Equal Rights, Privilege, and the Pursuit of Inequality

While cherishing ideas of equal rights and equality, Americans have simultaneously sought inequality. The Revolution of 1776 committed Americans to the idea of equal rights, but just as fundamentally it dedicated the United States to the protection and increase of individual property and the power to direct it to heirs. Although equal rights and individual property rights have proved compatible with religious and ethnic equality, social and economic inequality, both meritocratic and inherited, have been integral to the American social and political order. Moreover, based on the emerging biologies of race and sex, the idea of equal rights for people of color and for women faced new barriers in nineteenth-century America and beyond into the twenty-first century.

Equal Rights and Unequal People

Though Americans have favored the idea of equal rights and equal opportunity, they recognize that differences in wealth and social advantage, like differences in ability and appearance, influence the realization, or not, of equal rights, including equality before the law. In the generations after 1776 the rights of creditors, for example, often overrode the rights of debtors. And criminal trials demonstrate that in courtrooms equal treatment was most often achieved when defendant and victim came from the same social class. Otherwise if they came from different classes social realities, including ethnicity, color, and gender could shape court officials and public opinion. And when a woman’s sexual virtue was compromised, her credibility was almost always discounted. In principle officials paid homage to the ideal of equality before the law, but in practice unequal rights often prevailed.

People of Color and Equal Rights

In New England, if anywhere, equal rights might have included people of color. Free blacks comprised a small fraction of the population, and slave uprisings posed no threat. Yet in this region, as in others, racism prevailed. Discrimination in public business, including voting and education, was commonplace. But in criminal trials procedural safeguards and professional standards limited the effects of prejudice. Public opinion was not so restrained. And in rural New England vigilantes shut down New Hampshire’s racially integrated Noyes Academy and Prudence Crandall’s school for black girls in Connecticut. Connecticut banned schools like Crandall’s, she was jailed briefly, and the state’s supreme court denied equal rights for blacks, setting a precedent for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling.

Subordinate Citizens

Though no one doubted that women and children were citizens, there was also general agreement that they could not possess all the rights of citizens, especially full property and political rights. Abigail Adams challenged this status quo in 1776; and in succeeding decades a movement to supply equal rights for women gained momentum. Women’s literacy fed women’s political advocacy, including petitioning campaigns on behalf of Indians, abolition, and women’s rights. But post–Civil War politics blocked women’s suffrage, and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of women’s subordination. Because women, like children, were understood to be not fully responsible, in criminal trials they were sometimes treated less harshly than men—especially in capital cases. Indeed, subordination to husbands remained a pillar of family law. And whether rich or poor, the marital bond meant bondage for some wives, where they surrendered not only their property rights but also personal and religious liberty. As for people of color, inclusion of women within the doctrine that all “are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights” proved a deeply challenging proposition.

People of Color and the Promise Betrayed

In its 1857 Dred Scott decision the Supreme Court ruled that “negroes” were not, and never had been, citizens of the United States. Two justices dissented, declaring that when the Constitution was adopted free blacks possessed the rights of citizens, including suffrage, in seven states. The rights of free blacks, like other citizens, were thereby protected. But the Court majority, conflating slavery with race, denied citizenship to people of color. In fact, starting in 1776 a majority of states recognized the rights of people of color for at least a generation. Only after the free black population grew into the tens of thousands did states north and south act to curtail those rights. The new restrictions rested on old prejudices reinforced by the new “science” of race. Nature, it was claimed, warranted the denial of equal rights. So in new northern states—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan—as well as old ones like Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, equality was written out of law. By 1858, when Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas for election to the Senate from Illinois, some public figures explicitly denied the self-evident natural rights of the Declaration. But Lincoln made the Declaration’s self-evident truths his cornerstone. Regardless of race or nationality, he argued, natural rights applied to all men.

Equal Justice for Irishmen and Other Foreigners

For a generation or two after 1776—perhaps longer—American nationality was not firmly established, nor was there a single “American” ethnicity. And the colonial legacy was broadly welcoming for European immigrants. So regardless of nationality, equality before the law became the policy of every state. But old ethnic and religious prejudices, reinforced by immigration from the British Isles, made equal treatment problematic. Irish immigrants, who stood out as Catholics and potential radicals, were targets of prejudice. But when they were tried for capital crimes like rape and murder, adherence to legal procedures—including talented defense counsel—blunted the effects of prejudice. Yet fear of Irish and other Atlantic immigrants led congressmen to debate the qualifications for naturalized citizenship. Representatives agreed new citizens must be white; but they argued over the length of their probation and whether they should pay for the privilege. In the Jefferson administration Congress settled on five years and minimal fees. Equal rights for white immigrants became the rule in law and largely in practice.

Contending for Religious Equality

In the new United States every state included a bill of rights guaranteeing religious liberty. But the meaning of those guarantees varied. Though Rhode Island and Pennsylvania had no established religion from their beginnings, most colonies had possessed a Protestant establishment, and most states retained official preference for Protestantism. Catholicism was generally tolerated, but Catholics, like Jews, were denied equal citizenship rights in several states. But over the course of two generations Americans adopted Virginia’s model of equal religious liberty. Hard-fought contests led to disestablishment everywhere, and to virtually complete religious equality before the law.

The Declaration of Independence and the Mystery of Equality

What were the meanings of “all men are created equal” for the signers of the Declaration, and how was the phrase understood in different states? The chapter traces the natural rights origins of the Declaration and how the idea of natural equality affected ideas and policy on slavery, race, and religion, especially in Massachusetts and Virginia. Public figures everywhere recognized a conflict between their deep commitment to individual property rights and their assertion of equal human rights. Concern for social stability in a time of revolution influenced ideology and practice.