The founding document of this great nation is its Declaration of Independence, of which the signers of that Declaration, representing each of the thirteen colonies, through the testimony of those signatures, formerly recognized that all men are created equal, and further held that we all have unalienable rights. It was this Declaration, that dissolve the bands formerly held with Great Britain and was the rallying point for that successful revolution. Upon the success of that seminal fight, and in recognition that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate in order to sustain a new nation, another convention was called, in which a Constitution was thereby created and subsequently ratified by each of the thirteen States. As in most things, of which various people with various agendas get together, there were compromises made in order to form that union of those States. One of those compromises had to do with the continuing enslavement of those other persons, left to the domain of each individual State, of which those other persons, though considered by that Declaration to be created equally and to have unalienable rights, were wrongly denied those very attributes by that Constitution. However, there was a belief that in Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 of that Constitution that the banning of the importation of slaves in the year 1808 and thereafter, would thereby by its passage, slowly eradicate slavery as an institution. History, tells us, that this slow eradication did not subsequently occur.
So then, this country continued to be a republic of both free people as well as enslaved people, in which, in absence of a Constitutional Amendment specifically banning slavery throughout this land, the decision as to whether or not to permit slavery within a given State, was left to each individual State to decide, and the federal government thereby had no Constitutional power to interfere in such. In addition, in consideration that it was the Constitution that was the highest law of the land, this, in effect, made the Declaration of Independence, a Declaration, that was merely historical and therefore of no import to legislative, judicial, and executive decisions so made by those representatives.
Many a revolution has had the noblest goals for their constituents, only to find themselves after successfully overcoming their adversary, betraying those very same noble goals for their constituents, by their ignoring or vacating of such; for power, for greed, for control, and so on. The United States, in its construction of that Constitution, is no different; for in reality, those owning slaves, and signing that Declaration of Independence, most definitely had their time and place to defend that despicable institution and therefore to amend that Declaration to conform to their belief that those so enslaved, were really the property of those slave owners, and thereby not people. Instead, that Constitution, so created after that Declaration of Independence, never directly addresses slavery, though it also never concedes that other persons are property; yet, somehow finds a way to discount other persons to be three-fifths of a regular person, and with no rights that a white man was bound to respect.
It would take a great civil war and then the passage of the 13th-15th Amendments, for this country to recognize in its Constitution, what it had already recognized in its Declaration of Independence, that each of us is created equally, and equally of unalienable rights. So now, we do find that the highest law of this land is in conformance with its Declaration of Independence; yet, still the abolition of slavery does not mean the same thing as equality under the law or of opportunity, for even a cursory look around the institutions and the justice so rendered in the present day United States indicates that this is still not so.