What The Declaration Should Have Declared
• https://www.ericpetersautos.com, By ericI've long admired the beauty of the Declaration's language; my only editorial issue with it is that property rights weren't clearly articulated. Life and Liberty, certainly.
The simple answer to the question, "But how can one's right to life and liberty be secure when one's physical person is not?" is that slavery was accepted as a standard practice. A deeper answer would include the question, "Can a person voluntarily sign himself into slavery?" This was covered in the laws of Moses, from God, where a slave was to be set free every 7 years. There were other enslavement directives from God, some that worked around a 50-year time-frame. And, there was allowance that a slave/servant could voluntarily indenture himself to his master for life. Most of this slavery stuff was understood by the people of the day, back then. Writing it into the Declaration would have made for complications in the simple things that they were trying to do regarding forming the nation, especially with regard to freedom to become a slave.