Foundations of a Nation
To understand the foundations of America, we need to dig into the key texts and thinkers who have helped define our nation. On the "Foundations of a Nation" podcast Alex Tuckness, Chair of the Political Science Department at Iowa State University, talks with his friend, Barrett Randall, about the ideas that have shaped America. Season 1 looks at the Declaration of Independence."
Foundations of a Nation
Equality and the Declaration
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Barrett and Alex talk about the meaning of the famous statement "all men are created equal" in light of the fact that some of those who voted for it owned slaves. They explore the different views of equality that existed at the time and how the statement "all men are created equal" has been used subsequently in our history as America tries to make this ideal a reality.
To understand the foundations of America, we need to dig into the key texts and thinkers who've helped define our nation. I'm Barrett Randall, and I'm not an academic, but I'm also not afraid to talk to one. On the Foundations of a Nation podcast, I have conversations with my friend Alex Tuckness, chair of the Political Science Department at Iowa State University, about the ideas that have shaped America. Welcome to the Foundation of a Nation podcast. I'm Barrett Randall and I run a golf course. And I'm Alex Tuckness, and I'm chair of the Political Science Department at Iowa State. And we're going to be your hosts. In season one, we're looking at the Declaration of Independence. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about the idea that all men are created equal. Alex, you mentioned at the end of the last podcast that this one is controversial given what we know about some of the founders, including Jefferson, them having slaves. What do you mean, and what did they mean when they said all men are created equal?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think the first thing I'd say is I don't think they all agreed with each other. Right. So even though, you know, they they wrote a document together, but they didn't necessarily all think the same things. And so, you know, we talked a little bit in an earlier episode about how there was actually a drafting committee. Jefferson was kind of ended up being the lead person on that, but there were four other people on the committee. And if you look at them, you've got Thomas Jefferson and Robert Livingston, both of them own slaves, but then you also had John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Richard Sherman who were opposed to slavery. So even on this committee that's drafting it, you know, they didn't all have uh all have the same opinion.
SPEAKER_02What did they think about all men creating equal meant then? Okay.
SPEAKER_00So I think one of the things maybe that I'll add is that we have a tendency to think on issues like equality and slavery, that there's like one of two positions, right? Either you are like completely in favor of equality in all of its forms, or you're like pro-slavery. Uh and actually, like slavery was a big deal in their days. There's a lot of different positions people took on it. In the same way, if you were going to think about like immigration today, right, it's not as simple as just being like pro-immigration or anti-immigration. There's a lot of different positions that uh that people could take. Um and so as as they're as they're taking some of these different positions, they're they're having to try to figure out what kind of language they can come up with that they would all agree on, uh given the fact that they didn't agree about slavery, right? Some of them, you know, some of them are just in favor of it. Some of them are opposed to it in principle, but think it's really tricky to get rid of it. Uh, I think actually Jefferson is in that camp, right, of like opposed to it in principle, but thinks it's really tricky to know how to get rid of it. And then some who are who are opposed to it, right? And even among people who are for and against slavery, they sometimes disagree with each other about what level of racial integration they would want to see if slavery was abolished, right? So um, so I I guess the the first thing to say is this is a document that was written by people who weren't all on the same page. Sure. And and and part of the reason why I think that's important is I think at the end of the day, Jefferson obviously he he played a larger role than anyone else in shaping the document, but ultimately it's a document that was you know enacted by a whole group. So Jefferson's individual opinion isn't like the only thing that matters, right, when uh when thinking about this. So, okay, so that hasn't really actually answered the question yet. So the question was um what do they actually mean by equal?
SPEAKER_02And not only that, but if they didn't all agree, why did they even include it? Okay. I mean, I it does seem like now looking back historically and going it's at best massively hypocritical.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02So why was it included?
