slavery - bill of rights institute

For nearly 250 years, the existence of slaverydeprived African Americans of independent livesand individual liberty. It also compromised therepublican dreams of white Americans, whootherwise achieved unprecedented success in thecreation of political institutions and socialrelationships based on citizens’ equal rights andever-expanding opportunity.Thomas Jefferson, who in 1787described slavery as an“abomination” and predictedthat it “must have an end,” hadfaith that “there is a superiorbench reserved in heaven forthose who hasten it.” He lateravowed that “there is not a manon earth who would sacrificemore than I would to relieve usfrom this heavy reproach in anypracticable way.” AlthoughJefferson made several proposalsto curb slavery’s growth orreduce its political or economicinfluence, a workable plan toeradicate slavery eluded him. Others also failed toend slavery until finally, after the loss of more than600,000 American lives in the Civil War, the UnitedStates abolished it through the 1865 ratification ofthe Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

American slavery and American freedom tookroot at the same place and at the same time. In1619—the same year that colonial Virginia’s Houseof Burgesses convened in Jamestown and becamethe New World’s first representative assembly—about 20 enslaved Africans arrived at Jamestownand were sold by Dutch slave traders. The numberof slaves in Virginia remained small for severaldecades, however, until the first dominant laborsystem—indentured servitude—fell out of favorafter 1670. Until then indentured servants,typically young and landless white Englishmen andEnglishwomen in search of opportunity, arrived bythe thousands. In exchange for passage to Virginia,they agreed to labor in planters’ tobacco fields forterms usually ranging from four to seven years.Planters normally agreed to give them, after theirindentures expired, land on which they couldestablish their own tobacco farms. In the first fewdecades of settlement, as demand for the crop

boomed, such arrangements usually worked in theplanters’ favor. Life expectancy in Virginia wasshort and few servants outlasted their terms ofindenture. By the mid-1600s, however, as thesurvival rate of indentured servants increased,more earned their freedom and began to competewith their former masters. The supply of tobacco

rose more quickly than demandand, as prices decreased, tensionsbetween planters and formerservants grew.

These tensions exploded in1676, when Nathaniel Bacon leda group composed primarily offormer indentured servants in arebellion against Virginia’sgovernment. The rebels, upset bythe reluctance of GovernorWilliam Berkeley and thegentry-dominated House ofBurgesses to aid their efforts toexpand onto American Indians’lands, lashed out at both theIndians and the government.

After several months the rebellion dissipated, butso, at about the same time, did the practice ofvoluntary servitude.

In its place developed a system of race-basedslavery. With both black and white Virginiansliving longer, it made better economic sense toown slaves, who would never gain their freedomand compete with masters, than to rent the labor ofindentured servants, who would. A few early slaveshad gained their freedom, established plantations,acquired servants, and enjoyed liberties shared bywhite freemen, but beginning in the 1660sVirginia’s legislature passed laws banninginterracial marriage; it also stripped AfricanAmericans of the rights to own property and carryguns, and it curtailed their freedom of movement.In 1650 only about 300 blacks worked Virginia’stobacco fields, yet by 1680 there were 3,000 and, bythe start of the eighteenth century, nearly 10,000.

Slavery surged not only in Virginia but also inPennsylvania, where people abducted from Africaand their descendants harvested wheat and oats,and in South Carolina, where by the 1730s riceplanters had imported slaves in such quantity thatthey accounted for two-thirds of the population.

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Founders and the Constitution: In Their Own Words—Volume 1

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The sugar-based economies of Britain’s Caribbeancolonies required so much labor that, on someislands, enslaved individuals outnumberedfreemen by more than ten to one. Even in the NewEngland colonies, where staple-crop agriculturenever took root, the presence of slaves wascommon and considered unremarkable by most.

Historian Edmund S. Morgan has suggestedthat the prevalence of slavery in these colonies mayhave, paradoxically, heightened the sensitivity ofwhite Americans to attacks against their ownfreedom. Thus, during the crisis preceding the Warfor Independence Americansfrequently cast unpopularBritish legislation—whichtaxed them without theconsent of their assemblies,curtailed the expansion oftheir settlements, deprivedthem of the right to jurytrials, and placed themunder the watchful eyes of red-coated soldiers—asevidence of an imperial conspiracy to “enslave”them. American patriots who spoke in such termsdid not imagine that they would be forced to toil intobacco fields; instead, they feared that Britishofficials would deny to them some of the sameindividual and civil rights that they had denied toenslaved African Americans. George Mason,collaborating with George Washington, warned inthe Fairfax Resolves of 1774 that the BritishParliament pursued a “regular, systematic plan” to“fix the shackles of slavery upon us.”

As American revolutionaries reflected on theinjustice of British usurpations of their freedomand began to universalize the individual rights thatthey had previously tied to their status asEnglishmen, they grew increasingly conscious ofthe inherent injustice of African-American slavery.Many remained skeptical that blacks possessed thesame intellectual capabilities as whites, but fewrefused to count Africans as members of thehuman family or possessors of individual rights.When Jefferson affirmed in the Declaration ofIndependence “that all men are created equal,” hedid not mean all white men. In fact, he attemptedto turn the Declaration into a platform from whichAmericans would denounce the trans-Atlanticslave trade. This he blamed on Britain and its kingwho, Jefferson wrote, “has waged cruel war againsthuman nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacredrights of life and liberty in the persons of a distantpeople who never offended him, captivating &carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.”

The king was wrong, he asserted, “to keep open amarket where MEN should be bought & sold.”Delegates to the Continental Congress from SouthCarolina and Georgia, however, vehementlyopposed the inclusion of these lines in theDeclaration of Independence. Representatives of other states agreed to delete them. Thus began,at the moment of America’s birth, the practice of prioritizing American unity over blackAmericans’ liberty.

Pragmatism confronted principle not only onthe floor of Congress but also on the plantations of

many prominent revolu-tionaries. When Jeffersonpenned his stirring defenseof individual liberty, heowned 200 enslavedindividuals. Washington, thecommander-in-chief of theContinental Army andfuture first president, was

one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia. JamesMadison—who, like Jefferson and Washington,considered himself an opponent of slavery—wasalso a slaveholder. So was Mason, whose VirginiaDeclaration of Rights stands as one of therevolutionary era’s most resounding statements onbehalf of human freedom. Had these revolution-aries attempted to free their slaves, they would havecourted financial ruin. Alongside their land-holdings, slaves constituted the principal assetagainst which they borrowed. The existence ofslavery, moreover, precluded a free market ofagricultural labor; they could never afford to payfree people—who could always move west toobtain their own farms, anyway—to till their fields.

Perhaps the most powerful objection toemancipation, however, emerged from the sameset of principles that compelled the Americanrevolutionaries to question the justice of slavery.Although Jefferson, Washington, Madison, andMason considered human bondage a clearviolation of individual rights, they trembled whenthey considered the ways in which emancipationmight thwart their republican experiments. Notunlike many nonslaveholders, they consideredespecially fragile the society that they had helpedto create. In the absence of aristocratic selfishnessand force, revolutionary American governmentsrelied on virtue and voluntarism. Virtue theyunderstood as a manly trait; the word, in fact,derives from the Latin noun vir, which means“man.” They considered men to be independentand self-sufficient, made free and responsible by

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In 1650 only about 300 AfricanAmericans worked Virginia’s tobacco

fields, yet by 1680 there were 3,000;by the start of the eighteenth century,

there were nearly 10,000.


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habits borne of necessity. Virtuous citizens madegood citizens, the Founders thought. The use ofpolitical power for the purpose of exploitationpromised the virtuous little and possessed thepotential to cost them much. Voluntarism wasvirtue unleashed: the civic-minded, selfless desireto ask little of one’s community but, because ofone’s sense of permanence within it, to give muchto it. The Founders, conscious of the degree towhich involuntary servitude had rendered slavesdependent and given them cause to resent whitesociety, questioned their qualifications forcitizenship. It was dangerous to continue to enslavethem, but perilous to emancipate them. Jeffersoncompared it to holding a wolf by the ears.

These conundrumsseemed to preclude an easyfix. Too aware of the injusticeof slavery to expect muchforgiveness from slaves, in thefirst decades of thenineteenth century a numberof Founders embarked onimpractical schemes topurchase the freedom of slaves and “repatriate”them from America to Africa. In the interim, debateabout the continued importation of slaves fromAfrica stirred delegates to the ConstitutionalConvention. South Carolina’s Charles Pinckneyvehemently opposed prohibitions on the slavetrade, arguing that the matter was best decided byindividual states. The delegates compromised,agreeing that the Constitution would prohibit fortwenty years any restrictions on the arrival of newlyenslaved Africans. As president, Jefferson availedhimself of the opportunity afforded by theConstitution when he prohibited the continuedimportation of Africans into America in 1808. Yethe had already failed in a 1784 attempt to halt thespread of slavery into the U.S. government’swestern territory, which stretched from the GreatLakes south toward the Gulf of Mexico (thecompromise Northwest Ordinance of 1787 drewthe line at the Ohio River), and in his efforts toinstitute in Virginia a plan for gradualemancipation (similar to those that passed inNorthern states, except that it provided for theeducation and subsequent deportation of freedAfrican Americans). Of all the Founders, BenjaminFranklin probably took the most unequivocalpublic stand against involuntary servitude when, in1790, he signed a strongly worded antislaverypetition submitted to Congress by the PennsylvaniaAbolition Society. This, too, accomplished little.

