Thomas Jefferson was the biggest hypocrite among the Founding Fathers, at least where the issue of slavery was concerned. Other Founders owned slaves, but it was Jefferson who penned the Declaration of Independence, with its ringing affirmation that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Jefferson was painfully aware of the contradiction between his noble words and his shameful ownership of human beings. At times, he tried to avoid the truth by referring to his slaves as his “servants.” At other times, he engaged in public hand-wringing on the slavery issue, as when he said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

But when it came down to a choice between freeing his slaves and continuing to enjoy the pampered life of a planter-aristocrat, Jefferson chose the latter. He did not even free his slaves in his will, as did George Washington. When Jefferson died, his “servants” were sold to pay his debts, along with his other goods and chattels.

And yet, Jefferson’s words proved too powerful to be discredited, even by his own failure to live up to them. Mike Gerson, former speechwriter to President Bush, put it very well in an interview he gave to the Wall Street Journal last month. He said, "Even though [Jefferson] was inconsistent in his own life, he set out an ideal that improved and motivated and guided American history from that day to this." That, according to Mr. Gerson, "is the best role of political rhetoric."

I don’t know if Mr. Gerson ever read Gordon Wood’s excellent book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, but I suspect he did, since Professor Wood expressed much the same sentiments in slightly different terms. He wrote: “To focus, as we are today apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish – highlighting and lamenting its failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women – is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.”

Professor Wood is right. Even the current demands of gays and lesbians for equal treatment under the marriage laws are rooted in the language of the Declaration of Independence. Either all men (and women) are created equal, and are endowed with the same natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or they are not.

Thomas Jefferson is a rare example of a man whose words spoke far louder than his deeds. The proof is that mighty reverberations of those words are still shaking and shaping our world.