told is false. It is one of many ways that the American ruling billionaire plutocracy tries to make us, the have-nots whom it treats like dirt, honor and respect and admire its upper class forebears, who were the Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks and Bill Gateses of 1776, as I have written about in detail in my "The U.S. "Founding Fathers" Were Enemies of 'We the People.'"
As I will show, whatever wonderful ideas are in the Declaration of Independence are ideas that were held, and acted upon, by masses of ordinary people long before Thomas Jefferson was even born. In fact, it is precisely for this reason that the Founding Fathers told the public that their fight for independence against the British Crown was for these widely popular ideas. This is how the Founding Fathers aimed to get maximum support for their American Revolution against the British monarchy.
But as I show in my above-linked article, as soon as the Founding Fathers won the war of independence they turned viciously against the have-nots (including the subsistence farmers who fought in George Washington's revolutionary army) and made crystal clear to the have-nots that they had nothing but contempt for them and for the noble-sounding rhetoric about liberty and equality that the have-nots took so seriously.
Let's now take a close look at the famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence and see how widely known and acted-upon, long before Thomas Jefferson was even born, were these ideas.
"All men are created equal"
John Ball, who led the English Peasant Rebellion in 1381 preached that:
"things cannot go right in England...until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same." [Life in a Medieval Village, by Frances and Joseph Gies, p. 198, my emphasis]
Gerrard Winstanley (born 1609) wrote:
Whosoever labours the Earth for any Person or Persons, that are lifted up to rule over others, and doth not look upon themselves, as Equal to others in the Creation: The hand of the Lord shall be upon that Laborer: I the Lord have spoke it, and I will do it.
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That we may work in righteous∣ness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the Land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation. Not Inclosing any part into any particular hand, but all as one man, working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father, members of one Family; not one Lording over another, but all looking upon each other, as equals in the Creation; so that our Maker may be glorified in the work of his own hands, and that every one may see, he is no respecter of Persons, but equally loves his whole Creation, and hates nothing but the Serpent, which is Covetousness, branching forth into selvish Imagination, Pride, Envie, Hypocrisie, Vncleanness; all see∣king the ease and honor of flesh, and fighting against the Spirit Reason that made the Creation; for that is the Corruption, the Curse, the Devil, the Father of Lies; Death and Bondage that Serpent and Dragon that the Creation is to be delivered from. [ in The True Levellers Standard A D V A N C E D: or, The State of Community opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men, and related writings, my emphases]
Note that Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers never even hinted that women should be viewed as the equals of men and hence have the right to vote.
But long before Thomas Jefferson was even born, American Indians embraced the idea that women were the equal of men when it came to having a real say--a vote--in important social/governmental decisions. Read in this Wikipedia article one example of this:
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is believed to have been founded by the Great Peacemaker at an unknown date estimated between 1450 and 1660, bringing together five distinct nations in the southern Great Lakes area into "The Great League of Peace".[41]
When Europeans first arrived in North America, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois League to the French, Five Nations to the British) were based in what is now central and west New York State including the Finger Lakes region, occupying large areas north to the St. Lawrence River, east to Montreal and the Hudson River, and south into what is today northwestern Pennsylvania. At its peak around 1700, Haudenosaunee power extended from what is today New York State, north into present-day Ontario and Quebec along the lower Great Lakes–upper St. Lawrence, and south on both sides of the Allegheny Mountains into present-day Virginia and Kentucky and into the Ohio Valley. From east to west, the League was composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations.
...
