The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

5. All Men Are Not Created Equal

5 22 ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) (courtesy of the Library of Virginia) drafted the Declaration of Independence that in 1776 stated that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is unlikely that he anticipated the consequences of the language he wrote, and it is also doubtful that he actually believed that all men, women, and enslaved people were inherently equal. Yet the words he wrote when he was a young man contain a promise of inclusion in the political nation that animated much of American history and shaped the course of Virginia’s history for more than two centuries. A large and influential group of the state’s political leaders, though, had not adopted Jefferson’s stated beliefs even by the time of his death. W hen George Mason sat down in a room in Williamsburg during the third week of May 1776 to begin work on the first draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and when Thomas Jefferson sat down in a room in Philadelphia a few weeks later to begin work on the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, each of them could have begun with extremely memorable words. They could have inked their quills and written, “Four score and seven years ago our forefathers . . .” They did not, but they could have. Four score and seven years later when Abraham Lincoln wrote those words, he referred back to 1776 in order to place in context what he was going to say about rededicating the nation to its historic purpose of creating a government (using Lincoln’s economical words) “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Lincoln was a genius that way, in using a few choice words to conjure up rich volumes of meaning. With those words he invoked the history and meaning of the American Revolution and the American nation to set the stage for his plea for a fulfillment of the promise of the Declaration of Independence, that all men were created equal. Fourscore and seven years was not so long a time. When Lincoln and the men of his generation were young, they had known people who had lived through the years of the American Revolution. Many of their grandfathers had fought in that war, and the father of General Robert E. Lee had been one of its authentic heroes. Lincoln was speaking to people whose extended family memories included the experience of the American Revolution. Through his words they understood all that they knew and all that they needed to know about the ideas on which the nation had been founded. It would have been odd, in fact, had Lincoln begun his rededication of the nation without a clear reference to what many people of his generation believed were the cardinal tenets of its founders. Fourscore and seven years was not so long a time when George Mason and Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776, and they could have begun with the very same words and for the same reason, to invoke the essential legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the adoption in 1689 of the English Bill of Rights to explain the steps that they were taking to preserve English liberty in Virginia and the other American colonies. When Mason and Jefferson and the men of their generation were young, they had known people who had lived through the years of that earlier revolution, when Parliament expelled a king from the country and invited William and Mary onto the throne. Parliament and the new king and queen adopted the Bill of Rights, a landmark statement 114 the grandees of government of the liberties of freeborn Englishmen. By opening with the words “Four score and seven years ago,” Mason and Jefferson could have reminded their readers of all that they knew and all that they needed to know about their shared heritage of English liberty; and in Virginia they would have thereby reminded everyone of the political culture that had evolved there during the previous one and two-thirds centuries and that the colony’s leading men had been defending and explaining for a quarter of a century. Instead, Mason and Jefferson began with very different language that became equally memorable but had consequences that neither of them, nor any of the other men who voted to adopt...