The idea of equality is not a single concept, and its complexity is evident throughout the revolutionary era and early Republic. For some, equality was the Christian idea of the individual's direct relationship to God and the Protestant's disdain for papal hierarchy. For others it was a political notion of equal representation, or of the individual's equal rights and liberty in law, both natural and civil. For still others, it meant a rough equality of condition thought to be efficacious to a republic. In general, Americans during the nation's early years held to combinations of some or all of these ideas with varying degrees of consistency. Assumptions about race and gender were persistent challenges. Even the most egalitarian thinkers found the implications of their principles discomfiting if not entirely unthinkable. To understand the meaning of equality at this time requires one to ask, of what kind and for whom?
During the years 1629 to 1641, New England Puritans, seeking refuge from persecution by mainstream Anglicans, sought to practice their beliefs in a "purified" worship. Yet they were loath to extend this freedom to non-Puritans. Although the Massachusetts Body of Liberties was to apply to all inhabitants residing within the colony, the General Court could determine who qualified for residence and expel or punish anyone who was deemed to have "exceeded the bounds of moderation." Equality was initially the equality of Puritan believers and those willing to conform to Puritan strictures.
Early Quakers (the Society of Friends) and German Pietists in the mid-Atlantic colonies in the years 1675 to 1725 were more tolerant of nonconforming neighbors in their midst. Pietists generally avoided politics, but Quakers who controlled the government of Pennsylvania for the first six decades of the colony accepted all denominations as expressions of the Holy Spirit. More individualistic in their understanding of differences, they affirmed William Penn's belief that the "Liberty of Conscience is every man's right, and he who is deprived of it is a slave in the midst of the greatest liberty." This led to a very liberal granting of equal legal rights to colonists, whether members of the Society of Friends or not.
A more peculiar development occurred in the southern colonies, settled largely from the south of England between 1642 and 1675. The region was known for its support of the Stuart monarchy during the Puritan Revolution; class position and personal status were accorded great importance in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Many who arrived aspired to attain the position of gentlemen landowners, with all of the deference accorded such a position in England. As John Randolph of Roanoke announced, "I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality." That said, there was a kind of formal equality that evolved with slavery.
The paucity of labor proved an early inducement to the African slave trade on a more intensive level than elsewhere in America. This fact set in motion a unique dynamic between the larger landowners and the more middling and lower-class white colonists. By 1776 what had been the "equality of aristocrats" was transformed into the equality of white males. Basic legal rights were recognized, such as the right to sue and testify in court, the right to enter contracts, and the right to vote if one met minimal property requirements—all rights denied, not only to slaves, but to the few black freedmen who resided in Virginia. Consequently, vertical ties of allegiance from lower to upper classes were reinforced by a concept of equality within the race. That fact influenced the republican ideology that galvanized Virginia's resistance to England in the Revolution.
Equality, or the lack thereof, manifested itself in specific legal frameworks or religious practices. More problematic was the expression of equality in social life. Europeans, regardless of how egalitarian in political, philosophical, or religious matters, were steeped in medieval customs of hierarchy and status. Deference to one's betters was ingrained and, with the possible exception of the Quakers, was characteristic of most of the American colonists as well. Persons of wealth were accorded respect. Those with less were simply expected to give way when superiors were present, and were certainly never to presume familiarity. The Virginia gentry were held in awe by the middling to lower freemen, while slaves were always to show obeisance. In this context, it is often wondered how a revolutionary spirit and republican ideas of equal and natural rights ever came to the forefront of the American consciousness.
The religious ideas of the mid-Atlantic and New England states reinforced the belief that equality before God ought to be affirmed in law. Lockean ideas of the Enlightenment formed an important part of the theological understanding of man's original and natural rights in the state of nature. Elisha Williams preached in 1744 in Boston that "all are born . . . naturally equal, i.e. with an equal right to their persons; so also with an equal right to their preservation; and therefore to such things as nature affords for their subsistence." What followed was a Lockean account of how reason and differences in ability produced the natural right to property and the necessity for limited republican government. With prosperity and population growth, these ideas resonated with Americans who took umbrage at any claim that disparaged their status in the empire.