Unanimity in public acts was essential to the Council. In 1855, Minnie Myrtle observed that no Haudenosaunee treaty was binding unless it was ratified by 75% of the male voters and 75% of the mothers of the nation.[151] In revising Council laws and customs, a consent of two-thirds of the mothers was required.[151] The need for a double supermajority to make major changes made the Confederacy a de facto consensus government.[152]
The women traditionally held real power, particularly the power to veto treaties or declarations of war.[151] The members of the Grand Council of Chiefs were chosen by the mothers of each clan. If any leader failed to comply with the wishes of the women of his tribe and the Great Law of Peace, the mother of his clan could demote him, a process called "knocking off the horns". The deer antlers, an emblem of leadership, were removed from his headgear, thus returning him to private life.[151][153]
Councils of the mothers of each tribe were held separately from the men's councils. The women used men as runners to send word of their decisions to concerned parties, or a woman could appear at the men's council as an orator, presenting the view of the women. Women often took the initiative in suggesting legislation.[151]
Note that Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, all either slave-owners or friends of and business associates with slave-owners, never even hinted that slavery should be abolished. They never said that "all men" included non-white people as well as female people!
But long before Thomas Jefferson was even born, pirates DID say that "all men are created equal" included non-white people. You can watch a TEDx talk video here discussing this.
The late anthropologist, David Graeber, wrote about pirates in the 1680s and 1690s having views about equality and government deriving its legitimacy only from the consent of the governed, views that were put into actual practice in contrast (as I discuss in my above-linked article here) to the practice of the Founding Fathers.
“At least one prominent historian of European political thought has indeed suggested that some of the democratic forms later developed by Enlightenment statesmen in the North Atlantic world most likely were first debuted on pirate ships in the 1680s and 1690s: That leadership could derive from the consent of the led, rather than be bestowed by higher authority, would have been a likely experience of the crews of pirate vessels in the early modern Atlantic world. Pirate crews not only elected their captains, but were familiar with countervailing power (in the forms of the quartermaster and ship’s council) and contractual relations of individual and collectivity (in the form of written ship’s articles specifying shares of booty and rates of compensation for on-the-job injury). 3”
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
Graeber also writes:
“(the same ship might include Englishmen, Swedes, escaped African slaves, Caribbean Creoles, Native Americans, and Arabs), committed to a certain rough-and-ready egalitarianism,”
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
Referring to the early eighteenth century, i.e., before 1776 when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, we learn the following:
“The early-eighteenth-century pirate ship was a “world turned upside down,” made so by the articles of agreement that established the rules and customs of the pirates’ social order, hydrarchy from below. Pirates distributed justice, elected officers, divided loot equally, and established a different discipline. They limited the authority of the captain, resisted many of the practices of the capitalist merchant shipping industry, and maintained a multicultural, multiracial, multinational social order. They sought to prove that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy. The dramatist John Gay demonstrated his understanding of all this when, in Polly, he had Macheath disguise himself as the black pirate named Morano and sing a song to the tune of “The World’s Turned Upside Down.” 33”
— The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker
“The pirate ship was democratic in an undemocratic age. The pirates allowed their captain unquestioned authority in chase and battle, but otherwise insisted that he be “governed by a Majority.” As one observer noted, “They permit him to be Captain, on Condition, that they may be Captain over him.” They gave him none of the extra food, the private mess, or the special accommodations routinely claimed by merchant and naval captains. Moreover, as the majority gave, so did it take away, deposing captains for cowardice, for cruelty, for refusing “to take and plunder English Vessels,” or even for being “too Gentleman-like.” Captains who dared to exceed their authority were sometimes executed. Most pirates, “having suffered formerly from the ill-treatment of their officers, provided carefully against any such evil” once they were free to organize the ship after their own hearts. Further limitations on the captain’s power were embodied in the person of the quartermaster, who was elected to represent and protect the interests of the crew, and in the institution of the council, the gathering that involved every man on the ship and always constituted its highest authority. 34”
— The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker
“The pirate ship was egalitarian in a hierarchical age, as pirates divided their plunder equally, levelling the elaborate structure of pay ranks common to all other maritime employments. Captain and quartermaster received one and one half to two shares of plunder; minor officers and craftsmen were given one and one quarter or one and one half; all others got one share each. Such egalitarianism flowed from material facts. To merchant captains it was galling that “there is so little Government and Subordination among [pirates], that they are, on Occasion, all Captains, all Leaders.” By expropriating a merchant ship (after a mutiny or a capture), pirates seized the means of maritime production and declared it to be the common property of those who did its work. Rather than working for wages using the tools and larger machine (the ship) owned by a merchant capitalist, pirates abolished the wage and commanded the ship as their own property, sharing equally in the risks of common adventure. 35”
— The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker
The point of all this is that the good ideas in the Declaration of Independence were not newly delivered to the world as so many people who praise that Declaration believe. No! These good ideas were known by LOTS of people for a LONG time. Jefferson simply needed to get the support of the many good people, who already loved these good ideas, for a movement of the rich upper class in North America to gain independence from the British Crown. This rich upper class, as I show in my above-linked article here, had no intention of truly implementing these good ideas.
