Incompatibility of Liberty and Equality:

¶ … Incompatibility of Liberty and Equality: Slavery's Legacy in Early U.S. History

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he included two notions which were held to be of vital importance in the founding of the nation, but which were shown in the early history of the U.S. To be incompatible. These two notions are liberty and equality. Contradictions and conflicts found within the founding documents and evidenced in the early events of U.S. history all show that the U.S., in its experiment with democracy, experienced tremendous growing pains due to its insistence that both liberty and equality were possible within the same society. Among the conflicts which pointed out this incompatibility, none was more important than slavery. It was in the institution of slavery that the nation got its first major test of its founding ideals, and the history of how those ideals were shown to be related to that institution played perhaps the single most important role in defining the early nation. This brief paper will consider some of the major developments in the struggle around liberty, equality, and slavery in an effort to show how the founding fathers established a system of government which, by allowing one of history's most nefarious practices, proved to be an incomplete realization of their most basic political ideals.

Jefferson wrote that the reason the revolutionary forefathers believed they had a right to rebel against the British Empire was that the king had transgressed certain natural laws which they believed to be inviolable. He claimed further that "all men are created equal," and that each man has an "unalienable right" to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The King had not recognized this, according to Jefferson, and the U.S. deemed it necessary to reject his sovereign rule so that they could set up a society in which it was not forgotten. It seemed that the intent from the first, then, was to protect the individual's liberty and to promote the society's equality. However, even as he was writing those words, Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. And once the nation had justified his political decree by winning their independence at war, the difficulty of realizing those two goals in a nation where men owned slaves began to hit home with a vengeance.

The first major conflict revolved around the question of how slaves would be accounted for in the Constitution. Since the founding fathers wanted to set up a system of proportional representation, the southern states wanted to count all slaves in the census in order to maximize their population counts, thereby increasing their power in the legislature. The hypocrisy of this move did not go unnoticed by the northern states, which pointed out that the South, dependent on slavery for its economy, wanted to count slaves as men in order to benefit their power, but did not want to grant slaves citizenship rights. The north answered with its own hypocrisy, and agreed to count each slave as "three-fifths" of a man for census purposes.

In this compromise, the true wickedness of the slavery system and the incompatibility of liberty and equality can be readily seen. For example, the institutionalized slavery that had been existent in the U.S. For more than a century had been focused from the beginning in the southern states. The southern advocates for this system had argued that slaves were less than wholly mature adults, relegating them to the status of virtual livestock. However, when these same advocates were faced with the possibility of losing their political power by living in accordance with their own arguments, they admitted that they understood the people they had under their absolute control were men and not animals. Such an admission was tantamount to declaring that they didn't really believe in equality, but instead wanted to protect their own liberty to live their preferred way of life. They formed arguments for states' rights, which consisted of a kind of collectivized justification of liberty at the state level rather than on the personal level, and threatened to reject the constitution if their rights were not protected. The North, on the other hand, had rid itself of slavery earlier in its history, driven by the moral arguments of abolitionists and the fact that their economy had never really depended on slavery. They espoused a belief in equality but were not willing to let that belief get in the way of their desire to solidify the move toward the constitution. The upshot was that slavery, an institution which allowed neither liberty nor equality, proved the lie of equality, but did so in a way that would eventually also prove the lie of liberty.

As the nation ratified the constitution and moved through its early history, there were numerous developments which showed that liberty and equality were incompatible in ways unrelated to slavery. The rise of Andrew Jackson and populist democracy, for example, saw horrible abuses of Native American populations and discrimination against women. However, the institution of slavery always remained at the forefront of the national debate and at every turn it seemed to indicate that liberty and equality were zero-sum games. As the nation expanded westward and new territories were annexed, the question of whether to allow slavery was always a major concern. The nation struck upon a balancing act which basically guaranteed that with each free state added a slave state would be added. As long as slavery was permitted in the nation, it seemed that liberty and equality could coexist only in a tense standoff.