By that I mean they say in the opening lines of the Declaration Of Independence that all men are entitled to the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But what about slavery, lack of women's rights, and the fact you had to be a wealthy land owning male to vote? I don't expect them to have 21st century morals but I'd be interested to hear there logic for creating a system the said it was for freedom but kept telling door to citizen participation pretty tight.
The first draft of the deceleration is to have contained this segment:
he [the king of Britain] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html
Before Congress had it removed.
We also have John Adams remarking this way in 1822:
I was delighted with the high tone and the flights of oratory with which it [Jefferson's anti-slavery first draft] abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose. . . . Congress cut off about a quarter of it, as I expected they would; but they obliterated some of the best of it, and left all that was exceptionable, if anything in it was. I have long wondered that the original draft had not been published. I suppose the reason is the vehement philippic against Negro slavery.
So there was not intended to be a disconnect, but it was forced upon the founding fathers to appease the continental congress. Preservation of the fledgling union was considered a higher priority than abolitionism.
Rather apt, in a way - the deceleration of independence as it is now shows both the greatness and the danger of democracy.