SPEAKER_00And or what did they mean by that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So let's let's try to talk about that. I think part of the reason for why it's included, and and we'll continue on this in the next episode. Okay. Uh because one of the things I'm going to say is when they say all men are created equal, that's only part of a sentence. The next part of the sentence is that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So what they mean by equality is actually deeply connected to those rights, right? So the idea that people are equal in the sense, not in every sense, right, but they're equal in the sense that they have uh rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So those rights are obviously crucial to the document as a whole, because the violation of those rights is going to be the justification for why Americans are entitled to independence. Okay. So uh the Americans have to assert this kind of equal right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Um, and so that status of being created equal is kind of the grounding for the claiming that they have those rights. Now that's said, so that explains why it was important for them to have something like this in the document. But now let's talk a little bit about um maybe we'll call it the selective application of the principle. Right. Um, so you know, one question people will raise is well, like, what about women? Sure. All right. Different questions like what about slavery? So let's let's maybe talk about that a little bit. One of the things they didn't mean is they didn't mean we're all like equally virtuous, equally smart, equally powerful, equally wealthy. They realized like all of those things vary, right? But they're they're wanting to say that there's set the set of rights that's that's the thing that's equal, right? And that our equal status gives us. So what about like women? Well, one of the things to say is even though it says all men are created equal, the way they used the word men in that historical context, they clearly meant human beings, male and female. And we actually have uh a little bit of evidence for this. So I'm gonna read uh a section from the declaration that Jefferson included in the first draft, and it was cut out by the editing uh committee. You know, so when they get together on uh on July 4th and they're going through and making edits, this section gets cut out. Uh so this is from the end of the document where he's listing off the different grievances that the colonists have against King George. Uh and he says uh about the king, he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur uh miserable death in their transportation thither. This uh piratical warfare, like piracy basically, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain determined to keep open a market where men, uh, it's even capitalized, men uh should be bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative uh that's his veto uh for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. So, in other words, they're saying like the slave trade is awful. King George, unprovoked, is like grabbing these people from Africa, sending them to slavery a hemisphere away. Many of them are dying in transport. Uh, you know, all the world is outraged by this. Uh, whenever we try to ban the slave slave trade, King George uses his veto to stop us from doing it, right? So And Jefferson wrote that. And Jefferson wrote that. Yeah. So Which is complicated. It is complicated. So that's what that's why we have a whole podcast episode to talk about that. So so the first thing I want to note though is when he says in the passage, uh determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold. Jefferson knew as well as everybody else that women were bought and sold at slave markets. Right. So when he says men, he clearly means both men and women in that passage, right? Because everybody, like everybody's fully aware that in in slave markets, both male and female slaves are being purchased. So that's just one example. And you could point to lots of examples from that historical context of people using men in a non-gender specific way, when they're talking about like humanity more generally. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02But this is in that first draft that he had this strong opposition, moral opposition, it seemed, yeah, to slavery, and yet obviously as a slaveholder, but this was in that initial first draft.
SPEAKER_00It was in the initial draft. So yeah, so so okay, so what here's here's questions you may be wondering about. So one is why would a slave owner write this? And is this just completely contradictory, right? That's one thing. Yeah, sure. And then the the the second question would be why did they cut it out? Yeah. Right? You know, why did why why did some version of this not make it into the into the final draft? So um the the first part is it is complicated. So here's what I would say. I actually, as I've I've I've done some research on this. Uh-oh. It's good. I have not. I have not. I think I think Jefferson, there is a way in which he actually has an internally consistent theory. It's just it's it's one we may not agree with, but I think there's an internal consistency to it. Um so he so here's what he would have said. Uh I think I think Jefferson's belief was that slavery is wrong and unjust. He really does think that. And he thinks it in part because he believes even uh you know, even people from Africa are created equal, and so they should have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? And so slavery violates that basic right. So, so I think he would say, you know, the the the people living in Africa that they should have had the right to form their own governments, to govern themselves, right, to, you know, to you know, live uh live lives on the basis of those rights. And so when they're being uh, you know, grabbed and you know, transported across the country to be slaves, like there's this serious violation of rights that's taken place. So that that's premise one, and that explains why he could write something like this. Sure. But the second thing is I don't know that he actually believed that the races were equal in all respects. Right? He thinks they're equal in life, liberty, and property, right, and having these rights. Okay. Um, but if you you know, if you go through some of the different things he's uh he wrote, uh it's not always clear that he he thinks that uh human beings are equal in all respects. And and this becomes important because he was very pessimistic about the chances of like racial integration actually working in the United States. So uh, and partly he's he's concerned that like freed slaves are gonna have like decades or centuries of pent-up grievances from slavery. And are and and this is you know, he's worried about race wars breaking out. Um he's worried about situations where slaves get rapidly emancipated, but then no one wants to hire them because racism is still around. Um, and now they're unemployed and they're actually worse off. So in his mind, he was against the slave trade. He would like to stop the slave trade, but he worried that if you just emancipated slaves uh quickly in the United States is actually gonna make things worse. Um And so in his mind, the virtuous thing to do was keep owning your slaves because emancipating them is gonna make things worse, but also try to stop the slave trade so we stop more slaves from coming over.
SPEAKER_02So he's trying to be an altruistic slave owner.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, something like that.
SPEAKER_02So obviously, I mean, obviously his wealth came from that. Right. Right. So he was a plantation owner. Right. And so the family in my very quick Google background is his family's hit wealth was in Yeah. It was that's what he was given, thousands of acres and people. And so but I don't know. I think I think that's a complicated, I'm sure I mean it's really easy for us to look back and say this is hypocritical. Right. And and it is. Yeah. But um there I don't know if there's a butt in there. And it is. But I think there are like there I I say the butt is there are examples, I think, in current I mean you can you can look at people who make their money or wealth in something that they don't maybe inherently um find a lot of comfort or pride in. But I I don't know. I just feel like that's a very it is that's a tough one.
