Equal Rights in America's Infancy: The Evolution of Equality

On July 4, 1776, an historic document was signed into existence by the men of the Second Continental Congress. This document signaled a new chapter in world history. New nations were formed around the relatively new concepts of democracy and the rights of the people. This document was the Declaration of Independence. There were many ideas expressed in the Declaration, one of those ideas which, from a modern perspective, may not have been entirely true, is that of equality. This idea is expressed in one of the most famous lines of the Declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are create equal..." This excerpt was said to be a universal truth, that all are equal, so long as you're a white, male landowner. From the point of view of Americans in this time period there was nothing wrong with this train of thought. This line of thinking did remain generally the same for many decades after it was written, but the question was, does this phrase truly reflect the new reality that is the United States? If modern viewpoint is used, then the answer is yes, all men and women regardless of color and classes are equal. If, however, a historical viewpoint is used, then the answer is much more complicated. This viewpoint is that which Americans of these time periods used and that is sometimes much harder to tell in politics, in class, in gender and in skin color.

When the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were written, society was dominated by white, male land owners. Women were allowed to own property up until marriage (this was rare however) at which point they forfeited that right and slaves were allowed almost no rights at all except the right to be alive. The Declaration and the Constitution reflected the line of thinking this male dominated society used in the writing. In the Declaration it can be found in lines such as: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..." This is a type of quote that appears frequently. Though many may argue that the excerpt is making a reference to people in general, it is actually referring to the rights of male landowners in this time period. The quote is making a clear reference to the fact that white males could institute a government but women, African-Americans, and Native Americans could not. This type of quotation can also be discovered in the most famous line of the Declaration, which is at question: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal..." This is not a clever way of referring to the people or humanity in general, but a reference of who was allowed to make the rules and how each of them were equal to one another, that is of course, white males. While the Constitution was being debated into existence by the Federalist and Anti-Federalists, this male-dominated lingo makes an appearance in a number of speeches by the debating statesmen, for example this excerpt from a speech by Alexander Hamilton: "...Men always love power, and states will prefer their particular concerns to the general welfare...." Once again there is evidence that the speaker is referring to the dominant white male land owners of the time period. There are also smaller references in the Declaration, Constitution and speeches by various statesmen that allude to that line of thinking, these references used smaller words such as "his", "him", and "he" when referring to a body of peoples actions or abilities. As is continuously noted, the people believed that there was nothing wrong with the way society was structured and it is reflected in every historical document cited here and else where throughout history.

Americans believed in the words of the Declaration and that they (they being the white males of the country) were all equal no matter what. However there was an event that made some of these men question whether they were actually equal to lawmakers who were elected to run the new republic's government. This event took place in 1794 when a group of dissatisfied farmers and poor merchants in Pennsylvania, enraged over economic policy put in place by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and prodded on by local democratic societies, openly rebelled against the United States government. It was known as the Whiskey Rebellion. This struggle in the so called "equal" society put forth by the Declaration was a class struggle. Alexander Hamilton had pushed legislation through Congress which called for an excise tax on whiskey. In western Pennsylvania many poor families relied on their whiskey stills as a means of producing income through sales or for use as a bartering agent. These families did not have the necessary funds to pay the whiskey tax. As a result they came together in a massive mob to put forth their grievances against the government and demand that the tax be repealed. They believed in the United States government, but they believed the tax to be an immoral institution as put forth by William Findley, "The great error among the people was an opinion, that an immoral law might be opposed and yet the government respected, and all other laws obeyed, and they firmly believed that the excise law was an immoral one." These poor farmers believed that the rich aristocrats in the Federalist Party (which was in control of the government at this time) were unfairly taking advantage of the lower class families in order to enrich their own lives.

This type of struggle is appears in different parts of the country throughout history. Sometimes an event would happen that hurt both rich and poor alike but typically the latter more than the former. One such event is President Thomas Jefferson's Embargo of 1807. The embargo was meant to try and hurt the economies of a rather hostile Europe and in a strange way, to stimulate American industry. The country practically fell into a depression when the embargo was put into place. All American trade stopped entirely, cargo ships normally packed full with goods were now tied to wharves and docks across the country empty, crewless and rotting. Entire towns that had depended on trade with Europe were now suffering as it was described by a petition to the federal government from the small port town of Alfred, Maine in 1809,

"We are poor inhabitants of a small town, rendered poorer by the wayward, inconsistent policy of the general government; but life and liberty are as dear to us as to our opulent brethren of the South, and we flatter ourselves that we have as much love of liberty and abhorrence of slavery as those who oppress us in the name of Republicanism. We love liberty in principle but better in practice. We cling to a union of the states as the rock of our better salvation; and nothing but a fearful looking for of despotism would induce us to wish for a severance of the band that unites us. But oppression did sever us from the British Empire; and what a long and continued repetition of similar acts of the government of the United States would effect, God only knows!"

This small town was suffering badly under Jefferson's embargo policy. The townsfolk were dependent on shipping from Europe coming through their town to help provide jobs and an income in order to survive. The townsfolk's petition also mentions the South as being an opulent place. It is possibly due to the fact that the Southern states were for primarily agricultural, though many plantations' income was through shipping cotton to England for use in their textile factories. With the embargo in place these shipments were not going very far and as such those rich Southerners began to suffer also. As a result of the embargo, the class inequalities that had existed between rich and poor because of economical situations were brought closer to the expected class equality as envisioned by the Founding Fathers in their Declaration and Constitution.

Living in early America was very difficult. The American society back then was structured much differently than it is now. Women were seen as servants of the household in the pre and post-Revolution time periods. Typically, the male children of a family were the only ones who received a decent education. Very rarely would young girls be given to opportunity to attend school. This lack of opportunities is illustrated in the autobiographical recollections of Julia Hieronymus Tevis, "Being the second child and oldest daughter, I was sent to a country school at a very early age." Mrs. Tevis continues on to say that she was four years old at this point in time making the year around 1804 (she was born in December of 1799). However, Mrs. Tevis's case is an exception to the norm as her father was more enlightened about women being educated. Very few women received the same educational opportunities.

Most women were not educated at all; however this gradually changed. Parents in the early republic would later make it a point to ensure that their daughters could read and write properly. This change is credited to the emerging idea of republican motherhood in which mothers were expected to be able to education their children so that they would become responsible and contributing members of the new republican society. At a certain point in a young girl's life, she was either withdrawn from the school so that she could be taught the domestic duties that every woman had to know to run a proper household (depending on the woman's location and class) or she is sent to a young girls boarding school where proper lady-like manners and duties for the time period were taught. Those schools were usually a luxury of society's more well-off families.

As noted earlier, women were granted somewhat equal rights of property as men until they married. The practice of a woman's legal holdings being transferred to her husband was known as femme covert. When the woman married she forfeited all her belongings to her husband and became legally incompetent; she generally was regulated to being a servant of the household. She would rarely leave the home and would spend much of her time raising the children and attending to daily chores and duties that were needed in order to maintain a proper household. This mode of thinking concerning women would not begin to change in the slightest until the late 1820's as the feminist movement began to take root.

The women's rights movement first took root with the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. Seneca Falls was a meeting of female representatives from several states in the union. This convention was the brainchild of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott who had met each other at an abolitionist convention in London eight years before where they were forced to sit in a closed off section of the hall separated from the men. This segregation had infuriated the two women and they began to discuss the idea of gathering support in the United States for women to have the same equal rights as men. The Seneca Falls convention of one hundred women delegates drafted a likeness of the Declaration of Independence, but it was different in that it was a demand for the independence and equality of women as demonstrated in this excerpt from the document, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal" The women also outlined in this document, called the Declaration of Sentiments, the injustices that man had brought upon womankind.

These women and some male supporters had set off the equivalent of a bomb in the social structure of the United States. The idea of women, who were seen as the "weaker vessel", being capable of doing anything outside the home as it was, having the same equal rights as men was considered to be absolutely absurd to much of the country at this time, but these women were the foundation of what was to become a political force within the country as they held another convention at Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850 where approximately one thousand delegates attended. The right to vote was considered to the most sacred equal right that could be gained and at Worcester the women formulated a plan to begin circulating petitions through eight states to help meet this goal.

There were outcries from many newspaper editors and politicians against the goals of the women's suffrage movement including James Gordon Bennett who wrote the following editorial in the New York Herald, "That motley gathering of fanatical mongrels, of old grannies, male and female, of fugitive slaves and fugitive lunatics, called the Women's Rights Convention, after two day's discussion of the most horrible trash, has put forth its platform and adjourned." It is quite obvious what Bennett's opinion of the suffrage movement is and how he views the convention, delegates and its purpose. Bennett is not alone, opposition to the suffrage movement would be too great to bring forth an amendment to the Constitution allowing women to vote until August of 1920 when the nineteenth amendment was ratified, this is an example of just how slowly such changes took place in early America.

Slaves are considered to be one of the most heavily exploited groups in American history. Slaves in Antebellum United States had no equal rights at all regardless of gender. In fact they were considered to be only three-fifths of a person for political and census purposes. Slavery was phased out gradually in the Northern states of the Union in the early years of the Republic until slavery remained in only the southern states of the Union. While slaves were considered property and not an equal person, they did have some vague rights, dependent on their master, as illustrated by this excerpt from slave owner J. H. Hammond's overseer's handbook, "Marriage is to be encouraged as it adds to the comfort, happiness and health of those who enter upon it....Every reasonable complaint must be promptly attended to and with any marked or general symptom of sickness, however trivial, a Negro may lie up for a day or so at least..." These excerpts show that while most African-Americans in America had no equal rights, they were treated humanely for the most part. However that is never enough. Abolitionist movements headed by people such as Fredrick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison disagreed with the notions of well cared for property, but the rights and freedom of people who were being morally (and in some cases illegally) held in bondage. The supposed equal rights put forth by the Declaration of Independence once again held no sway over these matters. Southerners saw no immoral action in holding the African-Americans as slaves. They often said that it was their religious duty to save these people from the eternal damnation that they would have been condemned to if allowed to be free.

Other slave-owners believed that African-Americans were unable and incapable of caring for themselves without "guidance" from the "superior" white race. A number of slaves who were intelligent enough to think otherwise would organize followers and attempt to revolt against their masters. One of the most notable uprisings is the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion of 1831. Though the rebellion was stopped and Turner himself executed, the rebellion left fifty-two whites dead and near panic spreading across the South. Newspapers carried the story and all sorts of opinions about it across the country, such as this excerpt from William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator: "You have seen, it is to be feared, but the beginning of sorrows. All the blood which has been shed will be required at your hands." Garrison supported the rights of the Negro to rise up and claim his freedom, but he also supported doing it in a less bloody way as well. The insurrection would spawn other rebellions, but it also led to increased persecution and scrutiny of African-Americans and their activities. They were forbidden to learn how to read or write and were furthermore not allowed to leave the plantation at all unless accompanied by an overseer or the equivalent thereof. African-Americans would not gain their right to vote and equal rights until after the passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments in the years following the American Civil War. It was not however the end of the African-American struggle for equality, White Southerners would continue to hold power in the southern states and continuously deny African-Americans many equal rights guaranteed to them. The African-Americans would struggle for their equal rights well into the mid to late 20^th century.

In the history of the United States, the meaning of equality has been severely called into question a number of times for all sorts of different reasons. The Founding Fathers said that all men were created equal and granted inalienable rights. For their time period and society, that was true. But as time passed, society changed with new ideas put forth and the meaning of this phrase was called into question and the question of equal rights for several groups would become epic struggles in history to gain the right to vote and do as they please. The inalienable rights of men were not granted to all classes of society for many decades, the rights of women denied until the early years of the twentieth century and the rights of African-Americans as humans and men were denied until after the deaths of nearly six hundred and fifty thousand soldiers in a bloody conflict stretching across the 1860's. Thanks to the efforts of many different people through history such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and many others, these rights were eventually achieved. Are all men created equal? Today they are and so are women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and any other group who was once denied the inalienable rights and freedoms that are put forth by the Declaration and protected by the Constitution.

Declaration of Independence, July 4^th 1776

Alexander Hamilton Addresses the Constitutional Convention, 1787, Major Problems of the Early Republic pg 25

Major Problems of the EarlyRepublic 1787-1848; Chapter 3 pg 66 A Country Democrat on the Whiskey Rebellion, 1796

Major Problems in the Early Republic 1787-1848 by Sean Wilentz, Chapter 4 pg 101 Legislative Petition, town of Alfred, Main, 1809

Recollections of the Early Republic by Joyce Apleby: Julia Hieronymus Tevis 1799-1879 pg 72

Seneca Falls and Women's Rights, 1848 pg 328

Seneca Fals and Women's Rights, 1848, Opposition to Women's Rights: James Gordon Bennnet: "Women's Rights Convention" pg 333

Major Problems of the EarlyRepublic 1787-1848J.H. Hammond's Instructions to His Oversee, 1840- 1850 pg244

Major Problems of the Early Republic 1787-1848The Virginia Legislature Debates Slavery's End, 1832 pg 259

Nat Turner and Slave Insurrections, 1831 William Lloyd Garrison: "The Insurrection" pg 270