From Equivalence to Equity: The Management of an American Myth

Let us for a moment contemplate the magical, wonder-working word, "EQUALITY."

—Jonathan Maxcy, 1799 (1048)

When Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress place equality at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, announcing that "all men are created equal," they make the term available to the national imagination without stating in any specific way what such a claim might mean. In the terms of John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, ¹ moral words such as equality are particularly prone to certain abuses. Since such words of the "mixed mode" have reference only to the combination of ideas in men's minds rather than to substances in nature, one has to rely more than usual on a speaker to observe common usage, that is, not to use a term idiosyncratically. ² In Locke's view, most human controversies did not, in fact, occur around actual differences in people's ideas; people fought mainly over words. ³ Since the term "equality" was approved implicitly by the drafting committee (Robert Livingston, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Jefferson himself) and then by the Continental Congress, it is unlikely that its use was markedly idiosyncratic. It may, however, have been deliberately vague. ⁴ The Declaration was to be presented before diverse audiences, diverse interpretive communities with different educations, and attuned to different "common" uses. Robert Ferguson has suggested that, in the Declaration and other "consensual" or consensus-seeking writings of the period, "[t]he writer reduces the public text into an article of faith or an icon" (361). The iconicity of equality, its role in the civil religion of early American nationalism, allows the term to function as a fairly constant cipher for identification, even while varying considerably in its meaning. This becomes particularly evident as stresses on the nation in its first decades of development highlight competing conceptions of how America is equal. As we shall see, the word "equality" figures centrally even in opposed visions of the nation, its purpose, character, and destiny. As Gordon Wood explains, the kind of "tension and ambivalence of attitude" that form around equality are exactly those that "made for a painful disjunction of value and a highly unstable social situation" (75).

In the late eighteenth century, American writers wrestled with shifting conceptions of what constituted ideal relations among individuals. As the Confederation ceded to the Federal government, so, too, I will argue, did one notion of equality give way, albeit more gradually, to another. On the one hand, writers in the 1770s and 1780s proffer a "New World" where equality appears in images of a general equivalence or sameness in the social conditions of its white citizens. On the other hand, writers in the late 1780s and 1790s increasingly emphasize a condition of equality as equity, the admittedly uneven though impartial distribution of social standing. Writings by Americans in the 1790s return again and again to worry the nature and definition of equality as an abstract problem of political philosophy, asking how best to manage the disjunctions between equality, liberty, and order.

Equality is one element in a larger problematic of the North Atlantic Enlightenment, whose assumptions about a rational universe are often contradictory: that is, nature's discoverable design or order rests uncomfortably alongside certain visions of human freedom, and both seem out of joint at times with the notion of a natural balance, harmony, or moderation in the world. Equality collides with liberty and, at the same time, with order, the necessarily uneven or unequal distributions of power and goods thought to be both a sign of nature's judiciousness and the mark of civilized societies. Equality inhabits late eighteenth-century thought, moreover, as a theoretical problem and, with the end of the American and beginning of the French Revolution, a historical crisis. In the readings below, I argue that writing in a variety of early American texts...