Toward a more perfect union
In newspaper columns going back at least since 2012 and with an eye toward civil liberties that are still far from given, I have argued that the United States is still wrestling with the full implications of just four words from the Declaration of Independence that renaissance man, master wordsmith and slaveholder Thomas Jefferson wrote in the summer of 1776: “all men are created equal.”
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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …
That we have been drawing out those implications over decades, nay, centuries, is a sad commentary for a nation that began with such promise, especially given the fact that the founders knew, at least in some respects, where all this was headed, but couldn’t have anticipated exactly how far personal liberties would extend beyond landed, white property owners. I’ll show that despite this, all of the key issues that would later lead to civil rights as we know them found their impetus here in the early days of the republic, with considerable nods to those who inspired the founders, including John Locke, Montesquieu and others. This project of nation-building really was toward a “more perfect union” that is still being refined today.
‘There will be no end to it’
As much as a year before the Declaration was written and formally adopted, John Adams, one of the strongest advocates for independence from England during the run-up to war, was hearing opinions from people on all sides about how this new republic would address, or not, the rights of individuals, including the labor class, women and slaves:
Is it not incompatible with the glorious Struggle America is making for her own Liberty, to hold in absolute Slavery a Number of Wretches who will be urged by Despair on one Side, and the most flattering Promises on the other, to become the most inveterate Enemies to the present Masters? — letter from a resident in Fredericksburg, Va., 1775
Here is part of a letter to Adams signed only as “Humanity”:
Whot has the negros the africans don to us that shuld tak them from thar own land and mak them sarve us to the da of thar deth …? God forbit that it shuld be so anay longer. … I hear the gentelman that leads the army (Washington) holds 700 of them in bondeg. (Washington owned a little more than 100 slaves at the time.)
James Sullivan, a leading opponent of British authority and later governor of Massachusetts, wrote in a letter to Elbridge Gerry, which was forwarded to Adams, his views on the rights, or lack thereof, of the non-property holding working class:
Laws and Government are founded on the Consent of the people, and that consent should be each member of Society be given in proportion to his Right. Every member of Society has a Right to give his Consent to the Laws of the Community or he owes no obedience to them. This proportion will never be denied to him who has the least acquaintance with republican principles. … Why a man is supposed to consent to the acts of a Society of which in this respect he is an absolute Excommunicate, none but a lawyer well Labled in the fuedal Sistem can tell.
If the new nation did away with property qualification at the ballot box, where would this free buffet of rights end, Adams wondered, with some amount of prescience:
There will be no end to it. New Claims will rise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. — letter to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776
Adams’ own wife, Abigail, chimed in. She was fierce. You can just hear the wry sarcasm in this exhortation and warning to John about the power of the female voice. Her words deserve a full airing:
And, by the way, in the new code of law which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you will remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."
…
But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard ... and not withstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and, without violence, throw your natural and legal authority at your feet (emphasis mine)." - letters to her husband, John Adams, Spring 1776
Slow progress
For these groups, a full issuance of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would have to wait.
In 1800, only three states, New Hampshire, Kentucky and Vermont, gave all white males the vote. Not until 1828 could all non-property holding white males vote in most states.
Almost 100 years would pass before women would get the right to vote. Although the Nineteenth Amendment theoretically applied to all women, black women were discriminated against in many parts of the country, namely the South. Big surprise, right?
As we know, Black America’s path toward securing life, liberty and happiness was even more fraught with long-suffering and pain.
The failure of the founders to limit the spread of slavery kicked the can down the road into the next century, when the powder keg exploded into a war for the nation’s soul. The Union won the bloody struggle, and Lincoln emancipated the slaves but a poorly managed and executed reconstruction effort returned Southern black people into a kind of servitude that would have been all too familiar to their ancestors.
Again, Black people technically got the right to vote in 1869 with passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (and citizenship with the Fourteenth), but again, largely in the South, execution and enforcement of the same turned into an unmitigated disaster of corruption and discrimination at the ballot box. Not until the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did Black peoples’ right to pursue life, liberty and happiness come under full protection of the federal government.
‘Empire of liberty,’ for whites
And then there were the Native Americans, who barely factored into the promise of America at all under Jefferson’s lofty, but unrealized vision.
Joseph Ellis, in "American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic" (2007), said that next to the failure to end slavery or to put it on a path of extinction, America’s policy toward the Native Americans was the second greatest failure of the founders during this consequential period in American history.
