The Spirit of the Nation
The framers of the Constitution of 1787 had choices to make, some theoretical, some practical. Not infrequently, they chose the less egalitarian path, even when that path entangled them in contradiction.
They spoke of themselves as “we the people,” but they embraced an ethos of liberal individualism that was explicitly at odds with communitarian norms. Those communities, principally in the agrarian South, that continued to champion republican virtues, did so without abandoning their commitment to the traditional hierarchies of social and political life. Lost between these competing ethos—the liberal individualism of northern Federalists on the one hand, the conservative communitarianism of southern Republicans on the other—was any sense of the egalitarian commitments of a Rousseau; indeed, there is no record that the great French philosopher was even mentioned at the 1787 convention. As a result, the founding fathers all could agree with Jefferson’s ringing declaration that “all men are created equal” precisely because they shared common ground in rejecting that notion, except at an impossible level of political abstraction.
The framers spoke in universal terms about “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality,” but these principles seemed merely instrumental to rights in property, rights that were of real importance only to a privileged few. Thus, partly echoing Locke, they construed “liberty” to mean, above all, the natural right to own private property, to maintain, through the protection of the state, the fruits of one’s labor. “Justice” in turn became the protection of property from the democratic impulses of the laboring masses; “equality” then became the equal right to own property, and enjoy the attendant public benefits of propertied status.
And on this score, the framers were more or less explicit about what they were doing. According to Madison’s notes on the Philadelphia convention, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina was moved to remark on the singular equality of the American people:
Among them there are fewer distinctions of fortune & less of rank, than among inhabitants of any other nation. Every freeman has a right to the same protection & security; and a very moderate share of property entitles them to all the honors and privileges the public can bestow: hence arises a greater equality, than is to be found among the people of any other country, and an equality which is more likely to continue . . . because in a new country . . . where industry must be rewarded with competency, there will be few poor, and few dependent.
Madison concurred, but felt compelled to point out that “equality,” as Pinckney would have it, did not include an identity of material interests. As Shay’s Rebellion had made clear, already there were “different interests”—between creditors and debtors, farmers and manufacturers, and “particularly the distinction of rich & poor”—and these would likely intensify over time:
An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, & secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. No agrarian attempts have yet been made in this Country, but symptoms, of a leveling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in a certain quarter to give notice of the future danger.
Hamilton agreed with Madison: “It was certainly true: that nothing like an equality of property existed: that an inequality would exist as long as liberty existed, and that it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself. This inequality of property constituted the great & fundamental distinction in Society.”2
Rousseau had recognized this phenomenon: “It is precisely because the force of things always tends to destroy equality,” he had written, “that the force of legislation must tend to maintain it.” But, writing in The Federalist Papers, Madison made clear, that if Rousseau’s observation was correct, his prescription was wrong: the duty of government was to preserve inequality.
The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.
“The latent causes of faction,” Madison concluded, “are thus sown in the nature of man.” Hamilton agreed; inequality was natural, inevitable, and an altogether proper foundation for government:
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. . . . Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.
The notion was perhaps most fully developed in John Adams’s Discourses on Davila. There, Adams posited the existence of a “natural aristocracy”: “every society,” he wrote, “naturally produces an order of men, which it is impossible to confine to an equality of rights.” The rhetoric was too strong for some of his countrymen, but the central premise was widely shared: there is a social order, and it is altogether natural.
Perhaps no word dominated the rhetoric of the convention like this one: everything—rights, laws, orders, the government itself—all had to be “natural.” Montesquieu—part naturalist, part empiricist—had suggested that the natural law of each nation would vary with its natural conditions: the proper government was the one that consisted with the “spirit of the nation.” No authority was cited at the convention more than Montesquieu, and no idea seemed to capture the framers’ imagination like this one. The new government had to suit the country’s nature: it had to accommodate, not shape, the natural order of things.3
America’s natural order in turn seemed to depend on three interrelated phenomena. There was, first, human nature. There was near unanimous agreement with Madison’s sentiment that self-interest was “sown in the nature of man”; rejected was the Republican vision of an enlightened citizenry, trained in civic virtue, finding its fullest political expression in the idea of the public good. “It is the nature of man,” proclaimed James Wilson during the ratification debates, “to pursue his own interest, in preference to the public good.” Noah Webster, writing as “A Citizen of America,” insisted that “[t]he first and almost only principle that governs men, is interest” (emphasis in original). There was no altruism in this conception of humanity; “men are,” as Hamilton summarized it, “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.”
There was, second, natural inequality. The more egalitarian-minded Republicans, following Rousseau, had posited a community of genuine equals: they advocated what for the next two centuries would be cryptically and often pejoratively described as “social equality.” But for most of the framers, such a state was inconceivable. Some men, they reasoned, would naturally achieve greater success than others, if they were simply left to pursue their interests; it was the inevitable result of the “diversity in the faculties of men.” Thus arose the distinctions between classes—between rich and poor, between creditors and debtors—distinctions that are, as Madison explained in a 1787 letter to Jefferson, “various and unavoidable,” due to the “unequal faculties of acquiring” property.