“All men are created equal.” When Thomas Jefferson wrote those words in the summer of 1776, he both meant what he said, and didn’t. He meant that the white, propertied men who led the 13 colonies had no distinctions of rank or privilege among them. Unlike the British government and ruling class with its many titles, America would not have kings or nobility. Although “men” conventionally referred to all humans, female and male, of all races, Jefferson did not mean to include women or Blacks, and certainly not his own slaves. Abigail Adams urged her husband, John, to “remember the ladies,” neither he nor other leaders of the 13 colonies did so. Under the laws of those times, women were kept in an inferior position: Married women could not own property or even have custody of their own children. Men assumed that women lacked the mental and emotional capacity to engage in public affairs. In 1776, all the colonies still permitted slavery, and slavery was the foundation of the economies of the Southern colonies. About half the delegates to the Continental Congresses, the Congress of the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, were enslavers. Whites, including white women, considered Blacks intellectually and morally inferior to whites, and thus not fit to vote or to hold any position of responsibility, even if they were free. Slaves had no rights at all. Many whites thought slavery was the appropriate status for Blacks. What Jefferson thought about Blacks and slaves is not clear. He expressed reservations about slavery, but the only slaves he ever freed were children of his enslaved mistress, Sally Hemings. White men without property were also not included in Jefferson’s notion of equality. In most of the colonies, such men could not vote. Those excluded from the proclamation of equality fought back. Gradually, unpropertied white men gained the franchise in all states, culminating in the Jacksonian 1830s. Abolitionists fought tirelessly to end slavery; most Northern states had abolished slavery by 1830. Free Black men could vote in most Northern states by 1840. An organized feminist movement emerged in the 1840s and 1850s. Many women who led it were also prominent abolitionists. By the start of the Civil War in 1861, universal suffrage for white men had been achieved, along with Black male suffrage in the North. Strong abolitionist and feminist movements were active. But the Southern enslavers who touched off the Civil War were determined to deny that “All men are created equal.” The Confederacy rested on the proposition that Blacks are inherently inferior to whites, and therefore that slavery is their proper status. The Confederate defeat in 1865 led to Reconstruction, a determined program to make Southern society and polity more egalitarian, abolishing slavery and assuring freedmen the rights of citizens, including the right to vote and the right to hold property. Reconstruction faced the defiance of the Southern elites, and the North tired of enforcing it. The series of “Jim Crow” laws passed in the 1870s to the 1950s reimposed disenfranchisement and segregation on Southern Blacks. Only the organized Civil Rights movement, Supreme Court decisions and legislation passed in the 1960s ended the long legal purgatory of American Blacks. The feminists, meanwhile, after playing second fiddle to the Abolitionists, came into their own in the late 19th century. Against determined conservative opposition, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution granted women’s suffrage in 1919. By the 1970s, then, “All men are created equal” had achieved something approaching its full meaning. Its culmination would have been the Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress and sent to the states in 1972. The substantive clause read: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” But conservative opposition has prevented the amendment from being ratified. By 2020, 38 states had ratified, but the court ruled that ratification had expired. A long conservative reaction starting in the 1970s and reaching its apotheosis with Donald Trump’s second presidency seeks to roll back most of the expansion of equality throughout our history since 1776. When elite white men again rule, they think America will be great again.
John Peeler is a retired Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at Bucknell in Lewisburg