Round 2: What do you think the founding fathers were thinking of when they penned the words "All men are created equal"?

They were thinking of white men only.

Straight white men with money.

Landed (property owning), straight, white men with money

_“In 1776 the Second Continental Congress asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman to write the Declaration of Independence. The five men voted to have Thomas Jefferson write the document. After Jefferson finished he gave the document to Franklin to proof. Franklin suggested minor changes, but one of them stands out far more than the others. Jefferson had written, “We hold these truths to be sacred and un-deniable…” Franklin changed it to, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason and approved by the Virginia Convention on June 12, 1776, contains the wording:

“all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights of which . . . they cannot deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

The Massachusetts Constitution, chiefly authored by John Adams in 1780, contains in its Declaration of Rights the wording:

Article I. All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”

From a wiki article on the subject.

Cloning?

I don’t think that either wealth or land had anything to do with it. In fact, it was their anger over being treated like 2nd class citizens by wealthy, landed people in England that prompted the phrase. I think they meant it to apply to ALL white men, regardless of the circumstances they were born in to.

@rojo I love you man! I was looking for that exact line, about it originally saying “sacred” today but I couldn’t find it!

Again, they weren’t referring to, say Indians or slaves when they used the word “Men.” They couldn’t have been.

They likely took the notion from Thomas Hobbes, a 16th century philosopher and one of the many who influenced the founders.

And you are correct that they made a point of it to let the King know that they rejected the notion that royalty were intrinsically superior.

Another way they might have said it, making the same point, would have been “All humans are the same in their fundamental nature”

But they were in the middle of an armed rebellion. Maybe they thought that was too wordy for some of the less educated colonists who had never heard of Hobbes.

Nice Josie.

Read further down, after the ”...all men created equal…” part…

where it says…
”...Chicks are freaking crazy… We need more of these meetings to get out of the house.”.

Oh yeah… and the part about…
“It would be easier to rebel from the crown than to make my wife happy.”

Insight is found in the Federalist Papers and the collection of letters from Abigail Adams to John Adams, if you are really serious about getting an answer to your question.

I think it had to do with “snobbery” as you put it and class structure. That all men had equal opportunity. The US set it up so we are a democracy, there isn’t one group of people by birthright who are in charge. We also do not let family name influence the path for people born to that name. Each persons is to be judged on his own merit, not on the doings of his father whether good or bad.

I don’t think they were thinking race, but you would think that if they were alive today they would include race. I mean if they wanted religious freedom, you would hope they would come to see that all “minorities” need protection of civil rights.

Possibly, but I am terrible at history, since slavery was common place they were not including black people as equal men. That they were somhehow less than men? What do you think?

I do think it also has to do with property ownership and other related things. People owning property is a big part of economies developing, capitalism, and freedom to control your own domain.

I agree, not just blacks but Indians and every other non-white race were honestly believed to be inferior @JLeslie. It was such a given that they didn’t even feel the need to address it.

@Espiritus_Corvus Actually, I’m in the process of reading a book about the relationship between John and Abigail Adams. I’ll pay closer attention to the letters.

@Dutchess_III Yes, Abigail repeatedly reminds John, while he is off meeting with the Continental Congress and other bodies, to “Remember the Ladies.” She and many women in her social circle (of which exists even more correspondence) were quite dissatisfied with the status quo. They could not own their own land, they could not sign contracts, had no official political voice, and were pretty much SOL if widowed. They wanted the new country to be different. The power the “ladies” held was proven during the Stamp Act and other Intolerable Acts in the late ‘60s through the mid ‘70s when they responded by boycotting all British products from molasses to highly valued manufactured cloth, as they were the household shoppers. When it came to maintaining their homes, they held the purse strings. They shut down a lot of commerce forcing the Brits to re-think their methods and cancelling the Stamp Act within the first year of its inauguration. These were the daughters of the revolution. Slavery and the slave trade is also addressed in many of these documents. See Cokie Roberts’ Founding Mothers. More importantly, the book’s bibliography is a rich treasure of primary sources concerning the late colonial and revolutionary period, the tenor of the times, and these people’s mind set – both common and otherwise.

