Did you ever really think about what the Founders intended when they said “all men are created equal?”  I had some guesses about what they meant, but I wanted to know for sure, so I dug a little deeper and get to the truth of the matter. 

The words seem to have originated with Philip Mazzei.  They were printed in The Virginia Gazette in 1774 after being translated by his friend and neighbor, Thomas Jefferson.  

Here is an extract of a Mazzei article that I took from <http://www.geocities.com/circolomazzei/> March 26, 2009.  This is a recent translation from Mazzei’s original Italian: 

My dear fellow citizens, to reach the goal we desire we must remember that the natural rights of man are the basis of a free government. This discourse will clearly show that Britain was never this type of state, even at her highest level of perfection, and that ours may become no more than a captive copy of it, with all its other disadvantages, causing it to become little more than a state of slavery…

“All men are by nature equally free and independent. This equality is necessary to establish a free government. Each one must be equal to the other in natural rights. Class distinctions are not always static and will always be nothing more than an effective stumbling block, and the reason is most clear. Whenever you have many classes of men in one nation, it is necessary that you give each one its share in the government; otherwise one class will tyrannize the others. But the shares cannot be made perfectly equal; and whenever one class takes power, human events will demonstrate that the classes are not in balance; and bit by bit the greater part of the machine will collapse.

“For this reason all the ancient republics were short-lived. When they were stabilized, the inhabitants were divided by class and were always in dispute, each class trying to procure a greater share in government than the others; consequently the legislators came to yield to the prejudices of custom, to the contrary pretensions of the parties, and the best that could be had was a grotesque mixture of liberty and tyranny.”

Jefferson interpreted the first three lines of the second paragraph a little differently for the Gazette: 

All men are by nature equally free and independent. Such equality is necessary in order to create a free government.  All men must be equal to each other in natural law.

There it is, natural law again.   

Mazzei was a student of Roman history, and he was writing about the problems of classes.  The problem that Mazzei and Jefferson were addressing was the problem of the divine right of kings.  Kings were supposedly endorsed by God to rule.  They were part of a royal class.  Mazzei was directly challenging the rightness of having a royal class and starting to make a case against royalty based on the principle of natural law. 

The idea of equality addressed the historical problem of political classes.  Women and slaves were not a consideration because they were not a political class.  They were a social class, so they were not a concern with respect to political issues. 

Mazzei argued that a classless political system was necessary for stable government.   He also stated that “All men are by nature equally free and independent.”   Apparently, he was addressing the natural state of humanity, not the prescribed state of revealed faith.  Naturalistically all men are created equal.  We have the same faculties.  We have the same needs.  We have the same natural rights.

Jefferson’s subtle spin on the topic was that equality was necessary so that natural law could be applied.  Even in 1774 he was forming the ideas for the case he would present 1776 before the Supreme Judge of the World for declaring independence from Great Britain.  Natural law applies to all men equally regardless of class.  Natural law says that reasonable people can overthrow an unreasonable king or pope who causes harm to the people’s natural rights.  By referring to natural law instead of natural rights, he was making clear the theory of law that would be applied in the legal argument that was the Declaration of Independence.  

My understanding is that it was believed in those days that women and blacks were physically different enough that they were not equal to white men.  Overtime, those beliefs would be challenged and shown to be incorrect.

When Lincoln was elected to office he believed that blacks were physically inferior to whites.  Over time he met a number of black men, such as Fredrick Douglas, and being the intelligent man he was, began to realize the incorrectness of his prejudice.  Over time he was able to rationalize a greater principle of natural equality, referring to the Declaration of Independence and the statement of “all men are created equal.”

UPDATE Sept. 8, 2009

I expanded on this topic in more recent entries: “all men are created equal” means simpler government and About “All men are created equal” and natural law

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