The revolutionary spirit of the postwar decade,combined with the desire of many Upper Southplantation owners to shift from labor-intensivetobacco to wheat, created opportunities to reducethe prevalence of slavery in America—especially inthe North. Those opportunities not seized upon—especially in the South—would not soon return.

Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in1793 widened the regional divide. By renderingmore efficient the processing of cotton fiber—which in the first half of the nineteenth centurypossessed a greater value than all other U.S.exports combined—Whitney’s machine triggereda resurgence of Southern slavery. Meanwhile, thewealth that cotton exports brought to America

fueled a booming Northernindustrial economy thatrelied on free labor andcreated a well-educatedmiddle class of urbanprofessionals and socialactivists. These individualskept alive the Founders’desire to rid America of

slavery, but they also provoked the development ofSouthern proslavery thought. At best, Southernersof the revolutionary generation had viewed slaveryas a necessary evil; by the 1830s, however,slaveholders began to describe it as a positive good.African Americans were civilized Christians, theyargued, but their African ancestors were not. Inaddition, the argument continued, slaves benefitedfrom the paternalistic care of masters who, unlikethe Northern employers of “wage slaves,” cared fortheir subordinates from the cradle to the grave.This new view combined with an older critique ofcalls for emancipation: since slaves were theproperty of their masters, any attempt to forcetheir release would be a violation of masters’property rights.

Regional positions grew more intractable asthe North and South vied for control of the West.Proposals to admit into statehood Missouri, Texas,California, Kansas, and Nebraska resulted incontroversy as Northerners and Southernerssparred to maintain parity in the Senate. The 1860election to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, aRepublican who opposed the inclusion ofadditional slave states, sparked secession and theCivil War.

“I tremble for my country when I reflect thatGod is just,” Jefferson had prophetically remarked,for “his justice cannot sleep for ever.” Americanspaid dearly for the sin of slavery. Efforts by

“I tremble for my country when Ireflect that God is just,” Jefferson hadprophetically remarked, for “his justicecannot sleep for ever.” Americans paid

dearly for the sin of slavery.


members of the founding generation failed toidentify moderate means to abolish the practice,and hundreds of thousands died because millionshad been deprived of the ability to truly live.

Robert M. S. McDonald, Ph.D.United States Military Academy

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Suggestions for Further ReadingBailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, reprint, 1992.Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1754. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1990.Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill, N.C.:

University of North Carolina Press, 1968.Miller, John Chester. The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. Charlottesville: University of

Virginia Press, reprint, 1991.Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York:

W.W. Norton, 1975.Tise, Larry E. Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840. Athens: University of

Georgia Press, 1987.



A sound understanding of the United States requiresan appreciation of the historical commitment of theAmerican people to certain fundamental liberties.High on the list of these liberties is freedom ofreligion. The image of brave seventeenth-centuryEnglish Puritans making the difficult journey acrossthe Atlantic to American shores in pursuit of thefreedom to live according to theirfaith is a powerful part of theAmerican myth. Less remembered,however, is the fact that thecommonwealth established bythe Puritans was as intolerant asAnglican England, from whichthey had fled. Indeed, the road toachieving full religious liberty inthe United States was long andarduous. By the time of thewriting of the United StatesConstitution in 1787, Americanswere committed to the principleof religious tolerance (or, to usethe term of the time,“toleration”)and the idea of separation ofchurch and state, but only to a limited degree. Itwould be another five decades before all statesgranted broad religious liberty to their citizens andprovided for the complete separation of churchand state.

Modern ideas about freedom of religion weredeveloped in the wake of the Protestant Reformationof the sixteenth century, which shattered the unityof Christendom and plunged Europe into politicaland religious conflict. Though some European statesremained religiously homogeneous, either retainingthe traditional faith of Roman Catholicism oradopting some brand of Protestantism, religiousdivision within many countries led to discord andbloodshed. In England, the church established inthe mid-sixteenth century by King Henry VIII (whoreigned from 1509 to 1547) faced stiff resistance,first from the many Catholics who refused toabandon the faith of their ancestors, and then fromthe Puritans who opposed the rule of bishops andwanted to purify the church so that it includedonly the elect.

Henry VIII’s successors, Elizabeth I (1558–1603)and James I (1603–1625), successfully quelledopposition to the Church of England (the Anglican

Church), largely through harsh persecution ofdissenters. In 1642, however, England was engulfedby religious civil war, from which the Puritansemerged victorious. The Puritan Commonwealthestablished by Oliver Cromwell ruthlessly persecutedAnglicans and Catholics. But Puritan rule wasshort-lived. An Anglican monarch, Charles II, was

restored to the throne in 1660.This “settlement” of the religiouscrisis, however, was threatenedby the accession of a Catholic,James II, to the throne in 1685.Anxious Protestants conspiredand invited a foreigner, Williamof Orange, to assume thekingship of England. Williaminvaded England, drove Jamesinto exile, assumed the throne,and reestablished the Church ofEngland as the national church.

In this contentious atmospheresome English political thinkers,such as John Locke, began toadvocate a policy of religious

toleration. Locke’s ideas reflected a key assumptionof Enlightenment thought—that religious belief,like political theory, is a matter of opinion, notabsolute truth. “The business of laws,” Locke wrotein his Letter on Toleration (1689), “is not to providefor the truth of opinions, but for the safety andsecurity of the commonwealth and of everyparticular man’s goods and person.” Public securitywas in no way dependent on a uniformity ofreligious belief among the citizenry.“If a Jew do notbelieve the New Testament to be the Word of God,”Locke stated, “he does not thereby alter anything inmen’s civil rights.” Rather, intolerance led to“discord and war,” and Locke warned that “no peaceand security” could be “preserved amongst men solong as this opinion prevails . . . that religion is to bepropagated by force of arms.” Religious belief, inLocke’s view, was a matter of individual choice, amatter for society, not for government.

Locke’s views on religious liberty had a profoundinfluence on American thinking in the next century.Other writings, however, particularly the Bible, hadat least as great an impact on American politicaltheory. Indeed, the American experiment in religioustoleration began years before the publication of

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Locke’s treatise, though the early history of PuritanMassachusetts Bay was hardly indicative of the coursethat toleration would take in America. Establishedby John Winthrop in 1630, Massachusetts was arepressive place where church and state were oneand where religious dissent was ruthlessly stampedout. Dissenters had few options: they could besilent, suffer persecution, or leave the colony. RogerWilliams, a freethinking preacher, was forced tochoose this last option, leaving Massachusetts in1636 to establish the colony of Rhode Island.

In Rhode Island, Williams instituted tolerationfor all people, and his newcolony quickly became arefuge for persecuted groupslike Quakers and Baptists.Williams’s case fortoleration was at least asradical as Locke’s. Basing hisarguments on the Bible,Williams insisted that theJews, Muslims, and atheists were also deserving ofreligious liberty. The only “sword” to be used infighting their opinions was scripture itself.Intolerance was an offense to God. “An enforceduniformity of religion throughout a nation or civilstate,” Williams wrote in The Bloudy Tenent ofPersecution (1644), “denies the principles ofChristianity.” Williams argued that forced beliefwas not only a violation of God’s law but also anunwise policy. “Enforced uniformity (sooner orlater) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishingof conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in hisservants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction ofmillions of souls.”

Two years before the founding of Rhode Island,Cecil Calvert founded the colony of Maryland andproclaimed toleration for all Christians. Calverthimself was a Catholic, but he knew that theviability of his colony depended on luring enoughProtestant settlers to make it an economic success.A policy of toleration, he hoped, would serve thispurpose. In setting up Pennsylvania in the 1680s,William Penn, a Quaker, followed a similar course,making his colony a haven not only for his fellowcoreligionists, but, like Rhode Island, a refuge forpeople of all religious sects.

Pennsylvania and Rhode Island would preserveuninterrupted their traditions of religious liberty,but in Maryland, freedom of religion would becurtailed for Catholics once Protestants came topower in the last decade of the seventeenth century.Still, the idea that some degree of religious libertywas a healthful policy for government became

firmly rooted in America by the eighteenth century.Americans learned from the example ofseventeenth-century England that religiouspersecution was ultimately detrimental to thepolitical, social, and economic welfare of thenation. In America, where the Christian sects weremore numerous than in England, the repercussionsof religious intolerance would be especially adverseto the nation’s prospects. Americans’ devotion toreligious freedom, then, was a product of necessityand experience as well as reason.

