Are We Self-Evidently Equal?

Abraham Lincoln remarked in the Gettysburg Address that the American founders dedicated the United States to the “proposition” that all humans are created equal. But when he spoke in 1863, a generation had rejected what the Declaration of Independence once broadcast as “self-evident.” The American citizenry now found themselves in a violent civil war, testing whether a natural rights republic could endure. Lincoln warned that when a free people renounced their “ancient faith” in human equality, they destroyed the moral core of self-government. 

Today, as we prepare to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, the Declaration’s equality proposition faces renewed skepticism. Some contemporary theories of “equity” seek to cure alleged disparities wrought from immutable characteristics of race, gender, or class. These approaches risk prioritizing group identity over individual agency or uniqueness. In promoting unequal treatment in the name of redress, the pursuit of equity occasionally shifts focus from innate rights to engineered outcomes. Meanwhile, populist nationalism champions an “authentic” body politic opposing elites and outsiders. Populism can elevate collective identity above individual liberty, grounding justice not in natural rights but in the emotional will of the majority, or even in the cult of a demagogue.

Both equity-driven progressivism and populist nationalism challenge the Declaration’s universal claim that rights adhere to individuals by nature, not by group membership or majoritarian self-interest. In privileging the identitarian over the individual, grievance over virtue, and passion over reason, each can freeze society into static groups and erode the revolutionary truth that all individuals possess equal and unalienable rights. 

As the semiquincentennial approaches, Lincoln compels us to renew what he once called the “standard maxim for free society,” the Declaration’s “assertion that ‘all [humans] are created equal’.” Our task is threefold: to recover a healthy understanding of natural rights; to reaffirm the bond between the Declaration, Constitution, and Union; and to rekindle civic gratitude for the founding vision and its enduring promise.

On Natural Equality

The Declaration conveys a universal truth that all people are created equally in the divine image. That plain aphorism nullifies the fallacy that some are born to rule, and others born to serve. From this idea flows the patent justice due the whole human family. All people possess unassailable rights that preexist politics and even precede birth itself. Life, liberty, individual dignity—such rights are not restricted or dispensed by government, none are more worthy for one person than another. The assertation of natural equality is so evident that it is not confined to a distant past or a privileged class. It is a timeless truth, visible to all who look with the eyes of reason and providence.

Natural equality posits that no person retains a right to govern another without one’s consent. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” Lincoln ruminated on the eve of his storied 1858 debates against Stephen A. Douglas. “This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not democracy.” One need not crane to discern the link between Lincoln’s logic and Jesus’s golden supplication in the Gospel of Matthew: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” To be free, to pursue personal independence, to enjoy mobility, to practice political and civic equality, to own one’s moral conscience mandates virtuous consent not to impede those same natural rights due to all people.  

And yet, even the word “independence” does not capture the full breadth of natural equality. Taking a cue from Lincoln’s use of the rhetorical negative, “not dependent” is far more illuminating. Self-evident equality presupposes the fitness of common people to govern themselves. Humans are not dependent on the indiscriminate decrees from aloof potentates, snobbish kings, or distant bureaucrats. Natural equality infuses popular government of, by, and for the people. It saturates civil institutions, the rule of law, legitimate elections, peaceful transfers of political power, and consent for majority privileges and minority protections. 

The bond between republican government and natural equality facilitates the ideal conditions for human flourishing. If free citizens are not born into predestined lots in life, then they need not toil for their social betters. One’s unique talents and ambitions are theirs alone to harness personal autonomy, their innovation fueling social progress. Lincoln read the Declaration in this way to praise a “just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” Government cannot impose equitable distributions of happiness. But in adhering to the principle of natural equality, it safeguards the right of common citizens to imagine, to innovate, to compete, to claim the fruits of their labor. Then, they may live with dignified independence, unfettered from the stifling constraints as bound subjects. 

