The Enduring Message (and Mystery) of the American Creed

[A]ll men are created free and equal.
…That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn’t true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.

Robert Frost, “The Black Cottage”

The idea that “all men are created equal” is the core of the American creed and the foundation of all claims of human rights. In seeking to vindicate mankind’s capacity for self-government, the Declaration of Independence ushered in a new and radically ambitious popular order, beginning in America and spreading its message across the globe. The history of the American republic has been the working out of the meaning of this idea and its consequences – which at times has taken the form of a battle over whether it is central to the nation, or even true at all. 

Controversy Over the Creed 

Jefferson described the “truths” of the Declaration of Independence as self-evident and an “expression of the American mind.” Nonetheless, since the early years of the republic, some prominent voices have rejected the claims of the Declaration of Independence. Rather than finding equality self-evident, they concluded that people differ substantially in every relevant regard, not only in strength and talent, but in intellect, character, and moral accomplishment as well. John C. Calhoun said there was “not a word of truth” in the idea of universal human equality. Senator John Pettit of Indiana called the proposition that “all men are created equal” a “self-evident lie.” It is worth noting that Calhoun and Pettit’s rejection of the Declaration went hand-in-hand with their advocacy of slavery.   

The idea that human beings are unequal was not out of step with the judgment passed down through history, from classical times down to the American Founding. Classical and medieval thinkers generally argued that, by nature, some men are fit to rule and others to be ruled. The notion of political equality would have made no sense to them, since justice consists in equal shares for equals and unequal shares for unequals. Excellence demands distinctions, to deny which is to undermine the very teleological purpose of nature. 

In the modern age, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and survival of the fittest, introduced in his groundbreaking 1859 work, On the Origin of Species, constituted a direct challenge to the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” and its grounding in a natural moral order. Of course, Darwin’s theory also posed a thorny problem for Christianity and the idea of God as Creator, in whose eyes all human beings are equal.  

Progressives have also been harsh critics of the Declaration of Independence and its foundations in natural law. For both the early 20th-century Progressives and their contemporary descendants, nature does not set the standard for human happiness and goodness; history does – and since history is composed of time and change, human “nature” and morality are themselves always in a state of flux and evolutionary transition. In other words, there are no permanent truths, only those notions appropriate for a given time. For example, Woodrow Wilson advised that we ignore the opening of the Declaration (that is, the first two paragraphs, including that matter about “all men are created equal”), which constitutes the “least part” of the document and was a mere “theoretical expression” of the time. Instead, we should “make a new statement of the things [we] mean to set right.” For the Progressives, the Declaration’s equality principle is understood as an evolving, aspirational standard pointing beyond political equality to substantive equality, especially equality of condition in the face of systemic injustices. 

Throughout the nation’s history, criticism of the ideas of the Declaration of Independence has come from both left and right. In the 20th century, the paleo-conservative movement, which included figures such as Pat Buchanan, Steve Bannon, and Mel Bradford, was especially vocal in its rejection of the equality principle. Bradford, for example, argued that equality is heresy. Today, many of the views and passions of last century’s paleo-cons have been adopted by adherents of the National Conservative (or NatCon) movement. According to Yoram Hazony, the founder and intellectual leader of NatCon, the Declaration’s claim that individuals are naturally free and equal is a myth of Enlightenment liberalism. Minimizing the significance of the creed, NatCons and post-liberals instead emphasize ancestry, ethnicity, culture, and religion as the true sources of political unity. Some even call for the replacement of America’s democratic institutions with monarchical ones.

To call attention to the centrality of the creed, as this essay does, is not to diminish the importance of a common language, history, habits, customs, and laws. Abstract principle alone does not produce or sustain a way of life. Ideas and aspirations are inert until life is breathed into them by the spiritedness of human beings who care enough to take up their mantle.

But it is also true that a nation does not develop a way of life – a national character – without an animating principle. According to Aristotle, the way of life of every political order is informed by some idea of justice, however narrow, wrongly conceived, or unarticulated it may be. What that dominant principle is matters substantially; it informs public opinion and public morality and determines the character of the people and their political order.   

For Lincoln, the “abstract truth” and “central idea” that “all men are created equal” was hardly a feeble or worthless claim – quite the opposite, in fact. As Eva Brann has argued, the idea of equality is not “an ‘abstraction’ (as people are apt to call dealings with ideas), because nothing is less abstracted, ‘drawn off,’ its substance than an idea. Indeed, ideas are the most densely concrete objects if not in, then out of, our world.” 

In other words, the way human beings choose to act and live is drawn from the ideas they hold, not vice versa. For example, habits of attachment to one’s homeland may be more the result of the “prejudices of the community” than philosophic knowledge of the good, as Madison argued in Federalist 49. Nonetheless, the prejudices created the habits, the habits did not create the prejudices. These powerful civic prejudices are a form of salutary opinion—an expression of mental, abstract concepts (ideas) produced by the mind.