The crisis of empire during the 1760s and1770s served to strengthenthe American commitmentto religious liberty. It was notonly the intrusive economicmeasures passed by Parliamentduring these years thatalarmed Americans. Patriotleaders also warned of thedanger of the Anglican

Church’s interference in American religious affairs.There was much talk that the British governmentwould install a bishop in America who wouldbecome the instrument of tyranny. This idea thatpolitical and religious liberty went hand in handwas reflected in the New York Constitution of1776, which explicitly connected “civil tyranny”with “spiritual oppression and intolerance.”

Nearly all the state constitutions writtenduring the American independence movementreflected a commitment to some degree ofreligious liberty. The Massachusetts Constitutionof 1780 promised that “no subject shall be hurt,molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, orestate, for worshipping God in the manner andseason most agreeable to the dictates of his ownconscience.” The Virginia Declaration of Rights of1776, authored by George Mason, proclaimed“That Religion or the duty which we owe to ourCreator and the manner of discharging it, can bedirected only by reason and conviction, not byforce or violence.” Mason’s ideas mirrored Locke’sbelief that government should not intrude uponthe concerns of society.

But many states limited religious liberty toChristians in general, or to Protestants inparticular. The North Carolina Constitution of1776 decreed “That no person, who shall deny thebeing of God or the truth of the Protestantreligion . . . shall be capable of holding any office orplace of trust or profit in the civil departmentwithin this State.” Similarly, the New JerseyConstitution of the same year declared that “there

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so long as this opinion prevails . . .that religion is to be propagated by

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shall be no establishment of any one religious sectin this Province, in preference to another,” butpromised Protestants alone full civil rights. Thankslargely to the efforts of Charles Carroll of Carrollton,a Roman Catholic, Maryland’s RevolutionaryConstitution was more liberal in its guarantee ofreligious liberty to “all persons, professing theChristian religion.”

The Protestant majority in America was indeedparticularly concerned about the Catholic minorityin its midst. Catholics constituted the largest non-Protestant creed in the country, and it was believedthat Catholicism demanded loyalty to the popeabove devotion to country. The connectionbetween Catholicism and absolutism was deeplyingrained in the AmericanProtestant mind and was alegacy of the Reformation,which Protestants saw as aperiod of liberation fromthe ignorance, superstition,and tyranny of the RomanCatholic Church. During thecrisis with England, a waveof religious hysteria swept over AmericanProtestants, who worried that the pope wouldpersonally lead the Catholics of Canada in a militaryassault on American forces. “Much more is to bedreaded from the growth of Popery in America,”patriot leader Samuel Adams asserted in 1768,“thanfrom Stamp-Acts or any other acts destructive ofmen’s civil rights.” This bigotry caused RomanCatholics to become outspoken proponents ofreligious toleration and the separation of churchand state. In a country dominated by Protestants,this was the only realistic course for them.

All thirteen states at the time of Americanindependence, then, acknowledged to some degreein their constitutions the principle of religiousliberty. Most also provided for some degree ofseparation of church and state. Several states wentso far as to prohibit clergymen from holding stateoffice, a restriction in the Georgia Constitution of1777 that the Reverend John Witherspoon of NewJersey would famously protest. But few statesprovided for a complete separation of church andstate, for it was believed that the governmentshould give some support to religion in general.Though a substantial number of American elites inthe late eighteenth century were not church-goingChristians, nearly all believed in the God of theOld Testament, and all recognized the practicalvalue of Christianity as a check on antisocialbehavior. Many of the state constitutions written

in the era of independence, therefore, required thatgovernment give some support to Christianity.Though the Massachusetts Constitution guaranteedthat “no subordination of any one sect ordenomination to another shall ever be establishedby law,” it also permitted the legislature to levytaxes “for the support and maintenance of publicprotestant teachers of piety, religion and morality.”Similarly, the Maryland Constitution of 1776permitted the legislature to “lay a general andequal tax for the support of the Christian religion.”

There were, however, calls for completereligious disestablishment at the state level. InVirginia, James Madison and Thomas Jeffersonwere two of the most prominent advocates of a

strict separation of churchand state. Their ideas aboutreligious liberty were clearlyinfluenced by John Lockeand fellow Virginian GeorgeMason. In 1785, the Virginialegislature considered a billthat would provide forpublic funding of Christian

instruction. The measure was backed by severalprominent statesmen, including Patrick Henry. ButJames Madison, then a member of the legislature,took the lead in opposing the bill, remindingVirginians that “torrents of blood have been spiltin the old world, by vain attempts of the seculararm, to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribingall difference in Religious opinion.” The bill wasdefeated, and the following year, Jefferson introduced“A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” whichattempted to enshrine in law the idea “that no manshall be compelled to frequent or support anyreligious Worship place or Ministry whatsoever.”The bill passed with minor changes.

By the time of the Constitutional Conventionof 1787, there was a broad consensus regardingthe proper relationship between the nationalgovernment and religion: first, that the governmentought not to give support to any religious sect;second, that the government ought not to require areligious test for office; third, that the governmentought not to interfere with private religiouspractice; and fourth, that the government oughtnot to interfere with the right of the states to do asthey wished in regard to religious establishmentand religious liberty. These points of consensuswere reflected in both the body of the United StatesConstitution and in the First Amendment, whichwas ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights.Article VI of the Constitution explicitly stated that

Thomas Jefferson asserted that theFirst Amendment created “a wall of

separation between church and state.”What Jefferson meant by this term is a

subject of great debate.


Freedom of Religion

“no religious test shall ever be required as aqualification to any office or public trust under theUnited States.” The First Amendment declared that“Congress shall make no law respecting anestablishment of religion, or prohibiting the freeexercise thereof.”

The right of the states to set their own policy inregard to religion was implicitly acknowledged inArticle I of the Constitution, which stipulated thatto be eligible to vote in elections for the UnitedStates House of Representatives, “the elector ineach State shall have the qualifications requisite forelectors of the most numerous branch of the StateLegislature.” Several states at the time mandated areligious test as a requirement for the franchise,and the Constitution therefore tacitly approvedsuch tests. In addition, the First Amendment’sprohibition against religious establishment appliedexplicitly to the national Congress alone. Indeed, itwas not until after the American Civil War, in theincorporation cases, that the United States SupremeCourt ruled that some of the restrictions placed onthe federal government by the amendments alsoapplied to the state governments.

By 1800, then, there was a broad consensusamong Americans that religious freedom wasessential to political liberty and the well-being ofthe nation. During the next two centuries, thedefinition of freedom of religion would bebroadened, as states abandoned religious tests andachieved complete disestablishment and as stateand federal courts ruled that various subtle formsof government encouragement of religion wereunconstitutional. Shortly after the dawn of thenineteenth century, in a letter to a Baptistcongregation in Danbury, Connecticut, ThomasJefferson asserted that the First Amendmentcreated “a wall of separation between church andstate.” What Jefferson meant by this term is asubject of great debate. But there is no doubt thathis words have become part of the Americanpolitical creed and a rallying cry for those who seekto expand the definition of religious liberty, evento mean that religion should be removed frompublic life altogether.

Stephen M. Klugewicz, Ph.D.Bill of Rights Institute

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Suggestions for Further ReadingBerns, Walter. The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 1976.Dreisbach, Daniel. Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State. New York: New

York University Press, 2003.Levy, Leonard W. The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment. New York: MacMillan, 1989.Novak, Michael. On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. San Francisco:

Encounter Books, 2003.


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Commerce

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Although the modern United States is the preeminentexample of a nation dedicated to free enterpriseand commercial activity, the relationship betweenrepublican government and commerce was one ofthe central problems that confronted the Foundersin the late eighteenth century. In order to understandthe Founders’ attitudes toward commerce, we needto understand both the role thatcommercial activity played in theAmerican colonies in the centurybefore the Revolution, as well asthe important arguments aboutthe legitimacy of commercialsocieties that animated Englishand European thinkers in the twocenturies before the AmericanFounding.

