Americans of the revolutionary generation were preoccupied with the social conditions of freedom. Could a republic survive with a sizable dependent class of citizens? “A general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property,” proclaimed the educator and newspaper editor Noah Webster, “is the whole basis of national freedom.” “Equality,” he added, was “the very soul of a republic.” It outstripped in importance liberty of the press, trial by jury, and other “palladia of freedom.” Even a conservative like John Adams, who distrusted the era’s democratic upsurge, hoped that every member of society could acquire land, “so that the multitude maybe possessed of small estates” and the new nation could avoid the emergence of fixed and unequal social classes. At the Revolution’s radical edge, some patriots believed that government had a responsibility to limit accumulations of property in the name of equality To most free Americans, however, “equality” meant equal opportunity, rather than equality of condition. Many leaders of the Revolution nevertheless assumed that in the exceptional circumstances of the New World, with its vast areas of available land and large population of independent farmers and artisans, the natural workings of society would produce justice, liberty, and equality.
View from Bushongo Tavern, an engraving from The Columbian Magazine, 1788, depicts the landscape of York County, Pennsylvania, exemplifying the kind of rural independence many Americans thought essential to freedom.
Like many other Americans of his generation, Thomas Jefferson believed that to lack economic resources was to lack freedom. Jefferson favored a limited state, but he also believed that government could help create freedom’s institutional framework. His proudest achievements included laws passed by Virginia abolishing entail (the limitation of inheritance to a specified line of heirs to keep an estate within a family) and primogeniture (the practice of passing a family’s land entirely to the eldest son). These measures, he believed, would help to prevent the rise of a “future aristocracy.” To the same end, Jefferson proposed to award fifty acres of land to “every person of full age” who did not already possess it, another way government could enhance the liberty of its subjects. Of course, the land Jefferson hoped would secure American liberty would have to come from Indians.