Perhaps one of the most abused and misunderstood phrases in American history is found in the Declaration of Independence where Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal.” Since at least as early as the mid nineteenth century, the phrase has been used by many American politicians as justification for government intervention in the name of imposing whatever interpretation of “equality” happens to be popular at the time.
For example, the phrase is routinely used to justify federal intervention into democratically-elected state and local governments in places where federal employees have decided there is “too much” inequality. (We’re told that democracy is sacrosanct, unless, of course, Washington politicians don’t like the democratic outcomes.) When Washington does decide to impose its own vision on supposedly self-governing cities and states, the intervention is often justified on the grounds that some imagined benchmark of “equality” has not been met.
The same thing often happens internationally when the federal government wishes to invade some small and impoverished country. For example, when the United States government sought to justify its open-ended occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, we were told—among other things—that women (or Kurds or democrats, etc.) must be made more equal, and thus, invasion was necessary.
This abuse of Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence has led some opponents of federal power to suggest that it might have been best if Jefferson had never said that men are, in some sense, equal. For example, Richard Weaver, a giant of the American conservative movement, enthusiastically opposed any notion of equality at all. He condemned the very concept—apparently including the Jeffersonian formulation—as a “chimerical notion.”
Nonetheless, Jefferson meant something very specific when he used the term, and the fact that later politicians and activists assigned a completely different meaning to the word is hardly Jefferson’s fault.
Jefferson did not mean equality in the sense that everyone is more or less equal in talents and abilities. And he certainly did not mean that equality (however defined) ought to imposed by a powerful state. To know what Jefferson meant, we need look no further than the milieu of American classical liberals of the late eighteenth century. On this, Murray Rothbard writes:
. . .the concept of equality achieved its widespread popularity during the classical-liberal movements of the eighteenth century, when it meant, not uniformity of status or income, but freedom for each and every man, without exception. In short, equality in those days meant the libertarian and individualist concept of full liberty for all persons.
This “equality of liberty,” as Rothbard puts it, was simply a reaction to the government-imposed class privileges that existed under most European sovereign states during the eighteenth century. Jefferson was writing at a time when certain British subjects explicitly had access to government favors, while others did not. This was especially notable in the days of mercantilism—the economic system of absolutism—which granted lucrative government monopolies, among other privileges, to the politically well-connected. Commercial freedom was limited by a variety of “feudal” controls on land ownership, taxation, and commercial licensure. For the old free-market liberals—who valued laissez-faire in commercial enterprises, the old regimes’ grip on the marketplace represented a type of inequality that perpetuated an economic disadvantage for American farmers and merchants. The answer, of course, was not for the government impose any sort of egalitarian scheme. The answer was for the government to simply stop doling out special privileges to favorites of the ruling class.
The origins of Jefferson’s phrase can perhaps be found in the Virginia Bill of Rights—which Jefferson was certainly familiar with—and which stated that “all men are by nature equally free and independent.” Jefferson’s phrasing is more parsimonious that the Virginia formula, but any knowledge of the context of eighteenth century politics makes its meaning clear enough.
Moreover, the phrase was necessary. It served a key purpose in the text of the Declaration, in establishing the right of the Americans to separate and secede from the British Empire.
In contrast, a charge that Jefferson’s phrase was unnecessary was most forcefully pushed by the American conservative politician John C. Calhoun in the mid-nineteenth century. Calhoun was an anti-Jeffersonian who disliked the Declaration of Independence and especially opposed the phrase about all men being created equal.
Calhoun was especially distressed by the way that the phrase was being used by abolitionists to push for the emancipation of slaves. The abolitionists argued that political equality, as envisioned by Jefferson, applied even to non-whites.
Now, Calhoun had two enduring motivations in his political career in the 1840s. He crafted his political analysis to serve both ends. As noted by Patrick Newman, author of Cronyism: Liberty Versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849—Calhoun’s primary lifelong goal was to be president of the United States. His second primary concern was crafting defenses for slavery and the planter class.
In his June 1848 speech on the Oregon Bill, Calhoun denounced efforts to form the new Oregon territory as a free state. In an effort to illustrate the necessity and the benefits of slavery, he laments Jefferson’s use of the phrase “all men are created equal.” Calhoun further that the phrase is “dangerous” and “erroneous” and that in “no sense” are any people born “free” no is any person born equal to any other person.