The American coloniesoriginated in part as commercialenterprises. From the firstsettlements in the early seventeenthcentury until the eve of theRevolution, British and Europeansettlers saw America as a placewhere they could come and make a better life forthemselves. By the mid-eighteenth century, theBritish colonies in America were prosperous placesheavily engaged in production and trade. Althoughthe population was still overwhelmingly rural,colonial farmers were increasingly engaged incommercial agriculture. In all regions, theyproduced more than was needed for subsistence,trading their surplus with other colonies as well asengaging in a growing transatlantic trade withBritain and Europe. The Southern coloniesproduced valuable staple crops for export (tobacco,rice, indigo, wheat); farmers in the Middle colonieshad a flourishing agricultural economy which wasalso involved in trade with the wider world; and, bythe eighteenth century, the New England colonieswere building ships, selling timber, and tradingproduce with the British Caribbean sugar islands.As a result of these extensive Atlantic tradingnetworks, all of the colonial economies grewenormously in the eighteenth century. In addition,the main colonial port cities—Boston, New York,Philadelphia, and Charles Town (Charleston)—grewin size and importance. This burgeoning commercial

society also had a large merchant class, withpowerful and wealthy men like John Hancock inBoston involved in far-flung commercial ventures.

The pre-Revolutionary American colonieswere also consumer societies that eagerly usedtheir growing wealth to purchase goods from allover the world. And, as the Revolution approached,

a growing number of whitesettlers not included in thepolitical and economic elite wereincreasingly able to participatein this consumerism. Indeed,such was the widespreadprosperity of these colonies thatmany modern historians havereferred to them as the first middleclass societies in the world.

All of this commercialactivity, however, had a darkside. The Atlantic trade that thecolonists engaged in with suchprofit was founded in part onthe movement of African slavesto the New World. Once there,

these slaves were responsible for producing thelucrative staple crops that the colonies sold toEngland and Europe in exchange formanufactured goods. In addition, the ever-expanding agricultural economy of the coloniesdepended on the removal of the Native Americanpopulation from their lands.

Several strands of thought providedintellectual justification for the increasinglycommercial world of the eighteenth-centuryBritish Atlantic. The long tradition of Englishcommon law stressed the importance of propertyrights, which it saw as central to liberty, and whichit protected from arbitrary seizure by preventinggovernments from taking property without thesubject’s consent. By stressing the sanctity ofperson and property, the English common lawprovided a legal infrastructure which supported acommercial society.

Seventeenth-century English Puritanism alsoprovided a justification of commercial activity.According to Puritanism, God wanted people towork hard and prosper. To do so was a sign thatyou were one of the “elect,” destined to be “saved”

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and not “damned.” This Puritan work ethicremained a powerful force in American life wellpast the Revolution.

The political theory of the English writer JohnLocke (1632–1704), and in particular his ideas abouta natural right to liberty and property, also providedjustification for a commercial society. Like thecommon law, it placed a value on the liberty of theperson, including the liberty to engage in productionand trade. In addition, Locke offered an elaboratetheoretical defense of an individual’s right to property.According to Locke, individuals were not givenproperty rights by the state;rather, they generated a rightto private property by theirown labor. Locke defendedcommercial societies basedon private property byarguing that they producedgreater wealth for all thandid those societies whicheschewed private property and exchange. Bymaking this case, Locke helped to legitimizecommercial activity in the face of age-olddenunciations that it was sinful. Building on theseseventeenth-century ideas, English people on bothsides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth centuryincreasingly viewed themselves as free, Protestant,and deeply commercial.

By the time of the Revolution, the AmericanFounders had also encountered the ideas of aninfluential group of eighteenth-century Enlightenmentwriters who offered a sophisticated defense ofcommercial societies. The French writer Montesquieu(1689–1755) argued that commerce “cures destructiveprejudices” by fostering peaceful trade amongpeoples rather than war. Many Scottish writers inthe eighteenth century made a similar defense ofcommerce. They argued that commercial societiesconstituted the highest stage of civilization andwere the most conducive to human well-being,fostering political and religious liberty, peacefulrelations among nations, higher standards ofliving, science, and the arts. The moral philosopherand economist Adam Smith (1723–1790), writingin the same year as the American Revolution, arguedthat self-interest was beneficent, and that thosewho sought private wealth were simultaneouslybenefiting society. All of these thinkers celebratedthe modern commercial world in which they livedas superior to previous ages which, they argued,were characterized by feudal and aristocraticinequality, constant warfare, and religious fanaticism.

However, the ideas that influenced theFounders were not all supportive of commerce.Christianity, even in its Puritan form, could beused to denounce moneymaking. In New Englandin the seventeenth century, the merchant RobertKeayne was put on trial on charges of usury. In theyears after independence, this Christian critiquecombined in the Founders’ thought with that ofthe republican thinkers of Greece and Rome whoshared a similar skepticism about commerce. Theyargued that a society dedicated to commerce andself-interest would produce citizens overly concerned

with private matters andinsufficiently attentive to thepublic good. These classicalrepublican thinkers wereparticularly concernedabout the political effects ofluxury, worrying that libertywould be lost if people weretoo focused on the pursuit

of material gain. To the extent that republicanthinkers defended property rights, they did soprimarily as a means to the end of ensuring thatthere was an independent citizenry capable of actingfor the public good. These classical ideas about thedangers of commerce to republican governmentinfluenced the Founders in the late eighteenthcentury. In particular, the ideas led some of them tobe suspicious of the new institutions of commercialbanking and public and private debt that supportedthe eighteenth-century commercial world.

The Revolution initially fostered theseanticommercial sentiments in the colonial populace.In their attempts to harm the British economy, thecolonies organized widespread nonimportationagreements in the 1760s and 1770s. Drawing onboth the Christian and the classical republicancritique of commerce, some colonists argued thatthis withdrawal from trade would also create amore virtuous citizenry, one less likely to succumbto luxury and self-interest. Writing his influential“Thoughts on Government” in 1776, a guide forlawmakers in the newly independent republicanstate governments, John Adams openly called forlegal restrictions on consumption (called “sumptuarylaws” in the eighteenth century), arguing that “thehappiness of the people might be greatly promotedby them.”

Following the Revolution, the experience ofboth the new state governments and that of theContinental Congress operating under the Articlesof Confederation brought these questions about

According to Puritanism, God wantedpeople to work hard and prosper.

To do so was a sign that you were oneof the “elect,” destined to be “saved”

and not “damned.”


Commerce

the relationship between republican governmentsand commercial activity to the fore. By ending theold British trading system, the Revolution alsoushered in a debate about the commercial relationsbetween the United States and the rest of the world.

The newly independent United States facedsevere economic difficulties in the 1780s. Thestates found themselves with limited access to thelucrative British markets. They also owed money tothose who had financed the war. But the ContinentalCongress lacked the legal power to compel the stategovernments to agree on a common commercialpolicy. It also lacked theauthority to requisition thetaxes necessary to pay off theRevolutionary War debtfrom the state governments.Robert Morris, who servedas Congress’ superintendentof finance from 1781–1783,was reduced to pleadingwith the state governors to send money to thenational government.

The war had also left the individual states withlarge debts to repay. In order to pay these debts off,many states raised taxes and issued paper moneythat rapidly depreciated. In addition, many of thestates began to interfere with the free movementsof goods within the United States.

The drafting of the new Constitution inPhiladelphia in 1787 set out to address the economicproblems of the 1780s by creating a nationalgovernment that would have the authority to imposetaxes, regulate foreign trade, and, most importantly,create a common commercial policy between thevarious state governments. In the Federalist Papers,James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the mostprominent defenders of the new Constitution,argued forcefully that the federal governmentneeded these expanded powers in order to create alarge free trading area within the continentalUnited States. They, along with their coauthorJohn Jay, also argued for a vigorous commercialpolicy to open up markets for foreign trade.

In making these arguments, the framers wereheavily influenced by the Enlightenment defense ofcommerce discussed above. The Framers furtherargued that republican government, by allowingboth political and economic freedom, would fostervirtuous behavior in its citizens. Freed from theburden of supporting monarchs and aristocrats,ordinary people in a republic would have theincentive to be industrious and productive, secure

in the knowledge that they would be able to reapthe benefits of their labor.

Although the new Constitution laid thegroundwork for an extended commercial republic,it did not end the debates among the Foundersover the legitimacy of commerce. In the 1790s, theFederalists argued for a government-led programof commercial expansion, involving investments ininfrastructure as well as the creation of a nationalbanking system. However, the Democratic-Republican Party under Thomas Jefferson wasmuch more divided on the merits of commercial

republicanism. One strandof Jeffersonian thought wasskeptical of extensivecommercial activity,preferring instead a societyof independent yeomanfarmers whose landed statuswould give them a securematerial base for republican

citizenship. In making this argument, theJeffersonians echoed the republican thinkers ofantiquity who valued landed property overcommercial property because it alone enabled thevirtuous citizen to act in the public interest. Thisaspect of Jeffersonian thought was also skeptical ofmanufacturing and wage labor, fearing that apopulace engaged in such pursuits would not be ableto obtain the independence required of republicancitizens. Finally, Jeffersonians were very concernedabout the modern institutions of banking andpublic and private debt, fearing that they wouldenable powerful men to undermine republicangovernment by setting up an aristocracy of money.