The Meaning of the Creed

The American republic and its way of life “is not the result of accident,” Lincoln said. “It has a philosophical cause.” In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had the foresight to introduce an “abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” 

In the Declaration, a people defined themselves not by what separated them from others, but by the attributes and enduring aspirations shared by all humanity. The Declaration thus laid the groundwork for a new vision of political legitimacy—one that would influence republican movements far beyond America and for centuries to come. This is the beginning of the democratic-republican era. It is the birth of a new order of the ages.

To be sure, the American Revolution was a political revolution fought to decide who held the reins of power, but it was also a moral revolution that took place in the hearts and minds of men and women. As such, what might have been “a merely revolutionary document” was transformed into a profoundly revolutionary one, containing a radically transformative claim asserted by Americans, but meant for all humanity. 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Abraham Lincoln reminded us of the importance of these words:   

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

By “equal,” the American Founders meant equal in possession of natural rights, including the right of self-government. Lincoln once summarized his understanding of the meaning of the phrase “all men are created equal” and the requirements of consent of the governed on a fugitive scrap of paper: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master –This expresses my idea of democracy –Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

The roots of the idea of human equality can be traced back to the political and religious traditions that settlers brought with them to North America. Christianity, with its emphasis on the equality of all souls before God and the primacy of conscience, provided a moral basis for the idea that each person has both the right and the duty to take responsibility for his or her own life and actions. Enlightenment thinkers, particularly John Locke, argued that all people possess natural rights by virtue of their humanity, and that legitimate government is based not on bloodline but on the consent of the governed. Montesquieu declared that “in a free state, every man, considered to have a free soul, should be governed by himself.”   

The equality of “all men” thus conceived necessarily includes the whole human race, black as well as white, and brown, red, and yellow, women as well as men. In Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration, the comprehensive nature of the term “all men” is clear. Besides the two times the word “men” appears in this famous passage of the Declaration, Jefferson wrote it a third time—now in capital letters—referring to the despicable practice of the slave trade, “a market where MEN should be bought and sold.” 

While Jefferson’s condemnation of the British practice of the slave trade as a violation of the nature of humanity reveals the meaning of “men” in the Declaration of Independence, it does not of course serve as an excuse for his (or other Founders’) indulgent lifestyle and lack of robust commitment to remedy the injustice. Even if the Founders had no power to confer the boon of freedom on all men and women of their generation, clearly many of them could have given substantially more of their own personal comforts to secure the blessings of liberty.

The Moral Conditions of the Creed

From the truth of human equality, the Declaration derives other truths about the rights of mankind, including the possession of inalienable rights, the requirement that all just governments be based on the consent of the governed, and the right of revolution against oppressive governments. The Declaration’s conception of human equality is to be understood in the context of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The Founders understood “mankind” or “humanity” as earthly beings with free (but fallible) minds – neither God nor beasts. As such, no human being possesses the divine right to rule another human being (as they do the other animals, for example). Lincoln’s pithy statement cited above should be understood in this context, premised on the equality of human beings in the scheme of nature: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”  

The foremost scholar of Lincoln’s political thought and most robust defender of the creed’s centrality to the American republic was the late Harry V. Jaffa. According to Jaffa’s analysis of Lincoln and the tenets of the Declaration, the central idea of equality is not only the basis of the right to self-government, but it is also the foundation of the obligation of self-government. The nature of humanity informs human rights and duties, encompassed in the natural law and accessible to human reason. High among these obligations is the duty to treat others with the respect to which nature entitles them. 

Accordingly, consent as mere will is a necessary condition of legitimate government, but it is not a sufficient condition. The consent required by the Declaration is informed, or enlightened; it must rise to the level of understanding those moral duties concomitant with the rights of humanity. 

This moral dictate applies to each individual as well as to the majority that rules in governments based on consent. Jefferson expressed this notion most succinctly in his First Inaugural Address when he said that “the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, [but] that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” In government by consent, established by social compact, James Madison said, a “moral person” is created. In his essay “Sovereignty” (ideas he discussed at length with his friend Jefferson), he reasoned:

[A]ll power in just & free Govts. is derived from Compact,…where the parties to the Compact are competent to make it, and where the Compact creates a Govt, and arms it not only with a moral power but the physical means of executing it….[One view on the subject supposes] that each individual, being previously independent of the others, the compact which is to make them one Society, must result from the free consent of every individual….

[T]he lex majoris partis [majority rule]…operates as a plenary substitute…for the will of the whole Society;…the Sovereignty of the Society as vested in & exercisable by the majority, may do any thing that could be rightfully done, by the unanimous concurrence of the members; the reserved rights of individuals (of Conscience for example), in becoming parties to the original compact, being beyond the legitimate reach of Sovereignty, wherever vested or however viewed. 

As a plenary substitute for the unanimous will of the whole society, majority rule serves as the practical mechanism for decision-making in the ordinary operations of government. However, the majority has the authority to do only those things that can “be rightfully done” by the whole society, that is, in full regard for the rights of all. For Madison, the principle of equality finds its operational expression in the ongoing consent of the governed, namely, public opinion grounded in “justice and the general good.”  