SPEAKER_00No, it so it yeah, so I mean so one of the critiques obviously could be he has a vested financial interest in not freeing his slaves, which might be impacting his judgment, right, as he's kind of working through uh working through the different steps. Um But interestingly, like one of the things that some scholars have have pointed out is in Virginia at the time, you know, where he lived, uh there were actually some rules restricting uh the conditions under which you could free slaves, right? The law actually put some restrictions on freeing slaves because there were other people, not just Jefferson, who were also worried about the destabilization that would happen. So remember, I said like one question is how did he think these things are consistent? And I think I think that the simplest way to describe it is he believes slavery is wrong in principle. He thinks the slave trade should be stopped. He was consistently opposed to the importation of additional slaves into the United States. Um and he also thought you had to be really careful and do it in just the right way to emancipate without things uh going poorly. And he was never really aiming at a fully racially integrated society, right? So uh so in in his mind, he wants, you know, I think he wanted slaves to be free you know free ultimately, but probably free and separate, right, as opposed to like fully integrated. So if you hold him to the standards of like Martin Luther King Jr., he's gonna fall short, right, of kind of that vision of integration. Um but within the context of his day, uh he actually uh worked pretty hard trying to get uh some uh you know legislation passed in Virginia that would have like shut down the the slave trade in Virginia, right? You know, and the within his contact, there were certainly a lot of people who were more pro-slavery than he was. You know, he was at least willing to say it was wrong in principle.
SPEAKER_02He's willing to try to uh This is why it must have gotten cut out, because there I imagine there were other influential people who were like, I'll never sign this.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Yeah, so so there's there's a couple of reasons why it got cut out. So one obvious one is there was enough people who were like pro-slavery that they didn't want this kind of language, which is clearly uh, you know, condemning slavery in the document, right? So if if you're trying to unify the whole country, you gotta get all of those people on board, you know, for the for the war against England. That's part of it. But here's the second reason. I didn't read you all of the quote. Sure. If you read the rest of the quote, he also talks about how King George is uh stirring up rebellion among the slaves.
SPEAKER_01Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00Um, and what he really means by this is King George is offering to free the slaves if they will rise up in uh support of the British against the American revolutionaries. So the the other people are in the room were like, you know, this is a really tricky argument to make, where you start the sentence by critiquing the slave trade and how awful it is, and then you condemn the king for trying to like give slaves their freedom. Sure, sure.
SPEAKER_02It's contradictory in within a sentence. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So so I mean, again, I think Jefferson, in Jefferson's mind, there's a way when all these things are perfectly consistent. When you actually try to like put this in a public document, it would have been very easy for people to say, hey, well, if you think slavery is so bad, why don't you actually free your slaves? Yeah. Um, and one of the things that American colonists really were concerned about, right, was this idea uh that there might be a slave uprising that uh you know could undercut the war effort and all kinds of other things, and that the King of England is trying to encourage uh a slave uprising as a way to help win the war.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So that I mean, and and that's one of those things and again, this is my lack of knowledge about this kind of coming through. But I just think you you see those parts in the old documents and you think, why then like because we yeah, we have the benefit of then hundreds of years of history. And and we see the examples of just the horrifying um shame, I think, that comes from the slave trade. And and why you know there were so many people hanging on to this so desperately, but also like ultimately why did it take so much longer? It feels like there were a lot of people that were advocating and probably thought that it was close, that it was cl you know, not a couple hundred years away or whatever it was. And then I mean, what did that mean? I I guess the implications of that claim that all men are created equal, how does that speak to us now versus then? Because it it feels like there's this vast ocean of hurt that gets filled in maybe.
SPEAKER_00I don't know. No, no, no, that's a great question. So like one of the things to say is like one way of thinking about the declaration on this point is is Jefferson and the, you know, there was enough consensus in the room that people as human beings really do have these rights that he was able to get all men are created equal, and that's stayed in the draft, right? People didn't cut that part out, right? So there was some consensus on that. Which is weirdly understood as these Yeah, like rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, right? So but then there's also a separation if like if that's the set of rights we have, what is the path we're going to get, what's the path we go through to try to see those rights actually respected in reality? Okay. And here's where you know, a lot of people have looked back at Jefferson and some of the others and said, look, they were right in the principle that they announced, but Jefferson may have been wrong in thinking we got to go real slow on this emancipation business. Um, right. So the the path that he was going for. And and and historically speaking, uh, I mean, there there's there's some truth to the idea that a lot of people were thinking economically slavery may be on the decline anyway. When they're writing this, when they're writing the initial draft of the Constitution, the cotton gin hasn't been invented yet, which causes slavery to become much more profitable and it really expands. So what I think ends up happening historically is that idea that all men are created equal becomes part of this foundational text that's helped shape America's political identity. And so going forward, when people look at that statement that all men are created equal and they compare it to ways in which manifestly people are not being treated equally in the real world, they've been able to use this as a kind of statement of principle to call America to do a better job of living up to its own principles.