However, Jeffersonian thought also had astrong laissez-faire element, one that becameincreasingly important as the eighteenth centurycame to a close. Although still preferringcommercial agriculture over manufacturing,Jeffersonians were ardently in favor of free labor,free trade, and free markets. On this view,commerce was a liberating, even equalizing force,allowing the common people to benefit from thefruits of their own labor. In addition, thisJeffersonian policy of laissez-faire was veryskeptical of the Federalist plans for extensive state-directed commerce, preferring instead to letindividuals make their own economic decisions.This element of the Jeffersonian attitude towardcommerce expressed the powerful desire of theAmerican populace for material improvement, adesire which had deep roots in the colonial past.

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Although the new Constitution laid thegroundwork for an extended commercial

republic, it did not end the debatesamong the Founders over the

legitimacy of commerce.


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Jefferson’s election in 1800 did not end thesedebates about the propriety of commercial activity.Most Americans agreed that republican libertyincluded the right to own property and to enjoythe fruits of one’s labor. However, as Jefferson’s“empire of liberty” expanded west, this vision offree men and free labor clashed with the institutionof slavery as it became an increasingly profitableform of commercial activity, and one that wassometimes defended as an expression of the

American commitment to private property. Alongwith the relationship between slavery and freelabor, the question of the place of manufacturingin a republican society, the role of banks, the issueof free trade, and the desirability of stateintervention in the economy remained pressingquestions in the increasingly commercial UnitedStates well into the nineteenth century.

Craig Yirush, Ph.D.University of California, Los Angeles

Suggestions for Further ReadingAppleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s. New York: New York

University Press, 1984.Heyrman, Christine. Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts,

1690–1750. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984.Innes, Stephen. Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England. New York: W.

W. Norton & Co., 1995.Lerner, Ralph. “Commerce and Character.” In The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New

Republic. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1987.McCoy, Drew R. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. New York: W. W. Norton &

Co., 1982.Nelson, John R. Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789–1812.

Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.


As Benjamin Franklin left Philadelphia’s ConventionHall in September 1787, upon the completion of thework of the Framers of the Constitution, a womanapproached him and asked the old sage of theRevolution what the delegates had created. Franklinresponded, “A republic, Madame, if you can keepit.” The woman’s reaction to Franklin’s reply is left unrecorded by history,but she might well haveasked Franklin for a moredetailed answer. Thoughthe word “republic” wascommon currency inAmerica at the time, themeaning of the term wasimprecise, encompassingvarious and diverse formsof government.

Broadly, a republicmeant a country not governed by a king. The rootof the word is the Latin, res publica, meaning “thepublic things.” “The word republic,” Thomas Painewrote, “means the public good, or the good of thewhole, in contradistinction to the despotic form,which makes the good of the sovereign, or of oneman, the only object of the government.” In arepublic, the people are sovereign, delegatingcertain powers to the government whose duty is tolook to the general welfare of society. That citizensof a republic ought to place the common goodbefore individual self-interest was a key assumptionamong Americans of the eighteenth century.“Every man in a republic,” proclaimed BenjaminRush, “is public property. His time and talents—his youth—his manhood—his old age, nay more,life, all belong to his country.”

Republicanism was not an American invention.In shaping their governments, Americans looked tohistory, first to the ancient world, and specifically tothe Israel of the Old Testament, the Roman republic,and the Greek city-states. New Englanders inparticular often cited the ancient state of Israel as theworld’s first experiment in republican governmentand sometimes drew a parallel between the TwelveTribes of Israel and the thirteen American states. In1788, while ratification of the Constitution wasbeing debated, one Yankee preacher gave a sermonentitled,“The Republic of the Israelites an Example

to the American States.” Indeed, the Bible was citedby American authors in the eighteenth centurymore often than any other single source.

Americans not only knew their Bible, but alsothe history of the Greeks and Romans. The eliteclass mastered ancient languages and literature, arequirement of colleges at the time. To these men

of the eighteenth century,ancient languages were notdead, nor were ancientevents distant; rather,the worlds of Pericles and Polybius, Sallust andCicero were vibrant and near. The relativelyminor advancements intechnology across 2,000years—people still traveledby horse and sailing ship—

served to reinforce the bond eighteenth-centuryAmericans felt with the ancients.

Like the Greeks and Romans of antiquity,Americans believed that government must concernitself with the character of its citizenry. Indeed,virtue was “the Soul of a republican Government,”as Samuel Adams put it. Virtue had twoconnotations, one secular and the other sacred.The root of the word was the Latin, vir, meaning“man,” and indeed republican virtue often referredto the display of such “manly” traits as courage andself-sacrifice for the common good. These qualitieswere deemed essential for a republic’s survival. “Apopular government,” Patrick Henry proclaimed,“cannot flourish without virtue in the people.” Butvirtue could also mean the traditional Judeo-Christian virtues, and many Americans feared thatGod would punish the entire nation for the sins ofits people. “Without morals,” Charles Carrollproclaimed, “a republic cannot subsist any lengthof time.” New Englanders in particular sought tohave society’s institutions—government andschools as well as churches—inculcate such qualitiesas industry, frugality, temperance, and chastity inthe citizenry. The Massachusetts Constitution of1780, for example, provided for “public instructionsin piety, religion, and morality.”

The second ingredient of a good republic was awell-constructed government with good institutions.

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“If the foundation is badly laid,” George Washingtonsaid of the American government,“the superstructuremust be bad.” Americans adhered to a modifiedversion of the idea of “mixed”government, advocatedby the Greek thinker Polybius and later republicantheorists. A mixed republic combined the threebasic parts of society—monarchy (the one ruler),aristocracy (the rich few), and democracy (thepeople)—in a proper formula so that no one partcould tyrannize the others. But Americans believedthat the people of a republic were sovereign, so theysought to create institutions that approximated themonarchical and aristocraticelements of society. TheFramers of the Constitutiondid just this by fashioning asingle executive and a Senateonce removed from thepeople. The problem, as JohnAdams pointed out in hisThoughts on Government, wasthat “the possible combinations of the powers ofsociety are capable of innumerable variations.”

Americans had every reason to be pessimisticabout their experiment in republicanism. Historytaught that republics were inherently unstable andvulnerable to decay. The Roman republic and thecity-state of Athens, for instance, had succumbed tothe temptations of empire and lost their liberty. Thehistories of the Florentine and Venetian republicsof Renaissance Italy too had been glorious but short-lived. Theorists from the ancient Greek thinkerPolybius to the seventeenth-century English radicalAlgernon Sidney warned that republics suffer fromparticular dangers that monarchies and despotismsdo not. Republics were assumed to burn brightlybut briefly because of their inherent instability.One element of society always usurped power andestablished a tyranny.

The great danger to republics, it was generallybelieved, stemmed from corruption, which, likevirtue, had both a religious and a worldly meaning.Corruption referred, first, to the prevalence ofimmorality among the people. “Liberty,” SamuelAdams asserted, “will not long survive the totalExtinction of Morals.”

“If the Morals of the people” were neglected,Elbridge Gerry cautioned during the crisis withEngland, American independence would notproduce liberty but “a Slavery, far exceeding that ofevery other Nation.”

This kind of corruption most often resultedfrom avarice, the greed for material wealth. SeveralAmerican colonial legislatures therefore passed

sumptuary laws, which prohibited ostentatiousdisplays of wealth. “Luxury . . . leads tocorruption,” a South Carolinian declared duringthe Revolutionary era, “and whoever encouragesgreat luxury in a free state must be a bad citizen.”Another writer warned of the “ill effect ofsuperfluous riches” on republican society. Avaricewas seen as a “feminine” weakness; the lust forwealth rotted away “masculine” virtues. JohnAdams bemoaned “vanities, levities, and fopperies,which are real antidotes to all great, manly, andwarlike virtues.”

The second meaning ofcorruption referred toplacing private interest abovethe common good. Thistemptation plagued publicofficials most of all, who hadample opportunity tomisappropriate public fundsand to expand their power.

“Government was instituted for the general good,”Charles Carroll wrote,“but officers instrusted with itspowers have most commonly perverted them to theselfish views of avarice and ambition.” Increasinglyin the eighteenth century, Americans came to seegovernment itself as the primary source of corruption.

Fear of government’s tendency to expand itspower at the expense of the people’s liberty waspart of Americans’ English political heritage. Theyimbibed the writings of late-seventeenth-centuryEnglish radicals and eighteenth-century “country”politicians who were suspicious of the power of British officials (the “court”). Governmentcorruption was manifested in patronage (theawarding of political office to friends), faction (theformation of parties whose interests were opposed tothe common good), standing (permanent) armies,established churches, and the promotion of an eliteclass. Power, these country writers argued, waspossessed by the government; it was aggressive andexpansionist. Liberty was the property of thegoverned; it was sacred and delicate. The history ofliberty in the world was a history of defeat by theforces of tyranny.