Moreover, according to Madison, whether within or without civil society, every human being and every political order possesses moral agency and moral responsibility. Even in the absence of an established government, he argued, “the claims of [natural] justice…will be in force, and must be fulfilled; the rights of humanity must in all cases be duly…respected.” Such are the moral conditions inherent in humanity, derived not from what is lowest in man, but from what is decent and noble in him. 

Natural Right and Mystery 

To many people today the idea of a standard of right grounded in nature seems quaint, obsolete, and implausible. The proposition that all human beings are created equal is looked upon as a consoling fiction, suitable for democratic sentiment but refuted by science and experience. 

Nonetheless, Jefferson got the idea planted so deep in the American psyche that each generation has to wrestle with the “hard mystery” of it. Robert Frost’s poem “The Black Cottage” is a meditation on that mystery. 

Framed as a conversation between a minister and the narrator (presumably Frost himself), the poem invokes the religious creed to segue to a reflection on America’s political one. Pressured by younger congregants to modernize the creed’s language, the minister recalls an old woman in his parish who would never have consented to change the Christian creed, no more than she would consent to change or abandon the American creed. 

You see, she had lost her husband in the Civil War—at Fredericksburg or Gettysburg, the minister cannot remember—but she believed the war was fought for something more than union or emancipation alone. Her sacrifice, Frost writes, “somehow touched the principle / That all men are created free and equal.” Yet those words are now considered quaint, “so removed / From the world’s view to-day.” Jefferson’s principle, Frost concludes, is a “hard mystery.” The easy way out is to decide it simply is not true.

The deceased old woman’s neglected, decaying cottage that gives the poem its title stands as a symbol of this judgment. Like the Declaration itself, her sons preserve it out of sentiment but do not care for it. Nature slowly reclaims what humans forget and neglect. 

And yet Frost refused to walk past. The creed, he insists, was “planted / Where it will trouble us a thousand years.” Each age must pause to reconsider it.

Harry V. Jaffa shows that Abraham Lincoln also saw and confronted the challenge posed by the idea of equality. In Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa emphasizes that Lincoln did not accept the citizens’ creed unthinkingly.* He knew the force of the argument from inequality and the danger posed by the democratic impulse: How could equality serve as the moral foundation of self-government without collapsing into either tyranny or leveling?

Jaffa’s resolution turns on Lincoln’s insight into ambition and consent. The Declaration does not deny natural superiority; it denies the right of superiority to rule without consent. Equality refers not to sameness of capacity or condition, but to equal natural rights. Those who possess more wisdom and virtue will choose “kind, unassuming persuasion” over force and domination. Their unwillingness to claim a natural title to rule vindicates the creed, just as it demonstrates the comparable worth of their attributes. The danger comes not from the natural aristocracy – or true meritocracy – but from pseudo-aristocrats—those who mistake birth, appetite, or power for merit and seek to rule over others as their inferiors. Slavery, in Lincoln’s view, was the ultimate destructive and dehumanizing expression of this false claim. But it is certainly not the only expression of this. 

In this light, the citizens’ creed functions as a moral test. It asks whether the most ambitious types will express their aspirations through service, persuasion, and example, or through domination. In choosing the former, the proposition that all men are created equal is vindicated in practice, even if it remains a mystery philosophically. Equality is thus the condition under which excellence may appear without threatening liberty.

Jaffa’s analysis of Lincoln’s distinction between the shepherd and the wolf makes the point with clarity. The shepherd and the wolf are both situated apart from the sheep; both are or appear to be superior in strength and intelligence. Whereas the shepherd’s superior qualities take the form of protection and restraint, the wolf cloaks predation as superiority. Those who see the wolf’s pretense, see how ordinary his type of ambition is (though his desire for it is voracious). The Declaration denies the wolf’s ruse; it establishes moral conditions in which excellence may exist, but despotism can have no home. 

Frost arrived at a complementary understanding. He believed that the core of the American dream was that of “a new land [filled] with people in self-control.” Equality, rightly understood, does not flatten human distinction. It challenges human capacity. The Declaration teaches the political equality of all human beings so that each may exercise freedom according to the precepts of the natural law, calling each to a standard of human excellence. 

Like Lincoln, Frost did not take the easy way out when faced with Jefferson’s “hard mystery.” In a talk at Dartmouth in 1955, he confronted the enigma. “You’ve got to have something to say to the Sphinx,” he remarked. Pulling the audience into the challenge, he continued,  “A few years ago, the U.S. government hired a Swede to come here and provide an expert review of our form of government. His judgment was that America “is a conspiracy against the common man.” 

Now, what is to be said to this? Frost wondered. Just to “show my wit” and “ability at reasoning,” he playfully quipped, I’ve decided to answer. “I have to have something to say to that,” anyway, “sooner or later,” he added. And so do we all. 

The answer, he said, “is that that’s what it was intended to be. It was intended to be a conspiracy against the common man. Let him make himself uncommon.” 

Endnote

* Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 50th Anniversary Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 222 and passim.