“For equality [Americans] have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion; they want equality in freedom,” so marveled Alexis de Tocqueville on his grand tour of the United States during the 1830s. They “will not tolerate aristocracy.” The American character did not want for equal outcomes. Fervent democrats read their Declaration as a complete levelling of society. Arbitrary privilege, capricious advantage, and noble largesse enjoyed no sanction. The assertion of self-evident equality mocked Old World hereditary titles and feudal lordships—in essence, Tocqueville’s “aristocracy.” Government could no longer cater to the exclusive, reciprocal interests of its chosen favorites. Rule by the oligarch, the divine monarch, or the ethnic clan contrasted against the manifest equality that even the meekest commoner could claim as her own. 

Critics might scoff that all the preceding confidence amounts to little more than self-absorbed political theorizing. After all, what of the ubiquitous injustices that marred so much of the American experience? It is well to consider that critique alongside an equally compelling case: that the Declaration’s architects anticipated great social upheaval wrought by their words. Three weeks before he died on July 4, 1826—the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—Thomas Jefferson called the document “an instrument, pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world.” It was hardly an American certificate. It could not be, for natural equality infuses all people, always, at all places. “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be,” Jefferson hoped: “the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves.”

We are conditioned to dismiss Jefferson as a rank charlatan. As the master of hundreds of bondspeople and the father of enslaved children, he was indeed a hypocrite. But what if Jefferson’s logic nevertheless conveyed inherent truth? A sterling historian of Jefferson, Cara Rogers Stevens reads the Declaration as its author envisioned it. “What we should see,” she writes, “is ‘all people are created equal.’” Jefferson did not mean “the equality of white men exclusively.” No, he “had a much broader meaning in mind: despite differences in gender, race, talent, beauty, intelligence, or other basic respects all people nonetheless are equal in their possession of certain basic, God-given rights.” 

Jefferson did not anticipate the future assaults of a John C. Calhoun and Roger B. Taney, or even twenty-first-century cranks, who claimed the Declaration applied only to whites. Lincoln understood Jefferson’s claim of natural equality as “the father of all moral principle.” All people “have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”

Lincoln also considered the gradual proliferation of natural equality. The fathers “did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all [in 1776] were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon.” But in declaring the truth of a proposition, all could prove the right as their own. Only when public sentiment evolved to affirm the right would “the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” And thus, we must retain the lodestar of self-evident equality unadulterated at the heart of civil society for all to pursue justice in the name of innate human dignity. 

On the Union and the Constitution

If self-evident equality applies to all, then the Declaration might well have destroyed civil society. After all, the French Revolution’s bloodlust for liberté, égalité, and fraternité morphed into covetous barbarism. Self-government cannot survive chaotic revolutions that ignore public sentiment, the rule of law, and political consent. The constitutional structure of the federal Union thus binds natural rights in a legal framework, providing legitimate mechanisms for their protection and expansion. 

Fulfilling the claim of self-evident equality entails reviving the concepts of Union and ordered liberty. What the statesman Daniel Webster in 1832 called “a prominent exception to all ordinary history,” the federal Union ties distinct and sundry regions of the vast republic under the national authority of the Constitution. Infused with the spirit of the Declaration, the Constitution encourages action “to form a more perfect Union” and to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” 

The Union relies on consent and political equality. It hosts the constitutional space in which ordered liberty thrives. Through equal representation and checks and balances, the Constitution allows the Union’s diverse constituencies to debate and establish political consensus without resorting to violence, sudden shifts in power, or suppression of dissent. The Union promotes harmonious action, though it discourages conformity of thought. Constitutionalism fuels debate and disagreement, pushing partisan majorities to regard minority positions. In the same way, the Constitution offers pathways for gradual social evolution without yielding to impulsive majoritarian passions. If all individuals are imbued equally with inherent rights and dignity, then the Constitution thwarts any one group from dominating another. By establishing routine elections, processes to petition the government, avenues to redress grievance, and procedures to secure justice, the written Constitution promotes individual liberty through peaceful, ordered means.