The Founding Fathers replaced the genuine idea of democracy with the anti-democratic idea of "representative democracy."
The Founding Fathers, like all well-educated Europeans of the time, were well versed in the history of ancient Greece. In "First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country," we read "Many Americans prioritized Rome’s example over Greece, but Thomas Jefferson stood out because of his unique commitment to Greek ideas, rejecting the Ciceronianism of people like Adams."
The Founding Fathers knew that in Ancient Greece, credited with inventing the idea of democracy, democracy meant that ALL of the citizens (slave-owning males as was the case back then, not terribly different from the case when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and it meant property-owning white males) met and as equals decided what the laws and policies would be that they and everybody else would have to obey. Ancient Greek democracy, in other words, was NOT about representatives making the laws, but the entire citizenry doing it, with individual citizens being "represented" by themselves, not by somebody else. Ancient Greek democracy was absolutely not "representative democracy" (a.k.a. a "republic.")
The egalitarian genuine democracy that I describe here, and that was practiced in about a quarter of Spain in 1936-9 as I give an example of here, is similarly (in the sense of not being "representative democracy") based on sovereign local assemblies at which all adults with egalitarian values (described here) are able to personally attend and as equals determine the laws and policies everybody in the local community must obey, with no higher law-making body of government.
The Founding Fathers, however, rejected genuine democracy and instead wrote the U.S. Constitution to create so-called "representative democracy." As I discuss here, the U.S. Constitution was designed by the Founding Fathers to enable the rich upper class to impose its domination over the have-nots. All the talk by the Founding Fathers known as the Federalists about protecting against the "tyranny of the majority" was actually about protecting the upper class from the lower class. As soon as the Founding Fathers had their Republic, what did they do? They violently attacked lower class people when they tried to make things more democratic (in the sense of ordinary people having a real say) and equal. Here is an excerpt from my above-linked article:
When the Founding Fathers gathered to write the U.S. Constitution (to replace the Articles of Confederation) guess what dominated their concern, as evidenced by their correspondence?
Fear!
Fear that the Articles of Confederation did not give the national government the power it needed to suppress future Shays's Rebellions. The new U.S. Constitution was largely a response to the Shays's Rebellion that occurred just before the Constitutional Convention. The Founding Fathers stuck that famous "We the People" line in the preface to the Constitution to cover up the reality that it was a document designed by and for "We the Rich People." Read more about the Constitution here.
One of the most important Founding Fathers when it came to the writing of the Constitution was James Madison. Madison and Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, writing as "The Federalist," wrote a series of published essays about what the Constitution needed to do. In The Federalist No. 10, Madison made it very clear that the Constitution needed to prevent the majority from depriving a minority of its rights. Specifically, Madison's concern was quite clearly to prevent the majority who were not owners of a lot of property from depriving the minority of large property owners of their right to possess much more wealth than ordinary people--the "right of property."
Richard Kreitner, in his Boston Globe article (December 13, 2015) titled, "The Constitution requires inequality," explains what Madison wrote this way:
“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens,” Madison writes near the beginning of the essay, gesturing, as he does throughout The Federalist, to the fallout from Shays’ Rebellion, “that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
That majority, it slowly becomes clear, are the debtors and small landowners, those more recently designated the 99 percent. “The diversity in the faculties of men,” Madison explains, leads to different “rights of property,” and this difference represents “an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests” in the political community. “The protection of these faculties is the first object of government,” he adds.