Though the history of republicanism was adismal one, the lessons of history as well as theirown colonial experience convinced the AmericanFounders that they possessed sufficient informationon which to base a new science of politics.“Experience must be our only guide,”John Dickinsonproclaimed at the Philadelphia Convention; “reasonmay mislead us.” The Framers of the United StatesConstitution all had experience as public servants,


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Fear of government’s tendency to expand its power at the expense of thepeople’s liberty was part of Americans’

English political heritage.


and it must be remembered that the documentthey produced did not spring forth as somethingentirely new in the American experience. Rather,the Founders had learned much from the operationof their colonial charters, state constitutions, andthe Articles of Confederation.

At Philadelphia, the Founders focused on theproper construction of the machinery of governmentas the key to the building of a stable republic. TheConstitution makes no mention of the need for virtueamong the people, nor does it make broad appealsfor self-sacrifice on behalf of the common good. It isa hard-headed documentforged by practical men whohad too often witnessedavarice and ambition amongtheir peers in the statehouse, the courtroom, andthe counting house. A goodconstitution, the Foundersheld, was the key to goodgovernment. Corruption and decay could beovercome primarily through the creation of a writtenconstitution—something England lacked—thatcarefully detailed a system in which powers wereseparated and set in opposition to each other sothat none could dominate the others.

James Madison, often called “The Father of theConstitution” because of the great influence of hisideas at Philadelphia, proposed to arrange themachinery of government in such a fashion as notto make virtue or “better motives” critical to theadvancement of the common good. Acknowledgingin The Federalist Papers that “enlightened statesmenwill not always be at the helm,” Madison believedthat the separate powers of government—legislative,executive, and judicial—must be set in oppositionto one another, so that “ambition must be made tocounteract ambition.”

“In framing a government which is to beadministered by men over men,” Madison asserted,“the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enablethe government to control the governed; and in thenext place oblige it to control itself.”

James Wilson, representing Pennsylvania atthe Philadelphia Convention, declared that theConstitution’s separation of powers and checksand balances made “it advantageous even for badmen to act for the public good.” This is not to saythat the delegates believed that the republic couldsurvive if corruption vanquished virtue in society.Madison himself emphasized the importance ofrepublican virtue when defending the newgovernment in The Federalist Papers. But the Framers

agreed with Madison that men were not angels, andmost were satisfied that the Constitution, as GeorgeWashington put it,“is provided with more checks andbarriers against the introduction of Tyranny . . . thanany Government hitherto instituted among mortals.”

The question remained, however, whether onepart of society would come to dominate. No matterhow perfect the design, the danger remained that afaction would amass enough political power to takeaway the liberty of others. To combat this problem,classical republican theory called for creating auniformity of opinion among the republican

citizenry so that factionscould not develop. Theancient Greek city-states, forexample, feared anythingthat caused differentiationamong citizens, includingcommerce, which tended tocreate inequalities of wealthand opposing interests. In

contrast, Madison and the Founders recognizedthat factionalism would be inherent in a commercialrepublic that protected freedom of religion, speech,press, and assembly. They sought only to mediatethe deleterious effects of faction.

Republics also were traditionally thought to bedurable only when a small amount of territory wasinvolved. The Greek city-states, the Roman republic,the Italian republics, and the American states allencompassed relatively small areas. When the Romanrepublic expanded in its quest for empire, tyrannywas the result. Madison turned this traditionalthinking on its head in The Federalist Papers, arguingthat a large republic was more conducive to libertybecause it encompassed so many interests that nosingle one, or combination of several, could gaincontrol of the government.

Not all Americans accepted the Madisoniansolution. Agrarians, such as Thomas Jefferson, wereuncomfortable with the idea of a commercial republiccentered on industry and sought to perpetuate anation of independent farmers through the expansionof the frontier. Though uneasy about the “energeticgovernment” created by the Constitution, Jeffersonendorsed the Framers’ work after a bill of rightswas added to the document. “Old republicans” likeSamuel Adams and George Mason opposed theConstitution, even after the addition of a bill ofrights, fearing that the power granted to the centralgovernment was too great and wistfully looking backto the Revolutionary era when virtue, not ambition,was the animating principle of government. But in1789, as the new government went into operation,

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most Americans shared the optimism of BenjaminFranklin, who had decided at the conclusion of thePhiladelphia Convention that the sun carved intothe back of the chair used by George Washingtonwas a rising—not a setting—sun, and therebyindicative of the bright prospects of the nation.

“We have it in our power to begin the worldover again,” Thomas Paine had written in 1776,during the heady days of American independence.And indeed the American Founders in 1787 werekeenly aware that they possessed a rare opportunity.

Like the legendary Lycurgus of Ancient Greece,they were to be the supreme lawgivers of a newrepublic, a novus ordo seclorum or new order of theages. The American Founders were aware that theeyes of the world and future generations were uponthem, and they were determined to build an eternalrepublic founded in liberty, a shining city upon ahill, as an example to all nations for all time.

Stephen M. Klugewicz, Ph.D.Consulting Scholar, Bill of Rights Institute


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Suggestions for Further ReadingAdair, Douglass. Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998.Bailyn, Bernard. The Origins of American Politics. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.McDonald, Forrest. Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution. Lawrence: University

Press of Kansas, 1985.Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.Rahe, Paul A. Republics Ancient and Modern, 3 vols. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994.Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969.


Perhaps no single phrase of the Founders is morecommonly misinterpreted than the claim, made by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration ofIndependence, “that all men are created equal.”Jefferson did not mean that all people are, in fact,in every way equal. Nor did he mean that all peopleshould be equal in every way. He did, however,mean that all individuals possessidentical natural rights. Theserights, he wrote, include “life,liberty,” and the ability ofindividuals to engage withoutinjuring one another in “thepursuit of happiness.” Jefferson’sbelief in the equality of naturalrights reflected deeply-rootedAnglo-American tradition. Hiswords, after all, echoed thereasoning of John Locke, theEnglish political philosopherwho, in 1689, maintained that noone—no matter how powerful—possesses the right to “take away”without just cause “the Life,Liberty, Health, Limb or Goods of another.”

Yet Jefferson’s assertion regarding naturalrights also sanctioned a radical departure from thepast. The Declaration of Independence, whichJefferson penned in behalf of the other privilegeddelegates to the Continental Congress, helped toinspire ordinary Americans to overturn timewornsocial and political barriers separating aristocratsfrom common people and the powerful from thepowerless.

In 1776, these distinctions were stark. Maybethe 3.5 million people who lived in America hadbeen created equal, but more than 600,000 hadsubsequently been enslaved. When womenmarried, a legal doctrine known as “coverture”held that they lost their legal identity and forfeitedto their husbands their property. They could notvote, and since nearly everywhere laws madeenfranchisement conditional on the ownership ofa sizeable portion of land, neither could many men.Laws establishing primogeniture, which passed tothe eldest son all of a father’s land if he diedwithout leaving a will, slowed a fairly consistenttrend during the colonial era toward the gradualexpansion of land ownership among the population,

as well as the gradual expansion of common people’spolitical power, which land ownership madepossible. In addition, individuals who subscribedto minority religious faiths also suffered from legalinequality. Despite the relative rarity of instancesof state-sanctioned intolerance toward members ofmost minority religions, nine of the original thirteen

states designated an official faiththat enjoyed taxpayer-financedsubsidies as well as other benefitsand privileges.

A general acceptance ofsocial hierarchy reflected andreinforced these instances oflegal inequality. In many waysAmerican society continued tofit the description of JonathanEdwards, the eighteenth-centurytheologian, who observed thatall individuals possessed “theirappointed office, place andstation, according to theirseveral capacities and talents,and everyone keeps his place,

and continues in his proper business.” Theseassumptions, according to historian GordonWood, coalesced naturally with “the hierarchy of amonarchical society” and were feudal in theirorigins. “In such a society it was inconceivable,”Wood maintains, “for inequality not to exist.”

While an acceptance of monarchical governmenthelped to foster legal inequality and social hierarchy,the republican alternative to absolutism—whichgained ground in America especially after theGlorious Revolution of 1688—did not immediatelyspark a move toward egalitarianism. In many ways,in fact, republicanism bolstered the notion thatlimits should be placed on who could be entrustedwith the reins of government. While republicanthinkers believed that the distribution of politicalpower should be expanded to varying degrees, theempowerment of an increasing number ofindividuals constituted merely a means to a greaterend, which was the restraint of government poweritself.