Here we find Calhoun effectively conflating Jefferson’s notion of political equality with the notion of equality in talents. In any case, for Calhoun, great damage had been done to the pro-slavery position with the Declaration of Independence. He states that “under the authority of a document [i.e., the Declaration] put forth on so great an occasion, and leading to such important consequences, [the idea of equality] has spread far and wide, and fixed itself deeply in the public mind.”
Again, Calhoun here is not merely objecting to a later, broader notion of egalitarianism. He is also opposing the Jeffersonian and Rothbardian idea of “equality of liberty.” The problem, of course, was that the notion of universal rights might be extended to blacks and slaves, thus endangering the privileges of the planter class.
Calhoun then moves in for the kill and suggests that the phrase should never have been in the Declaration of Independence in the first place:
It was inserted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity. It made no necessary part of our justification in separating from the parent country, and declaring ourselves independent. Breach of our chartered privileges, and lawless encroachment on our acknowledged and well-established rights by the parent country, were the real causes, and of themselves sufficient, without resorting to any other, to justify the step. Nor had it any weight in constructing the governments which were substituted in the place of the colonial. They were formed of the old materials and on practical and well-established principles, borrowed for the most part from our own experience and that of the country from which we sprang.
Calhoun was never an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of secession, since, as Newman has noted, the dismemberment of the United States would complicate Calhoun’s attempt to rise to the top of the American regime. Nonetheless, he did support the idea of secession in extreme cases but his vision of secession was quite different from that of Jefferson’s. Unlike Jefferson, who promoted a right of secession based on universal natural rights, Calhoun contended that secession depended solely on contractual rights found in the text of the US constitution. By extension, the right to secede—a mere legal right in Calhoun’s schema—was available only to the state governments themselves. And, of course, this right could only be extended to parties of the contract, the state governments themselves.
Jefferson, on the other hand, adhered to the idea that secession was included among universal human rights. This is why the phrase “all men are created equal” is actually key to the Declaration’s argument and formula. The right to separate from the British empire was being put forward by the Americans as a right open to any group of human beings who possessed natural rights, in a manner similar to that contemplated by John Locke. In this view, since the British ruling class and the American separatists were fundamentally equal—given the universal nature of natural rights—the Americans had as much a right to rule themselves as any Brit had a right to rule over the Americans.
[Read More: “Rothbard and Mises vs. Calhoun on the Natural Right to Secede“]
Calhoun could not afford to adopt this Jeffersonian view since, to do so would require accepting that groups other than the state governments had a right to secede. This would imply that municipalities or counties had a natural right to govern themselves, thus leading to secession within the states. Moreover, the natural-rights position could even be used to justify secession by many other groups, including slaves.
So, Jefferson’s promotion of universal rights becomes an impossible option for Calhoun, and a right to secede is therefore reserved to only to very specific state institutions. Yet, Calhoun’s conservative and stunted view of the right to self-determination was quite insufficient to support the efforts of the American revolutionaries. Although Calhoun apparently believed an appeal to colonial charters and contracts was sufficient to establish a right to independence, the colonial charters themselves did not provide a legal avenue for withdrawing from the British Empire. If the Americans were going to make a case for the moral legitimacy of their cause, they were going to have to appeal to universal human rights. Moreover, Calhoun clings to a view of the American revolution that is similar to that of the hyper-conservative Prussian diplomat Friedrich von Gentz. This view—thoroughly debunked by Rothbard— was that the American Revolution was only an attempt to re-establish, in Calhoun’s words, “practical and well-established principles” which had existed before the Revolution. This view proved to be popular with conservatives throughout the nineteenth century, but it was certainly contrary to the facts of the Revolution.
It is not surprising, however, that Calhoun had no particular love for Jefferson or his words in the Declaration. Jefferson had, in the 1780s, supported measures to prohibit the spread of slavery into the western territories. Jefferson’s support for limitations on slavery in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for example, was apparently enough to sink him in the opinion of Calhoun, and he apparently never forgave Jefferson for this transgression:
We now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in the declaration of our independence. For a long time it lay dormant; but in the process of time it began to germinate, and produce its poisonous fruits. It had strong hold on the mind of Mr. Jefferson, the author of that document, which caused him to take an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South; and to hold, in consequence, that the former, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the latter; and that to deprive them of it was unjust and immoral. To this error, his proposition to exclude slavery from the territory northwest of the Ohio may be traced, and to that the ordinance of ’87, and through it the deep and dangerous agitation which now threatens to ingulf, and will certainly ingulf, if not speedily settled, our political institutions, and involve the country in countless woes.
