(Another post because it's largely of a historical nature, and have nothing to do with how admirable Jefferson was.)

>An idea like "all men are created equal" occurred in a time when there were deeply embedded notions of class, nobility, slavery, etc. That it failed to instantly transform the world is not a flaw in the idea. It takes some time.

That idea did transform the world in pretty short order; Locke, the man who is most commonly credited with laying out that idea for the founders, (though he certainly wasn't the first to express the idea) was a 17th century man who fought in the English civil war. Considering how quickly after the American revolutionary war that other popular wars started popping off, you could say that the American revolution was one of the causes of those other revolutions, and in a real way, it could have been said to have been the decisive blow against the idea that men with titles are superior to men with money. This idea that maybe we should have less respect for inherited privilege swept the western world in just a few hundred years, with the definition of 'man' in Jefferson's writing about the idea being slowly expanded. The early 19th century was characterized by the aftermath of the french revolution, which I argue includes the wars of German nationalism and expansion during the late 19th and early 20th centuries[1]. I make a distinction between the revolutions before and after the English civil war; the revolutions before that were largely struggles between the king and other men with titles, while after that, the war was about men with titles against men with money. (There's a third phase hinging on the French revolution where it's between those with money and those without[2].)

Now, in favor of the "all of this is just expanding the definition of "man" narrative, while I feel that the view that people with titles should have more rights as very similar to the view that people of a certain race should have more rights, generally speaking those fights, from a historical perspective, have been fought at very different times. Yes, yes, the ACW was fought at a time where the average northerner feared the growing power of the southern planter, and the southern planters are seen by northerners both at the time and now as respecting titles or birth more than money, the south did have official, legal distinctions between the rights of people of different races, while as far as I know, the distinctions between people of title and people without were unofficial and not codified into law, so I would argue that the war was more about race than about the fight between inherited titles and money, though you could make a lot about the white northerner's motivations and their fear of men of title if you wanted to make the counter argument.

[1]One could argue that the Levée en mass was enabled by the ideas of the french revolution; that arming a wide swath of your citizens is only possible if you also give them some political rights; some argue that before this time, armies were made up of smaller portions of the population (and promotion was tightly confined to the noble classes) because otherwise the men with the guns would demand better treatment in general for the lower classes. Of course not everyone agrees with that, and even I see some problems with that worldview. My assertion that the wars of unification and then world wars 1 and 2 were related to the napoleonic wars is... far more controversial. There is a lot of support for my assertion that the wars of German unification were part of the aftermath of the napoleonic wars; All the countries in question had been involved, and most of them conquered by Napoleon; seems like that would be a big incentive to unite. They even signed the treaty ending the war in France, as a sort of middle-finger, I think, to their previous overlord. My assertion that this is related to world war one is way weaker, except perhaps in the sense that Germany expected France to invade if given half a chance

[2]Many people would argue that the three are different stages of the same issue, bringing basic human rights and political agency to an ever broader swath of humanity, and that is certainly a valid way to view it. Personally, though, I think there's a fundamental difference between the war between the king and the barons, then the war between the people with titles and those with money, and finally, the war between people with money and people without. I think that the American revolutionary war, at least on the radical edges where it wasn't just a tax protest (and it was just a tax protest for the majority, I think) was largely the middle one, while the balance between the king and the nobles quickly became a dead issue (sorry) during the French revolution, and it quickly became a fight between monied interests and the non-monied. The 20th century Russian revolution went similarly, and ended with the balance favoring money rather less than the French. I understand and sympathize with but mostly disagree with the idea that money and titles are the same thing because both are inherited. I think that "people with money should have more rights" is a very different sort of worldview from "people with titles or with a skin color should have more rights"