SPEAKER_02So it's kind of like a precedent. Yeah. Like a moral precedent. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00No, I think it is. And like so let me let me give a few examples historically. So uh, you know, probably the most influential black thinker of the 1800s was Frederick Douglass. Yeah. Uh so you know, he's he's a really influential abolitionist. Uh he, you know, is has a lot of influence uh in Washington, D.C., um, you know, has influence after the Civil War. I mean, so he's he's a he's a just giant uh in American American history. Absolutely. And and he gives, you know, so we're we're thinking about the Declaration of Independence. And like one of his most famous speeches he gives is this speech uh that is basically asking, uh, what does the Fourth of July mean for black people in America? Yeah. What do you know, what to the slave is the voice, the Fourth of July? Because you're you're you're celebrating independence at a time when slavery is still being widely practiced in the American South. And he gives this interesting speech, but one of the things uh he says, I mean, this is a quote from Frederick Douglass in the speech, he says, are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice embodied in that declaration of independence extended to us. So what Frederick Douglass is saying is there are clear principles of equality, freedom, and justice that the Declaration announces should be ours. Are those Being applied to us yet or not. So in other words, he's not criticized. Like it's really interesting you go back. He doesn't really criticize the founders primarily. He's saying his main critique is the founders announced a set of principles, and we today are not living up to those principles.
SPEAKER_02Slavery was set in the Declaration. Right. And you're not upholding that promise. Right.
SPEAKER_00And so interestingly, like Abraham Lincoln takes a very similar approach, right? So Abraham Lincoln is actually one of the most influential interpreters of the Declaration of Independence. So he's saying, like, this is the beginning of America, right? And so his basic claim is the founders, like Jefferson, knew that slavery was wrong. They realized they didn't have enough consensus and circumstances at that moment didn't allow for immediate abolition of slavery. But they announced the principle to tell us the trajectory of where America was headed.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Right. So like from Lincoln's standpoint, this is like a promissory note, right? So they announced the declaration and the declaration that all men are created equal, not because it was going to be instantly attained, but they were like describing the ideal that America was moving toward. Right. And then I'll I'll give one more historical example. So in the 20th century, Martin Luther King Jr., so in his famous I Have a Dream speak, uh, here's what Martin Luther King Jr. says uh about the Declaration. He says, when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Right. So it's actually a very Lincoln, you know, style interpretation where what happens historically is people have seen the moral power of that original promise. They've seen ways in which America has fallen short of it, but they've they've used the declaration to help motivate and shape the push to try to make America better at living up to its principles.
SPEAKER_02So it kind of sounds like it's it's okay to acknowledge the hypocrisy, or at least the in the I don't know, the confusion. But remember what it did is set a pace.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. So so we don't have to say America was perfect, right? So I I think, yeah, I think I think the the the key idea here is that there was enough consensus to get these words that all men are created equal to going into the document uh into the document, yeah. That the people who wrote it, like I said, it's a it's a spectrum. Uh you had some who are full defenders of slavery, you had a lot who oppose slavery but may not have favored complete, you know, integration. Uh there were there were some who were more strongly anti-slavery than Jefferson was, yeah. Right. So so you got this this whole like range of people, but there was enough consensus on this belief in human equality and uh basic rights to allow this to become part of America's um, you know, kind of political creed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, ultimately we can look back at this and think the the point of the Declaration of Independence wasn't to initialize some great American legislature, but but to declare their independence from Britain.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, that's that's right. Yeah, so so one of the things to say is the people who are actually adopting this, when they're saying all men are created equal, that they have certain unalienable rights, they're not primarily thinking about slavery, right? They're mostly thinking about the rights that they feel have been violated by Britain.
SPEAKER_02Sure.
SPEAKER_00And you know, kind of declaring their right uh to do what they have to do to make sure that those rights are protected. So what's interesting, though, is in order to make that claim, they don't just say because we are Americans of a certain status, we have these rights. They say, you know, because we're we are you know created by God, we have these rights. Sure. Which that way of framing it makes it more universal and it makes it possible for others uh you know later on to say, hey, look, that the implications of this principle are bigger, right, than just America's independence from England. Yeah. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of Iowa State University. Thank you for listening.