A Call to Liberty - Liberty Fund

Anything But Compromising

An essay by Christa Dierksheide

Writing a Declaration that could secure support required compromises and negotiations: How did these compromises chart the course of, or delay the recognition of equality for coming generations?

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Letter from the Editors

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.

This Month's Further Reading and Listening

After you have read our main essays by Christa Dierksheide and Colin Nicolson this month, we invite you to explore a range of related material from Liberty Fund. This month we point you to a lively Liberty Matters discussion about debates over slavery during the Constitutional Convention as well as two podcasts with guest Yuval Levin discussing the politics and philosophy of early America. From our book catalog, Frederic Maitland’s A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality should interest curious readers, and a brief conversation with Gordon Wood points to the importance of thinking carefully about equality in early America. As ever, we hope you’ll visit Jack Greene’s collection The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question to explore its ever-growing collection of primary sources from the Revolutionary period.

Countdown to the Declaration

New material every month as we explore the Declaration's past, present, and future.

21

months to go

Find the full list of months, including archived and upcoming themes, on our Countdown page.

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