All men were created equal

The phrase "all men are created equal" in the United States Declaration of Independence is sometimes argued to mean that the US Founding Fathers were race denialists, genetics denialists, modern day politically correct liberals, and/or socialists/communists, views which all would have been extremely rare or non-existant at this time.

Instead, the phrase refers to concepts such as equality before the law. It was aimed against phenomena such as the at this time common occurrence in many countries of special rights and privileges for certain groups, such as the nobility. This was sometimes justified with claims that God had created different group of men with unequal rights and privileges, one example being the medieval concept of the great chain of being.

The US originally did not support many modern forms of "equality". The voting rights in the different states were typically originally restricted to non-poor White men and the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited giving US citizenship to immigrants to only White persons of good character.