In my mind the presence of slavery in spite of the words in the Declaration is a direct contradiction to the written words. The people you mentioned, Jefferson and Washington, as well as Southern leaders and aristocrats right up to the Civil War violated the plain words agreed to by the founders. This was an error. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and the post war Amendments corrected these obvious errors. Lincoln was a true follower of the Declaration of Independence and the prototype Republican. John Calhoun was a Democrat, continued in his erroneous ways, and served as the spiritual leader of Jim Crow Democrats. Abraham Lincoln and John Calhoun are not the same.
You are interpreting the words with an anachronistic view of things. Jefferson and Washington, both slave owners, did not believe the "all men are created equal" verbiage was meant to apply to slaves. If they did, they would have freed their own slaves.
The primary purpose of the Declaration of Independence was to assert the natural law right of States to be Independent of the United Kingdom. It was most certainly not intended to free any slaves. The verbiage interpreted to mean that, was just a bit of Thomas Jefferson mischief which the Founders mostly ignored at the time.
The Founders were Pro-Slavery, or at least pro-accommodate slavery. Again, it is the ugly truth, but it is the truth, none the less.
The people you mentioned, Jefferson and Washington, as well as Southern leaders and aristocrats right up to the Civil War violated the plain words agreed to by the founders.
No they didn't. They simply did not see the larger meaning that other people would twist out of the words. When they contemplated the phrase "all men are created equal" they were applying it to themselves relative to the Aristocrats and King of England, not relative to the slaves, whom they considered to not be their equals at all.
But let's see what Thomas Jefferson said about how verbiage written on governing documents should be interpreted.
"On every question of construction let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
Lincoln was a true follower of the Declaration of Independence
The document which asserted that people had a right, given by God to leave a Union? Lincoln was a "true follower" of that document? Surely you jest?
"Four Score and Seven Years ago..." refers to 1776, the Year the 13 slave holding states broke away from the United Kingdom. You say Lincoln was on the "Pro break-away" side?
Thirteenth Amendment perpetuated the absolute outlawing of slavery as practiced before the War of Northern Aggression and that is clearly about the only good result of that conflict.
The Fourteenth Amendment has served as the Magna Carta of Leviathan government that oppresses ALL of us, North and South, black and white and every other color to this very day and especially in this very day under Obozo and the shamefully leaderless and supine Republican Congress. The Fourteenth is a Pandora's Box for meddlesome, troublesome busybodies. In retrospect, I don't think very favorably of Barry Goldwater because he was a rampaging pro-abort and social revolutionary enemy of civilized moral standards otherwise, but, in casting his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the limited basis that the federales had no business ordering the integration of restaurants and hotels, he was right. Nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment allows, much less demands, the modern interpretation that it trumps property rights. But the radicals of Lincoln's time like Thaddeus Stephens and his ilk were having none of that and they established "Reconstruction" to tyrannize the Southern people who were not "of color." Those who lean on justice to rationalize 660,000 or so dead young Americans ought to have practiced justice and they did not. Only quiet resistance by Southern Bourbon Democrats (and in spite of the horrendous behavior of the KKK) brought some respite from Northern tyranny.
The Fifteenth Amendment provided for the voting rights of ex-slaves (at least the men) but was honored more in the breach than in the performance until recent times.
As to the meaning of the Declaration, you are wrong. That cherished document was adopted by the Continental Congress including many slaveholders but ONLY after the slaveholders obtained the understanding that "all men are created equal" did not include slaves whom they wrongly regarded as less than human. It would have saved post-1860 America a lot of grief and a lot of suffering if it had been otherwise but history, warts and all, is what it is and not what we would have preferred it to have been.
In our time, the left defines the unborn as not fully human beings and therefore as the "property" of their mothers but not their fathers and able to be disposed of in incinerators, crematoria or given over via a dumpster to Mitt Romney's little dead baby disposal profit center or "parted out" for profit as we have recently seen. That the unborn are not human is regarded as a convenient fiction by honest baby-killers and an article of a perverted faith by more simple-minded proponents of baby-killing.
Likewise, slavery was nothing of which to be proud. The Southland defined slaves as outside the human race. It was WRONG to seek to continue and perpetuate slavery and it certainly did so seek if you review the language of the secession resolutions of the respective Confederate states.
Finally, NOTHING in the Declaration of Independence deprived any of the thirteen states of a right to withdraw from the Union just as those who wrote the Declaration had withdrawn from British citizenship. Actually the right of secession seems NECESSARILY implied.
The Continental Congress ceased to be when the government of the largely forgotten Articles of Confederation was established and, in spite of the clear provisions of the Articles that no essential changes be made without UNANIMOUS consent of the states, a constitutional convention was held, drastic changes proposed and ratified by less than all of the states and the Articles passed into history by being ignored. Our current government took effect before ratification by several states who LATER ratified to avoid being orphaned militarily and on foreign policy.
One more observation: If he were alive today, John Caldwell Calhoun would have the Republican Congressional "leadership" hauled before a firing squad. Calhoun did not even get along with Andrew Jackson when he was Jackson's VP. I can only imagine what he would have done to the GOPEE leaders of today who have not a principle to their names. Calhoun sometimes had wrong principles but he was ALWAYS principled, right or wrong! No one will credibly accuse Romney, McCain, Dole, Bush the Elder, Ford, Nixon, McConnell, Cockroach, Cornyn, Alexander, Corker, Boehner Cantor, McCarthy, Ryano and so many, many others of having principles. They only keep their hands perpetually ready for lobbyists' cash and for Muffy's trust fund. Souls for sale! Ka Ching!
This article itself is a great and balanced and nuanced work, relying on the insights of giants of our movement: Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, etc. and not pygmies like Richard Lowry. More, please!