It sounds like you're romanticizing American history to a great extent. As a reminder, the founders wanted to create a class based empire resting largely on forced labor, both through slavery and indentured servitude. They certainly didn't intend the rights they granted themselves to trickle down to lower segments of society.
Empire was not what all of them wanted, and Jefferson is an example of a founder who spoke against slavery in his early career and then accepted it because essentially the time to fight that battle hadn't yet occurred (his statement against it in the Declaration of Independence was overruled in light of national unity). He did keep slaves until his death, but he also freed his descendants and was involved in drafting the Rights of Man which says a lot about his more egalitarian views. That is remarkable for a gentleman planter from Virginia. Of course some of the founders in the north despised slavery anyway.
Jefferson was a bit of an outlier but make no mistake what they did was radical for the time. We can't romanticize history nor try and analyze it in light of today's values.
Jefferson also conceived of the lower classes as literal waste, that needed to be bred and put to productive use, just like the animals and slaves he owned. He wanted to import Germans to improve the breeding of the poor whites, because he, along with the other elites, considered them as inferior creatures.
Again, the founders idea of America was based on importing forced labor - the majority of early Americans weren't people 'fleeing religious persecution', they were slaves, indentured servants, convicts, and the rest of England's 'trash' that could either be forced or deceived into getting on a boat.
This is only tangentially related, but can you determine what was the highest percentage of the U.S. that was enslaved at a given point? My best approximation is the slave pop. topped out at 10% ~1861, which sounds like a lot less than "the majority."