Republicans insisted, for example, that politicalparticipants be virtuous and that their decisions bemotivated by a concern for the good of the entiresociety. In other words, republicans maintained that

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voters and officeholders alike should be selfless (or“disinterested”) in their decision-making—that theyshould not aim to use the power of government toserve the interests of themselves or any particularconstituency. Such disinterestedness, republicansbelieved, could only be expected of individualswho possessed a sufficient degree of economicindependence. Certainly the enslaved lackedindependence, and women were presumed to bedependent on their husbands and fathers. Were thepoor empowered with the franchise, theirdesperation could mean that their votes could becheaply purchased. It mightalso lead them to use theirpower to seize the wealth ofothers. Republican theoristspresumed that the rich andthe middling, meanwhile,would less easily fall underthe influence of others andwould be less likely give in toselfish motives. Republicans, who maintained thatthe only people who should be entrusted with thegovernment of others were people capable ofgoverning themselves, focused their energies onrestraining the predatory nature of political power.

One of the most effective weapons in thiscrusade, however, was the principle that all menhad a right to equal protection under the law.Republicans in Britain and America maintained,for example, that all men accused of serious crimeswere entitled to be tried in front of juries of theirpeers. In addition, republicans believed that allmen deserved protection against the imposition ofexcessive bails and excessive fines, and against theinfliction of punishments disproportionate withthose accorded to others found to have committedsimilar offenses against the law. A general acceptanceof this sort of procedural equality, which aimed toprevent government officials from singling outindividuals or groups for persecution, created aclimate within which other forms of equality couldtake root.

So did the belief that all Britons—whetherthey resided in England or America—shared anequal right to the protection of a representativeassembly. The English Bill of Rights (1689) notonly guaranteed to all men the benefit ofconsistent legal practices, but also restrictedgovernment from acting in certain circumstanceswithout the consent of Parliament. The monarchpossessed no unilateral power to suspend laws, levytaxes, station an army among the civilianpopulation, or interfere with elections or the

legislative process. While members of the House ofCommons generally favored a narrow interpretationof the Bill of Rights and believed themselves to bethe ultimate authority on these mattersthroughout the British empire, Americans tendedto disagree. Since they had no direct representationin Parliament, Americans believed that their ownelected colonial assemblies possessed Parliament’sprerogatives.

The 1763–1776 imperial crisis brought this issueto the fore and cemented in the minds of manyAmericans a belief in their own collective equality

with the people of Britain.First, Parliament drew itsunpopular ProclamationLine, which prohibitedAmerican settlement beyondthe crest of the AppalachianMountains. Then Parliamentpassed the hated 1765 StampAct, through which it acted

without the consent of colonial legislatures toimpose a tax on legal documents, newspapers,broadsides, and other paper goods. These andother British measures spurred a spirited resistancemovement, helped to provoke the spilling of bloodat Lexington and Concord, and led to theDeclaration of Independence. Many Americanscame to agree with Thomas Paine, who wrote in his1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, that “there issomething very absurd, in supposing a continentto be perpetually governed by an island.”Parliament’s recalcitrant insistence on its authorityto govern a distant people portended continuedabuses of power and unacceptable usurpations ofrights. Since in Parliament there existed noequality between the people of Great Britain andthe people of America, there was no accountabilityon the part of Great Britain compelling it toconsider what was good for America.

This unbalanced relationship unleashed theavarice of Britons, whom some colonists comparedto wolves salivating over vulnerable Americansheep. As Paine observed, “the property of no manis secure in the present unbraced system of things.”Within this context, Jefferson, in the Declaration ofIndependence, not only claimed the equal rights ofAmerican people but also the equality of theAmerican people relative to the people of all othernations when he asserted that Americans had aright to enjoy “the separate and equal station towhich the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitlethem.” Americans, in other words, counted for justas much as people anywhere else.


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One of the most effective weapons inthis crusade, however, was the principle

that all men had a right to equalprotection under the law.


This was a powerful sentiment. First, itexpressed the collective will of the people whocomprised the various colonies that now—like theindependent nations of Europe—called themselves“states.” The value placed on collective equality bythese new states manifested itself through the factthat, according to the rules that governed theContinental Congress as well as those of theArticles of Confederation, a tiny state such asDelaware had a voice as loud as a much morepopulous state, such as Pennsylvania. Even underthe 1787 Constitution, which provided for a lowerchamber with proportionalrepresentation, within theSenate the states had equalpower. Second, the statementdrafted by Jefferson helpedto inspire the hopes ofvarious groups—such ascommon people, religiousminorities, women, andAfrican-Americans—that would now begin toquestion their own unequal stations. If earlier,Americans had based their claims of equality upontheir inclusion within a system of English rights andprivileges, American revolutionaries now madetheir appeals on the basis of self-evident truths anduniversal rights granted by God or nature. As Painewrote, “a new method of thinking hath arisen.”

It took no great leap of logic to apply theuniversal claims of the Declaration to variousdeprived groups. Abigail Adams did this when in1776 she wrote to her husband, John, a member ofthe Continental Congress. “I long to hear that youhave declared an independency,” she said, for itwould provide him and his colleagues with anopportunity to make a new code of law. In this, shemaintained, “I desire you would remember theladies and be more generous and favorable to themthan your ancestors.” Appropriating some of thesame principles that had been used to justifyAmerican opposition to Britain, she reminded herhusband that “all men would be tyrants if theycould. If particular care and attention is not paid tothe ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion,and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws inwhich we have no voice or representation.”

A group of slaves from the towns of Stratfordand Fairfield in 1779 used similar arguments whenthey petitioned the Connecticut General Assemblyfor freedom. “We are endowed with the sameFaculties as our masters,” they wrote, “and there isnothing that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, thatwe are any more obliged to serve them, than they

us.” Not unlike white Americans, they maintained,“we are Convinced of our Right (by the Laws ofNature and by the whole Tenor of the ChristianReligion. . . .) to be free.” It was simply not “consistentwith the present Claims, of the united States, tohold so many Thousands, of the Race of Adam, ourCommon Father, in perpetual Slavery.”

Although women and African-Americanswould continue to suffer under unequal laws formany decades, for white Americans the idea ofequality yielded much more immediate benefits.To a certain degree, American social hierarchy had

never been as fully articulatedas in Europe. John Adamsobserved in 1761 that “allPersons under the Degree ofGentlemen are styledYeoman.” Yet, within thelifetime of the revolutionarygeneration, the veryexistence of a special class of

“gentlemen” and “ladies” had been called intoquestion. Old distinctions melted away as theprinciples of the Revolution combined with thedramatic new economic opportunities of the MarketRevolution and the leveling spirit of early nineteenth-century religious revivalism to foster in the mindsof Americans the notion that no man or woman wasin any fundamental sense better than any other.

This spirit manifested itself through thegradual elimination of laws that favored certainreligious groups over others. Paine helped to setthe stage for this development, for in 1776 he wrotethat “there should be diversity of religiousopinions among us: It affords a larger field for ourChristian kindness.” Then the efforts of Jeffersonand James Madison resulted in the 1786 passage ofthe Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, startinga trend that would continue until 1833, whenMassachusetts became the last state to cut ties witha specific church. Similarly, laws limiting thefranchise also eroded. Thanks to egalitarianprinciples and the recognition that, in thediversified market economy, land no longer servedas a meaningful measure of independence, by the1840s all white men could vote.

The flowering of equality in America manifesteditself not only through the new republic’s laws butalso through its people’s spirit. This is what struckEnglishman Charles Janson, who traveled in theUnited States in the first decade of the nineteenthcentury. Upon his arrival at the house of anacquaintance, he was greeted by a servant. “Is yourmaster at home?” he asked. The servant’s response

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was simple: “I have no master.” The point was thatAmericans were their own masters and that statushad more to do with effort, behavior, and characterthan inheritance. Americans never called forequality of condition, but they did seek equalopportunities to engage in individual pursuits ofhappiness. Americans, who had abandoned old

notions that paid deference to the inheritedaristocracy of wealth and privilege, now embracedwhat Jefferson described as a “natural aristocracyof talents & virtue.”

Robert S. McDonald, Ph.D.United States Military Academy

Suggestions for Further ReadingAppleby, Joyce. Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2000.Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.Bushman, Richard. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.Pole, J. R. The Pursuit of Equality in American History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.Zagarri, Rosemarie. “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America.” William and Mary

Quarterly. 55 (1998): 203–230.


Liberty was the central political principle of theAmerican Revolution. As Patrick Henry, one of itsstaunchest supporters, famously intoned, “Give meliberty or give me death.” Henry was not alone in his rhetorical fervor. Indeed, no ideal wasproclaimed more often in the eighteenth-centuryAnglo-American world than liberty.

The idea of liberty defendedby the American Founders camefrom several sources. The mostvenerable was English commonlaw. Beginning in the latemedieval period, writers in thecommon law tradition developedan understanding of libertywhich held that English subjectswere free because they livedunder a system of laws whicheven the Crown was bound torespect. Leading English juristsargued that these legal limits onroyal power protected thesubject’s liberty by limiting the arbitrary use ofpolitical power.

