College of Political Knowledge
Subject: Early American History
From time to time when I am talking with people a subject comes up that puts my brain into overdrive and I just have to post something before it can rest………this was a conversation I was having with a conserv friend and he used the ‘equality’ about 5 times in a sentence………BANG! My mind went to work…….
Let me inject that I am not saying that what we believe about our founding era is wrong just that the thinking may not be the same as it is today or has been portrayed by history books……..I have spent many years studying and researching the founding period a….by read papers and thoughts from those men that we hold in high regard….and in doing so I have found an insight in the thought processes from those days……..
Who does not know those magic words from our founding, “….that all men are created equal……”? Words that we Americans are proud of and hopefully we aspire to live by…….words that have echoed through out our history……but what we the Founders thinking? What can explain the continuation of slavery? Or women not being allowed to vote? What were they thinking?
Well the liberal definition is that people are born equal….legal and political equality but equality of opportunity as well….the conservative definition is more an abstract and unachievable goal…..but where did the Founders fall in this scheme?
Most of the Founders were well schooled and being such would have been exposed to John Locke……..Equality is the driving force of Locke’s political theory because it is the basis for our consensual participation in society, a requisite for the establishment of any state. As such, equality is not just necessary in the establishment of government but is also a requisite in maintaining a safe and stable nation. Locke describes the responsibility of the government (specifically the legislative power) as “the preservation of the society, and of every person in it” (Locke, Treatise, 69), showing his belief that the obligations of the government are to provide safety and protection to all its citizens equally.
But was Locke the driving thought of the day?
Let’s start with the person who put the idea in the minds of average Americans, Thomas Paine, in his mind equality meant just what it sounds like……for men, women, slaves………Paine thought everyone in the society was equal there were no one person or group that was better than the others……Paine wrote about women and they voting, wrote about free all slaves and even wrote about a social security type of fund for retirement……he foresaw all people living as equals in a just society.
But that is about where the Founders departed from the whole equality thing…..at least in my opinion.
Equality is a magical word but what did it mean in the context of our founding documents? Personally, I do not think the the Founders were speaking about ALL men…….their idea was that Americans were equal to citizens of England….that they should have all the rights and privileges of their English brothers…..
I give you the decision written by Taney in the Dred Scott vs Sanford……..Taney — a staunch supporter of slavery and intent on protecting southerners from northern aggression — wrote in the Court’s majority opinion that, because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The framers of the Constitution, he wrote, believed that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.”
Yes, he was a supporter of slavery but also I believe that he was interpreting what the DoI was stating…..that all white free men were equal to the free men of England and all others were subordinate to that…….I want to believe that the Founders were that forward looking but their writings and papers just does not bear that out…..