Ironically, in the southern colonies it was precisely the concern with domestic issues of status that prompted similar philosophical and political developments. If gentlemen planters were reluctant to submerge their status within their own society, they were especially reluctant to assume a position of inferiority with respect to their British counterparts in the empire. When British policy changed with the need for revenue, these status-conscious southern leaders asked why they did not have the same rights as all Englishmen to consent to the taxation of their properties. Richard Bland of the Virginia House of Burgesses articulated this point early in 1766: "These Acts which imposed severer Restrictions upon the Trade of the Colonies than were imposed upon the Trade of England, deprived the Colonies . . . of the Privileges of English Subjects, and constituted an unnatural Difference between Men under the same Allegiance, born equally free, and entitled to the same civil Rights."
Whether originally conceived of as equality before God, the equality of all believers, or the equality of freeborn aristocrats, the concept of equality came to mean equal legal and political status with the inhabitants of the mother country. By the end of the eighteenth century, the colonists would no longer tolerate being the "subjects of subjects."
As resistance to British colonial policy intensified, the assertion of equal status was replaced by a more universal claim to their equal natural rights, or rights given by God or nature to all humanity. With the decision to declare for independence, Thomas Jefferson penned perhaps the most famous statement on equality along these lines in the American Declaration of Independence: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Few sentences have been the source of so much debate. Is the statement simply about rights, or is it a basic assertion about the social conditions necessary for "happiness"? Does it describe, or does it also prescribe, the form equality ought to take in the new nation? Some writers have attempted to find a case for material equality, or equality of condition, during the Revolution and founding periods, and this has produced some interesting evidence.
For one, the culture of deference stemming from medieval views on status was irrevocably undermined. The urban artisan and working classes discarded much of their reserve with respect to their supposed social superiors. In cities like Boston and Philadelphia, often to the consternation of the higher sorts, artisans and day laborers were suffused with a spirit of republican equality that encouraged a more outspoken and participatory attitude. Yet the general sense was not so much in favor of material equality as a celebration of social freedom—the freedom to take pride in oneself regardless of occupation or wealth.
Others have detected a celebration of rough material equality considered to be especially conducive to a republic. Thus we find a statement by the minister Enos Hitchcock of Providence in 1793: "This soil is distributed in such portions amongst the inhabitants, and holden by such tenure, as afford the greatest security to the continuation of free government." In the absence of vast aristocratic fortunes, Americans need not fear domination by any particular group. Such fortunes, it was believed, gave means to bribe legislators and control government, but a rough equality of condition would avoid that unhappy prospect. Yet Hitchcock stopped short of prescribing anything other than equal laws. It was enough that in America
property is rendered secure, by the equality of law to all; and every man, being master of the fruits of his own labour, enjoys the right of property—no arbitrary imposition of taxes or of tythes, no lordly exactions of rents, chill the heart of industry, nor repress the cultivators exertions—no mercantile corporations, with exclusive rights, damp the ardent spirit of enterprise.
Jefferson's experience with the profound poverty evident in France caused him to question whether liberty and large disparities in property ownership are compatible. In 1785 Jefferson noted the poverty of the French lower classes and monopolization of land by the aristocracy—lands left "undisturbed only for the sake of game." He was "conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality" led him to conclude that legislators could not "invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind." By "natural affections," he believed it would be sufficient in most cases to eliminate laws that required all land to go to the eldest son. But "whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right." That was not the case in America, but in France, as he noted in the Autobiography, he saw "the monstrous abuses of power under which this people were ground to powder." Such circumstances might require redistribution. This was not advocating material equality per se. It merely meant lessening that inequality that left some near starvation. Thus in his Second Inaugural Address in 1805, Jefferson could still congratulate America for the "equality of rights maintained, and that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers."
As with Jefferson and Hitchcock, most Americans of this period considered a rough material equality as desirable but not a main objective. The idea made sense only in relation to liberty. Individuals were to be free to pursue opportunities and reap the consequences. A rough equality of property was a happy accident of the equal application of law, but it was not to be a hindrance to the equal right to pursue opportunities and acquire the rewards of industry.