Under English common law, liberty alsoconsisted in the subject enjoying certain fundamentalrights to life, liberty and property. William Blackstone(1723–1780), the leading common lawyer of theeighteenth century, argued that these rights allowedan English subject to be the “entire master of hisown conduct, except in those points wherein thepublic good requires some direction or restraint . . .”For Blackstone, these English rights further protectedthe subjects’ liberty by making them secure in theirpersons from arbitrary search and seizure, and byensuring that their property could not be takenfrom them without due process of law.

In order to preserve these fundamental rights,the English common law allowed the subject theright to consent to the laws that bound him byelecting representatives to Parliament whose consentthe monarch had to obtain before acting.

Common lawyers in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries did not view these rights andthe liberty they protected as the gift or grant of themonarch; rather, they believed that they were anEnglishmen’s “birthright,” something that inheredin each subject and that therefore could not betaken away by royal prerogative.

This common law understanding of libertywas central to the seventeenth-century strugglesagainst the Stuart monarchy. Prominent jurists andParliamentarians such as Edward Coke (1552–1634)took the lead in the attempt to limit what they sawas the illegal and arbitrary nature of the Stuarts’ rule.This struggle culminated in the Glorious Revolution

of 1689 and the triumph ofParliamentary authority over theCrown. For champions of Englishliberty, the result of this century-long struggle was the achievementof political liberty. They furtherargued that, as a result of thisstruggle, Britain in the eighteenthcentury had the freest constitutionin the world. According to theFrench writer Montesquieu(1689–1755), Britain was “theonly nation in the world, wherepolitical and civil liberty” was “thedirect end of the constitution.”

This seventeenth century struggle betweenroyal power and the subject’s liberties made a greatimpression on the American Founders. Theyabsorbed its lessons about the nature and importanceof liberty through their reading of English historyas well as through their instruction in English law.

A second and equally influential understandingof liberty was also forged in the constitutionalbattles of the seventeenth century: the idea thatliberty was a natural right pertaining to all. Theforemost exponent of this understanding of libertyin the English-speaking world was John Locke(1632–1704). Locke’s political ideas were part of awider European political and legal movement whichargued that there were certain rights that all menwere entitled to irrespective of social class or creed.

Like the common lawyers, Locke saw liberty ascentrally about the enjoyment of certain rights.However, he universalized the older Englishunderstanding of liberty, arguing that it applied toall persons, and not just to English subjects. Lockealso expanded the contemporary understanding ofliberty by arguing that it included other rights—in particular a right to religious toleration (orliberty of conscience), as well as a right to resistgovernments that violated liberty. In addition,Locke argued that the traditional English common

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law right to property was also a natural right, andwas an important part of the subject’s liberty.

Locke began his political theory by arguing thatliberty was the natural state of mankind. Accordingto Locke, all men are “naturally” in a “State ofperfect Freedom to order” their “Actions, anddispose of their Possessions, and Persons as theythink fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature,without asking leave, or depending upon the Willof any other Man.”

However, Locke did not argue that this naturalliberty was a license to do whatever we want.“Freedom is not,” he argued,“A Liberty for every Man todo what he lists (For whocould be free, when everyother Man’s humour mightdomineer over him?).”Rather, Locke held that sinceall men are “equal andindependent, no one oughtto harm another in his Life, health, Liberty, orPossessions.” According to Locke, each of us has“an uncontroulable Liberty to dispose of ourpersons and possession,” but we do not have theright to interfere with the equal liberty of others todo the same.

In Locke’s political theory, men enter intosociety and form governments to better preservethis natural liberty. When they do so, they create apolitical system where the natural law limits onliberty in the state of nature are translated into alegal regime of rights. In such a system, Lockeargued, each person retains his “Liberty to dispose,and order, as he lists, his Person, Actions,Possession, and his whole Property, within theAllowance of those Laws under which he is; andtherein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will ofanother, but freely follow his own.”

For Locke, as for the common lawyers, the ruleof law was necessary for liberty. In Locke’s view,“the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but topreserve and enlarge Freedom.” According to Locke,“Where there is no Law, there is no Freedom. ForLiberty is to be free from restraint and violence fromothers which cannot be, where there is no law.”

Building on both the English common law andon Locke’s ideas, the eighteenth-century Englishwriter Cato argued “that liberty is the unalienableright of mankind.” It is “the power which everyMan has over his own Actions, and his Right toenjoy the Fruit of his Labour, Art, and Industry, asfar as by it he hurts not the Society, or anymembers of it, by taking from any Member or by

hindering him from enjoying what he himselfenjoys.” Cato was the pseudonym for two Britishwriters, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.Their co-authored Cato’s Letters (1720–1723) werewidely read in the American colonies.

On the eve of the American Revolution, then,the received understanding of liberty in the Anglo-American world was a powerful amalgam of boththe English common law and the liberal ideas ofwriters like Locke and Cato. On this view, libertymeant being able to act freely, secure in your basicrights, unhindered by the coercive actions of others,

and subject only to thelimitation of such laws as youhave consented to. Central tothis idea of liberty was theright to hold property and tohave it secure from arbitraryseizure. In addition, under theinfluence of Locke, liberty wasincreasingly being seen on

both sides of the Atlantic as a universal right, onenot limited to English subjects. Equally influentialwas Locke’s argument that if a government violatedits citizens’ liberty the people could resist thegovernment’s edicts and create a new politicalauthority. However, despite the gains that had beenmade since the seventeenth century, manyEnglishmen in the eighteenth century still worriedthat liberty was fragile and would always beendangered by the ambitions of powerful men.

Since the first settlements were established in the early seventeenth century, the Americancolonists shared in this English understanding ofliberty. In particular, they believed that they hadtaken their English rights with them when theycrossed the Atlantic. It was on the basis of theserights that they made a case for their freedom ascolonists under the Crown. In addition, in theeighteenth century, the colonists were increasinglyinfluenced by the Lockean idea that liberty was anatural right. As a result, when they were confrontedwith the policies of the British Crown and Parliamentin the 1760s and 1770s to tax and legislate for themwithout their consent, the colonists viewed them asan attack on their liberty.

In response, the colonists argued that theseBritish taxes and regulations were illegal because theyviolated fundamental rights. They were particularlyresistant to the claims of the British Parliament, asexpressed in the Declaratory Act of 1766, to legislatefor the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” By 1774,following the Boston Tea Party organized by SamuelAdams and John Hancock, and the subsequent


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Coercive Acts, many leading colonists such asThomas Paine and James Otis argued that they hada natural right to govern themselves, and that sucha right was the only protection for their liberty. Inaddition to several essays in defense of rights,including Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,John Dickinson wrote the first patriotic song, “TheLiberty Song.”

This colonial thinking about liberty and rightsculminated in the Declaration of Independenceissued by the Continental Congress in 1776, whichproclaimed that, because their liberty wasendangered, the colonists had a natural right toresist the English King and Parliament.

Having made a revolution in the name of liberty,the American challenge was to create a form ofgovernment that preserved liberty better than thevaunted British constitution had done. In doing so,the founders turned to the ancient ideal of republicanself-government, arguing that it alone could preservethe people’s liberty. They further argued that themodern understanding of liberty as the possession ofrights needed to be a central part of any properrepublican government. Beginning in 1776, in themidst of the Revolutionary War, all of the formercolonies began to construct republican governmentswhich rested on the people’s consent and whichincluded bills of rights to protect the people’s liberty.

Since there was widespread consensus amongthe Founders that liberty required the protection ofrights and the rule of law, much of the politicaldebate in the crucial decades following the AmericanRevolution revolved around the question of whichinstitutional arrangements best supported liberty.Was liberty best protected by strong stategovernments jealously guarding the people’s libertiesfrom excessive federal authority, as leading Anti-Federalists like George Mason contended; or, wasan extended federal republic best able to preservethe freedom of all, as leading Federalists like JamesMadison and Alexander Hamilton argued?

The era of the American Revolution also gavebirth to a further series of important debates aboutliberty. Was slavery, as some Americans in theeighteenth century were beginning to recognize, anunjust infringement upon the liberty of AfricanAmericans? Were women, long deprived of basiclegal rights, also entitled to have equal liberty withtheir male fellow citizens? By making a Revolutionin its name, the Founders ensured that debatesabout the nature and extent of liberty wouldremain at the center of the American experimentin self-government.

Craig Yirush, Ph.D.University of California, Los Angeles

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Suggestions for Further ReadingBailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.Kammen, Michael. Spheres of Liberty: Changing Perceptions of Liberty in American Culture. Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.Reid, John Phillip. The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1988.Skinner, Quentin. Liberty Before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1969.


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