To Wildalaska: You have a very distorted view of both the founding father's view of equality and our early history.
No, he doesn't, but I do see how you conveniently neglected to address the sexual issue.
Slaves were property and therefore not citizens
.
Oh well, right, I guess that makes it okay. Property doesn't have rights and so I guess is it okay to claim that the founding fathers were not bigoted or biased based on sex or race as it isn't racism if the human being is property.
What about women? Oh wait, they were property as well, owned by their fathers or husbands.
Native Americans were not allowed to vote. They weren't slaves, but they were not allowed to vote. Was it because they were not considered to be human either?
The only thing that Wildalaska left out is being over the age of 20.
John Adams is considered a founding father, right? He was big into that whole early government scene. He was not in favor of letting a more generalized cross-section of the population vote.
http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/spring07/elections.cfm
The founding fathers had a view of equality that was definitely skewed and not actually based on equality. We don't like to think that our heroes ever did anything wrong, but the fact of the matter is that by our standards, they did some terrible things.