Bolstered by the Declaration’s philosophy of unalienable rights, the Union’s sovereignty rests in “We the People.” The Constitution takes seriously the foundational idea that no person is born naturally superior to another. It bans laws of primogeniture and titles of nobility. It forbids bills of attainder and ex post facto laws. It shields people—not just citizens—in their life, person, and property. And it guarantees a republican form of government to each state. And while the Constitution promotes majority rule, the Bill of Rights outlines discreet protections to political minorities, particularly the minority of one. 

On the eve of his 1861 presidential inauguration, Lincoln ruminated on the moral bond between the Declaration and Constitution. The Declaration’s statement of self-evident equality “was the word ‘fitly spoken’ which has proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us.” The creed animates the national character and the human spirit. But that which exists so purely in nature must be sheltered from abuse. Self-evident equality must enjoy consensual, legitimate transmission across the turbulent passage of time. “The Union and the Constitution are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it,” Lincoln concluded. “The picture was made not to conceal or destroy the apple but to adorn, and preserve it.” The Declaration and Constitution work in concert. Though sometimes by slow, frustrating means, they envision a common end. “So let us act,” Lincoln concluded, “that neither picture or apple shall ever be blurred or bruised or broken.”

On Gratitude

In 1783, an anonymous writer penned an exquisite essay under the pseudonym Vox Africanorum, or “The Voice of Africans.” Communing on behalf of “the black inhabitants of the United States,” the essayist praised the newly independent republic for combatting history’s long train of oppression. A free people had joined their nation to the laws of nature’s God, their “glorious deeds” now “recorded in the court of heaven.” And even in a country marred by racial slavery, the black writer read the events of 1776 as an inclusive story. Why? 

The American founding affirmed “the principles of humanity, and the dictates of common sense.” The Declaration of Independence is hardly mystifying. Its modest prose captures self-evident truths applicable to all and understood by all. Thus, the “disparity in colour . . . can never constitute a disparity in rights.” Advanced by “dictates” and “reason,” the nation was as axiomatic as a geometric equation. “The wisdom of America” went to “prove our right to liberty,” white and black alike. 

Vox Africanorum conveyed a lesson in gratitude, the essential virtue to fulfill the Declaration’s claim of self-evident equality. Gratitude is a habit of mind, a more of free society. It recognizes and conserves the good, spreading beneficence to subsequent generations. The American founding assumed that people could be free, that they could practice self-government, that they could know and pursue the moral right. Gratitude involves intentional affirmation of these sublime truths. As a reciprocal commitment of liberty, gratitude teaches the equality principle. It encourages duty to others, promoting the obligations of the free citizen in civil society. 

Fostering consensus and social peace, gratitude endorses a common origin story. If we reimagine the American founding to satisfy either haughty self-congratulation or irksome grievance, then we foment the “pride, intolerance, considerations of interest, avarice, or maxims of false policy” about which Vox Africanorum cautioned. “Let America cease to exult—she has yet obtained but partial freedom,” warned the writer, when “slavery and oppression are not yet banished [from] this land.” Reveling in one’s good fortune with no pretense of mutual obligation bends toward nihilism.

Gratitude anchors upon the civic compact the principle of approximation at the heart of the Declaration’s equality doctrine. Vox Africanorum recognized that individuals are not identical in all respects. And yet, disparities in status, race, or birth should never be considered so extreme as to undermine natural equality in life and liberty. The Declaration establishes what Lincoln considered “a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” Gratitude aligns the Union and the Constitution with the principles outlined in the Declaration. And thus springs the fount of social progress, economic mobility, individual improvement, and political consent. 

A free society cannot conquer human nature or escape history by marching toward some sunny utopia. In an age of polarized moral absolutism, gratitude tempers unrealistic visions of social perfection; it guards against the drift of apathetic entitlement. By conserving the good, gratitude draws on liberty’s modest restraints to bind the social fabric. To fulfill the Declaration’s claim of self-evident equality, we must maintain those unalienable attributes and free institutions best suited to human flourishing. As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, may we commit to a new birth of freedom, a civic baptism in the nation’s ancient faith.