The main purpose of the new Constitution, then, was to preserve inequalities among individuals and the inequalities in the distribution of property among them. “Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society,” Madison observes. Ever had it been, and ever under the Constitution would it be. The division of wealth and political power, between the haves and the have-nots, between (as the new Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan has put it) the makers and the takers, was to be carefully maintained. For Madison, in Federalist No. 10, the question was how to do so while at least nominally “preserv[ing] the spirit and the form of popular government.”
When you know the actual history of the period when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers soon after wrote the U.S. Constitution, the history that I examine here,
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how the Founding Fathers turned from loyal subjects of the British Crown to fighters for independence from the Crown primarily because of fear that the Crown, which had abolished slavery in England in 1772, was about to abolish slavery in the North American colonies imminently*, and
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how the Founding Fathers who gathered to write the U.S. Constitution feared another Shays's Rebellion (against the Founders; unjust and cruel taxation), and
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how the Founders created a strong national government to suppress such rebellions, and
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how George Washington did exactly that when he led an army against the Whiskey Rebellion, the rebels of which understood perfectly that the rhetoric about equality and no taxation without representation was just rhetoric, and that the new rulers of the "independent" American government did not intend to honor that rhetoric at all; and
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how, after the Haitian slaves carried out a successful revolution, U.S. President (1801 to 1809) Thomas "All men are created equal" Jefferson "refused to establish diplomatic relations with Haiti (the United States did not recognize Haiti until 1862) and imposed an economic embargo on trade with Haiti that also lasted until 1862 in an attempt to ensure the economic failure of the new republic as Jefferson wanted Haiti to fail, regarding a successful slave revolt in the West Indies as a dangerous example for American slaves." [Wikipedia gives this source: Dubois, Laurent (2005). Avengers of the New World. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01826-6., pg. 303]
then and only then will you understand the aims of the Founding Fathers. Then you will know why Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers do not deserve our praise, no more than their equivalent personages today--Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, etc.--deserve our praise today.
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*
This point is persuasively made by the historian, Gerald Horne, in his The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.
“Like many Africans, the exiled Thomas Hutchinson, the last colonial governor of Massachusetts, found Jefferson’s Declaration to be the epitome of casuistry. If the rights enumerated were so “absolutely inalienable,” he asked querulously, how could the august delegates reconcile depriving so many Africans “of their rights to liberty”? 30 One astonished resident in Bristol, England, remarked after reading the Declaration that “one would imagine that the Parliament of Great Britain … had treated” the rebels “with as great cruelty and as much injustice as they [rebels] … treat their Negro slaves.” 31”
— The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne
The above-cited authors of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, provide a detailed account of how in the years leading up to the American Revolution of 1776 there was massive and militant opposition, by the lower class including blacks as well as whites (the 'motley crew'), in the Colonies to British oppression (impressment of sailors, the harsh taxes, etc.) This was a mass movement of the poorest people that the likes of the Founding Fathers a) feared because it was opposed to class inequality, but also b) needed to use in order to defeat the British Crown and win independence. They write:
If the motley crew’s audacious actions gave motion to the multiclass movement toward independence, they also generated commotion within it—fear, ambivalence, and opposition. In New York, for example, the Sons of Liberty came into being as a reaction against the “threatened anarchy” of autonomous risings against the press and the Stamp Act in 1764 and 1765. Everywhere the Sons began to advertise themselves as the guarantors of good order, as the necessary counterpoint to the upheaval within which they themselves had been born. By 1766 the propertied opponents of British policy had declared themselves for “ordered resistance.” In the aftermath of the Boston Massacre in 1770, John Adams defended the redcoats and made an explicitly racist appeal in court, claiming that the looks of the Afro-Indian sailor Crispus Attucks “would be enough to terrify any person.” But in 1773 he wrote a letter about liberty, addressed it to Thomas Hutchinson, and signed it, “Crispus Attucks.” Adams dreaded the motley crew, but he knew that it had made the revolutionary movement. 49” [my emphasis]
— The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker