Anything But Compromising

Perhaps no phrase from the Declaration of Independence has been the source of more debate–even before it was put on paper–than “all men are created equal.” Written in a time when slavery was legal in America and when voting was largely limited to free, adult male property owners who were members of an established church, this sweeping claim can sound, by turns, inspiring, hypocritical, or simply unlikely.

Is “all men are created equal” an ideal which the founders hoped would inspire America as an aspiration for the new country? Is it a statement of belief about the facts of human creation? Or is it a statement from a privileged perspective that denies the realities of life in early America?

Our 21st century approach to equality tends to be to think of it in terms of gender, race, and wealth. But is that what the founders had in mind? 

A Call to Liberty will explore questions centering on the phrase “all men are created equal” several times over the course of this project. This month, Christa Dierksheide’s essay “Anything but Compromising” considers ways in which the ringing poetry of phrases like “all men are created equal” took a back seat to political practicalities and military necessities of 1776. She argues that the need to create support for the Revolution required constructing and enshrining “unyielding binaries” designed to make people choose sides and stick to them. War, she argues, is not a time for nuance.

“A Letter to G. G.”, this month’s featured pamphlet from Jack Greene’s collection, The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question, demonstrates the rhetoric that created and preserved that kind of division in early America. Even the subtitle that Colin Nicolson notes is often appended to the pamphlet, “stiff in opinions, always in the wrong” demonstrates how divisive the American Question was, and how insurmountable the divisions and inequalities seemed to be.