Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown (review)

For all of us who thought we understood the precept that "all men are created equal," Richard Brown's exhaustive study proves us wrong. The Declaration of Independence's inspiring words sound definitive, but, as Brown points out, they were meant to be aspirational rather than a paean to accomplishment. Besides, was the expression inclusive? At a time when class, race, and gender divisions trumped equality, did it really mean all Americans? How did "all men" eventually become all people? In short, we can only wish Jefferson and his generation had explained what they meant—even if they meant what they said. This, according to Brown, is the point, and one that is often overlooked: colonial convictions about liberty and equality were based on a tacit and collective understanding that rendered further explanation unnecessary.

Self-Evident Truths is a gracefully written book that traces the history of equal rights in America. It is divided into chapters that discuss the subject from different perspectives: religion, nationality, race, gender, children, and class. Religion seems to have presented the thorniest test of equality, since the Declaration's theoretically definitive words were committed to paper before the great migration of Irish Catholics to the United States in the nineteenth century. The First Amendment supported the Declaration's precept by sidelining governmental intrusion in religious matters. Nevertheless, Brown concedes that "Americans never resolved the status of religious equality definitively," even though the momentum leaned toward toleration (60).

Drawing heavily on primary sources as well as secondary literature, Self-Evident Truths confirms America's long history of chauvinism while immigrants from the four corners of the world populated the continent. Yet if Brown calls attention to the American distrust—even dislike—of foreigners in the nineteenth century, he balances the story by acknowledging that those same newcomers were often (but not always) treated equitably in American courts of law. By the nineteenth century, however, tensions between America as an "asylum of the oppressed" and "Yankee xenophobia" had increased in proportion to the soaring numbers of Irish immigrants (93). Because they were likely to be white, the Irish fared better in terms of civil rights than African Americans during the first half of the nineteenth century—even better than people of color who had been born in America. But the law lacked consistency; Brown indicates that within different jurisdictions, state bodies often applied civil rights standards that varied from place to place. What remained constant, however, was the ongoing decline of civil rights for African Americans over the half century before the Civil War.

"All men . . ." Did the statement really mean to exclude women? Given Jefferson's patriarchal attitude, no doubt it did. Yet in this chapter, Brown may have relied too much on legal theory, since multiple sources indicate that women led far more egalitarian lives than Brown allows. Married women skirted coverture on a regular basis by running businesses independently. They bought and sold goods both locally and internationally on their own accounts. They appeared in court without their husbands. Yet Brown is right that the laws disfavoring women were slow to change, a matter that Abigail Adams brought to John's attention in 1776. It took many decades more, Brown reminds us, before women could claim the civil rights that men—even poor and non-white men—had enjoyed for decades. Suffrage was an important goal, but women chafed even more at the economic restrictions that coverture imposed. It is unlikely that Abigail's grievance was, as Brown puts it, "virtually unique" (170).

While much of the information in Brown's book is well known, Brown's interpretation challenges the reader to reevaluate the mainstream interpretations of nineteenth-century American history. For Brown, it is not always a positive story about the evolution of civil rights. On the plus side, equality before the law was unquestionably...