@Espiritus_Corvus Damn!

@Dutchess_III Here’s a searchable copy of The Federalist Papers. As you probably already know, the Papers are a large collection of correspondence during the revolutionary period between John Jay (first Chief Justice of the US), Hamilton (Chief of Staff under Washington, argued for suffrage for land owners only and a central banking system, argued vehemently against the Articles of Confederation, and was eventually a presidential aspirant—his career cut short when he was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr), and Madison (4th US President). This correspondence amounts to practical discussion about what kind of country they envisioned after the revolution. Combine this with the distaff correspondence as described in my last post and one gets a feel of how others felt and the affect it was having upon them.

It’s all very informative and gives great insight to what these men were thinking. Hamilton was quite the aristocrat and couldn’t quite give up the trappings or the mindset of his class. He was constantly at odds with Jefferson’s aspirations for a country of universal white male suffrage (i.e. all white men—peasants/commoners and property owners alike.) and education of the commoner. Jefferson envisioned a “Nation of noblemen” through universal education. I think Hamilton was horrified by this idea. Landless commoners with a vote? He feared a slippery slope to true universal suffrage and this would unseat the class of people he believed were ordained to rule, and voiced this belief frequently.

After reading his letters and journals, I believe Jefferson, for all his faults and his slaves, aspired to a future nation free of slavery, long after he was dead of course. Many of the men and women of his class were voracious readers and were current on the cultural and scientific advances of the day. (After the revolution, many women of New York, Boston and Charleston expressed relief that they could once again buy their clothing from the houses of Paris without fear of shipping mishaps, and that they could again serve real tea on their tables. In the same missives, these ladies would discuss scientific advances in their correspondences—things that could prove to make the management of their homes, or their husband’s management of their estates and businesses easier.) Jefferson and others could see that mechanical advances could some day replace the manual labor and costs of the peculiar institution without interruption of production or commerce. James Watt had shown the world the manufacturing and agricultural potential of his steam engine by the 1760s. By 1793, Eli Whitney had patented his cotton gin. To many, it was only a matter of time before manumission would be the practical order of the day and this sentiment was pushed hard by the ever-growing radical Quaker movement to free the slaves outright (which later by the 1840s had developed into the politically powerful abolitionist movement and was instrumental in Congress to prevent new states as slave states).

There are small nuances, little things occurring that foreshadowed a greater movement against slavery as well. When Lloyd’s refused to insure slave-trade shipping in the late 1770s, most big American insurers followed suit. This boycott was promoted in America by Benjamin Franklin, an insurer himself. For economic and political reasons, this movement was very slow in it’s undertaking. But by the 1830s, our British cousins had outlawed slavery in their colonies and began using their navy to intercept the slave trade out of Africa and soon the US outlawed the importation of new slaves. Many will say this was due to a saturation, but these were anti-slave laws just the same. I believe, by this time, certain power cliques, fueled in many instances by the influence of powerful women, wives of reluctant but powerful men, were guiding America down the long road toward manumission—for both moral and practical reasons—and using whatever bedfellows they could to meet that objective.

But, as we all now know, it blew up in their faces in April of 1861. I believe that, while the war resulted in the outlaw of slavery, the violence and destruction, the animosity between the industrialized Americans and the agrarian South, set civil rights and the economic development of the whole southern half of this country—, from the Pecos to the Atlantic, from the Gulf to the Ozarks and the Appellations, back one hundred years.

Sorry. Way too much coffee again. But that was fun.

@Espiritus_Corvus Damn! Bookmarked.

I actually sat here and read every word of that @Espiritus_Corvus. Very, very nice, very well written. I’ll look at The Federalist Papers when I have more time.

Very interesting. Thank you!

“I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies; for, whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives.

“But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken; and, notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and without violence and throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.”

Abigail to John
August, 1776

You have to love this woman.