The other shadow, almost as dark (as slavery), was the failure to implement a just and generous settlement with the Native Americans. … All the principle founders acknowledged that the indigenous people of North America had a legitimate claim to the soil and a moral claim on the conscience of the infant republic. This is another problem, like slavery, that either failed to engage the creative energies of the founders in their fullest form or was inherently insoluble.
Here is Washington’s Secretary of War Henry Knox:
Indians being the prior occupants of the rights of the soil. ... To dispossess them ... would be a gross violation of the fundamental Laws of Nature and of that distributive Justice which is the glory of a nation.
But dispossess them, we did.
By the time Jefferson was president, he had created an “‘empire of liberty,’ but for whites only,’” according to Ellis, who said that the Louisiana Purchase west of the Mississippi provided a place for the Native Americans to be relocated, with their lands essentially ceded to white settlers east of the river.
This idea of forcefully removing the indigenous people from their own lands was further developed under President James Monroe and then codified and brought to cruel fruition under Andrew Jackson. Nearly to the present day, America’s various policies in trying to “deal” with the presence of Native Americans, daring to persist on lands that were taken from them, have been tepid and perfunctory, and at best, embarrassing at worst.
As an article from Bridgewater State University notes, the United States finally began to look at Native Americans, who didn’t get full citizenship until 1924, from a “self-determination and autonomy” point of view, allowing them to operate casinos to further their economic status in the 1970s and 1980s:
The Indian casinos proved to be a financial windfall for some tribes and gave Americans the false belief that the Native Americans were finally moving forward after years of neglect. In reality, many of the gambling venues created few jobs and were subjected to the vagaries of a weakened economy.
One in three Native Americans live in poverty. Unemployment among Native Americans sits well above the national average, according to the BSU article. Life expectancy is also lower among Native Americans, “as mental illness, drug use, food insecurity and suicide continue to affect far too many Native Americans.” Despite being the first and original occupants of this land, Native Americans have seemingly been among the last groups to enjoy the full implications of the Declaration’s most promising, yet elusive, passage.
‘Potent and consequential’
Once rights are acknowledged and bestowed — the first part of Jefferson’s introduction to the Declaration — they have to be secured. Thus enters the second part of the passage, which is just as important as the first in explaining why a liberal reading of the Declaration and Constitution is essential to the perpetuity of said rights. It also explains why Adams, James Madison1, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton argued so robustly for a strong central government.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …
Rights - have - to be secured by the federal government because only the government has the power to fully enforce rights across every state, which, if given the chance, could and have attempted to subvert people's "self-evident" liberties. This is also why the Constitution has something called the Supremacy Clause to prevent state trespasses such as these. The federal government, with its checks and balances and 535 elected members of Congress representing every state in the Union, is the final arbiter.
The reason a weak federal government with little intervention — the libertarian and conservative dream, at least to the extent that it serves their purposes — won't work is because whole groups of people that make up the fabric of who we are as a nation would be in danger of falling through the cracks and having their rights trampled on by the majority.
While the founders took issue with a lot of Jefferson's verbiage elsewhere in the Declaration, much to his chagrin, they, somewhat surprisingly, left his powerful introduction virtually unchanged, and it has reverberated down through history.
Here is Ellis:
It is no exaggeration to observe that between the summer of 1775 and the spring of 1776, the entire liberal agenda for the next century of American history made its appearance for the first time. Indeed, if one wanted to push the evidence a bit, to include the civil rights and feminist movements, the next two centuries of political reform were previewed. (pp. 40-41) …
We can say with considerable confidence that these were destined to become the most potent and consequential words in American history, perhaps in modern history. They became the political fountainhead for all the liberal reforms that would seep out and over the nation, and eventually much of the world. (p. 36)
The "liberal agenda" is really nothing more than the culmination of what Jefferson penned in solitude in those hot and heady days of Revolution, the realization that “all men are created equal.”
This is the story of America, the hope and promise of America that has and will win out in the end.
Conservatives are going to continue fighting against it because it creates dissonance with their worldview, religion and outward or hidden prejudices, but they're fighting against the tide of history, which has only, and ever will, run one way.
It must be said that for his part, Madison would later renig on his earlier arguments for a strong central government and essentially became a mouthpiece for Jeffersonian politics, which focused more on state power over federal and toward an agrarian society as a means to protect the planter class, of which both Jefferson and Madison were members.