Freedom from artificial restrictions came to be the dominant conception of equality in economic matters after the Revolution, but profound social tensions were revealed as ideals conflicted with lived experience. Few embodied that tension more than Jefferson. The idea of equal freedom was rarely extended beyond white male adults. The most egregious inconsistency was the institution of slavery. Jefferson's conceptual struggle was indicative of a wider societal ambivalence.
Jefferson's eloquence in defense of equal rights makes the fact of his ownership of slaves particularly jarring. The thinking of many of his contemporaries tended toward a justification of the "peculiar institution" by various theories of racial inequality. Rather than ignore the obvious conflict between the claim of equal rights and the existence of slavery, Jefferson wrestled with both, and this struggle has highlighted the inconsistencies in his life and thought. He would move for emancipation, but only if followed by colonization or deportation back to Africa. He would assert that the "unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people," but later contend that "no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves."
Equally problematic was the legal and political position of women. Accepted as equal intellectually, women were considered emotionally and physically unsuited to political life and public leadership. The Revolution was a political act, and even the most ardent of male liberal Patriots, or "Whigs" as they called themselves, could not conceive of women as having a political character or role. Yet during the Revolution women were depended on for providing food, shelter, and funds, and even for military intelligence. Equality was not so much the issue, but the role and status of women was steadily reconceived. The idea of republican motherhood was a first step in recognizing a political place for women in the family. Mothers were enjoined to impart republican values of independence, loyalty, thrift, and industry to their children.
Writing to John Adams on 31 March 1776, Abigail Adams famously asked him to "remember the ladies." She hoped he and the other representatives in Congress would "be more generous and favourable to [women] than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could." Yet her call was only for an improvement in legal status or a lessening of inequality. "Regard us then," she continued, "as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the Supreem [sic] Being make use of that power only for our happiness." John Adams responded with the observation that the move to independence had "loosened the bands of Government every where." Everywhere, people seemed to be agitating for their rights; Abigail's was but "the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented."
John Adams's reply was prophetic for society as a whole. With independence and the establishment of the U.S. Constitution, American civil society saw a whirlwind of political and social organizing for all sorts of causes.
The first political contests of the early Republic gave rise to the first two-party system, with the more democratically oriented Republicans under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison squaring off against the more conservative Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. These were great social events at the local level and stirred the political consciousness of a whole generation of Americans. Combined with a dynamic economy, the years following the heated election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800 saw tremendous movements of people both geographically and across social strata. Individuals became far more mobile socially, some moving up the socioeconomic ladder, while the relative status of established ranks was diminished. That dynamism contributed to the further erosion of earlier deferential social norms. How Americans thought of equality was given new expression in American religious, economic, and political life.
The Second Great Awakening, beginning in the 1790s and lasting until the Civil War, was a period of increased religious enthusiasm and organization. Like the first Awakening in the 1740s, the trend favored popular charismatic and "low" church forms of devotion, with emphasis on revivals and evangelism. These movements drew from the older wells of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist faiths but were less hierarchical. The spirit of renewal unleashed a powerful desire to reform not only the individual, but society. From these sources sprang the temperance movement, the antislavery movement, education reform, and the movements for women's suffrage. The ideals of the Revolution were reexamined with an eye toward perfecting American equality in faith, in law, and in representation. Although the roots of the reform societies can be found in this period, their most important influence would not be realized until after 1830.
For many born after 1776, consistency with the Declaration became paramount as a means of demonstrating their worthiness of their Revolutionary and republican inheritance. The period saw a visceral reaction against unearned status that severely crippled the Federalist Party in all but a few New England states, ushering in the so-called Era of Good Feelings (1820s), a time when the predominant party was Jefferson's Democratic Republicans. Even in business, entrepreneurs exulted in the equal rights of all individuals to pursue opportunities and for the common man to make good for himself and his family.
Equality in America was a complex blending of the equality of all believers, equality before God, equality in rights both natural and legal, and the lessening of the arbitrary distinctions of aristocracy. It was the working out of these ideals that eventually produced the great reform movements of the nineteenth century.